Culturally Conferred Conceptions of Agency: A Key to Social Perception of Persons, Groups, and Other Actors

Abstract

Many tendencies in social perceivers 'judgments about individuals and groups can be integrated in terms of the premise that perceivers rely on implicit theories of agency acquired from cultural traditions. Whereas American culture primarily conceptualizes agency as a property of individual persons, other cultures conceptualize agency primarily in terms ofcollectives such as groups or nonhuman actors such as deities or fate. Cultural conceptions ofagency exist in publicforms (discourses, texts, and institutions) and private forms (perceivers' knowledge structures), and the more prominent the public representations ofa specific conception in a society, the more chronically accessible it will be in perceivers' minds. We review evidencefor these claims by contrasting North American and Chinese cultures. From this integrative model ofsocial perception as mediated by agency conceptions, we draw insightsfor research on implicit theories and research on culture. What implicit theory research gains is a better grasp on the content, origins, and variation ofthe knowledge structures central to social perception. What cultural psychology gains is a middle-range model of the mechanism underlying cultural influence on dispositional attribution, which yields precise predictions about the domain specificity and dynamics ofcultural differences.More than just an occasional modern pastime, people watching is an essential, primordial human activity. As social animals, people depend on the social perception abilities that allow them to navigate their social environments. Yet learning who to avoid, who to trust, and so forth, requires more than simply registering others' observable actions; it requires inferring underlying characteristics and enduring dispositions from which future actions can be predicted. Psychologists have long contended that perceivers go beyond the observable data with inferences guided by theorylike knowledge structures (Bruner, 1957;Heider, 1958). This "theory theory" of social perception is rooted in the metaphor that lay social perceivers are like scientists, guided by theories in the questions they ask and the answers they construct when interpreting ambiguous data. Proposals about the content of the implicit theories guiding social perception have ranged, with theories of action (Heider, 1958) and theories of mind (Wellman, 1990) being among the most influential. These proposals have been successful in accounting for particular inferences that perceivers Requests for reprints should be sent to make about persons, yet they do not capture how perceivers make parallel inferences about other kinds of perceived actors, such as groups or nonhuman supernatural entities. An integrated model of social perception across cultures requires a more encompassing account of the implicit theories that underlie attributions to dispositions.We propose that social perception is best understood as guided by implicit theories of agency (ITAs). ITAs are conceptions of kinds of actors, notions of what kinds of entities act intenti...

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