It has long been believed that the Japanese are more collectivistic than the Americans. To assess the validity of this common view, we reviewed 15 empirical studies that compared these two nations on individualism/collectivism. Surprisingly, 14 studies did not support the common view; the only study that supported it turned out to bear little relevance to the ordinary definition of individualism/collectivism. An examination of the supportive evidence of the common view disclosed that this view had been formed on an unexpectedly flimsy ground. It further turned out that the wide acceptance of the common view may have been the result of the fundamental attribution error, which may have led to an underestimation of situational factors in interpreting the past obviously collectivistic behavior of the Japanese.
It was predicted that the use of a foreign language should cause a temporary decline of thinking ability because the heavier processing load imposed by a foreign language than by a native language should produce stronger interference with thinking to be performed concurrently. A divided-attention experiment with Japanese-English and English-Japanese bilinguals confirmed this prediction: performance in a thinking task (i.e., calculation) declined when a concurrent linguistic task (i.e., question-answering) had to be performed in their respective foreign languages. This decline is distinguished from foreign language processing difficulty per se because the thinking task involved no foreign language use. The decline was also observed in another divided-attention experiment employing a different type of thinking task, that is, spatial reasoning problems adopted from intelligence tests.
It has been long believed that the Japanese are typical collectivists whereas Americans are typical individualists. To examine the validity of this common view, we formerly reviewed 15 empirical studies that compared Japanese and Americans regarding individualism/collectivism (I/C), and found that the overwhelming majority of those studies had not supported the common view (Takano & Osaka, 1999). In this follow-up, we reviewed 20 additional empirical studies (7 behavioral studies, 13 questionnaire studies), most of which had been published after the former review. When combined with the formerly reviewed 15 studies, 19 studies reported no clear difference, and 11 studies reported that Japanese were more individualistic than Americans. These 30 studies are inconsistent with the common view. Only 5 studies supported the common view, even when we included 3 studies whose validity was questionable. After it was formerly found that the common view was not supported empirically, a variety of alternative accounts were presented regarding the reason for this finding. We examined three major accounts in light of the reviewed studies and found that none of them was congruent with the empirical data. Thus, it seems to be reasonable to conclude that the common view is not valid.
This paper proposes a solution to the mirror reversal problem: Why does a mirror reverse left and right but not up and down? The paper first reviews past hypotheses and shows that none of them has succeeded in explaining all the related phenomena. It then proposes a multiprocess hypothesis based on the insight that what is called a mirror reversal is actually composed of three different types of reversal: The Type I reversal is produced by the discrepancy between an orientational framework that is aligned with a viewer's body and the one that is assumed in the viewer's mirror image; the Type II reversal is produced by the discrepancy between the mental representation of an object and its mirror image; and the Type III reversal is produced by a mirror's optical transformation. The proposed hypothesis is shown to provide reasonable accounts for all the related phenomena disputed in the past literature.When a viewer faces a plane mirror, alphanumeric characters are illegible because their left and right sides are reversed; a watch around the viewer's left wrist is seen on the right wrist of the viewer's own mirror image. Why does a mirror reverse left and right but not up and down? Although a number of psychologists, philosophers, physicists, and mathematicians have been discussing this mirror reversal problem for nearly half a century, no satisfactory answer has ever been obtained (lttelson, Mowafy, & Magid, 1991;Morris, 1993). This paper first reviews major hypotheses that have been presented to answer this problem, along with criticisms raised against them. It then proposes a multiprocess hypothesis and shows how it explains the mirror reversal and related phenomena. It will also be shown that the proposed hypothesis is invulnerable to those criticisms. PAST HYPOTHESESIn the past literature, six relatively independent principles ofexplanation can be identified, though some ofthem may be combined to provide a single answer. This section will examine how each principle was employed to form an answer to the mirror reversal problem and how it failed.Before reviewing the preceding hypotheses, it seems appropriate to examine the view that there is no real problem to be solved. This view asserts that the mirror reversal problem is a pseudoproblem because a form and its mirror image are geometrically isomorphic in that they can be brought into coincidence by appropriate geometric operations. According to this line of argument, however, one YT. is grateful to Ulric Neisser for his warm support concerning the present paper. Correspondence should be addressed to Y Takano, Department of Psychology, Graduate School of Humanities and Sociology, University of Tokyo, Bunkyo-ku, Tokyo 113-0033, Japan (e-mail: Itaro@hongo.ecc.u-tokyo.ac.jp). 37could maintain that the Muller-Lyer illusion, for example, is not worth investigating because the two compared lines are identical in length from a geometrical point of view. The mirror reversal problem arises from a discrepancy in recognized directions, just as the Muller-Lyer illusion ar...
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