The Effects of Interdependent and Independent Priming on Western Participants’ Ability to Perceive Changes in Visual Scenes

Abstract

The current study examined whether priming interdependent relative to independent selfknowledge would induce different thinking styles among Western participants, and whether this would, in turn, affect the speed of detecting changes in a change-blindness task. Based on predictions from the semantic-procedural interface model, we predicted that participants would attend more to the context following an interdependent self-construal priming manipulation than following an independent self-construal priming manipulation. Sixty individuals were asked to circle the pronouns we/us/our or I/me/my in a paragraph of text. Following this, all participants were shown alternating images in a change-blindness task. Reaction times and accuracy rates at identifying focal and contextual changes were measured. Though our Western participants were faster at identifying changes in focal objects relative to contextual objects, this difference in reaction times was reduced in half for participants who were primed with interdependency (we/us/our pronoun circling) relative to independence (I/me/my pronoun circling). This result is consistent with the claim that interdependent and independent self-construals are stored in a semantic network which is connected to different procedural modes of thinking and that by priming these different views of the self, participants activate a mode of thinking that influences attention.Years ago it would not have been exceedingly controversial for vision scientists to claim that all people, irrespective of cultural variability, perceive the world in the same manner because the underlying physiology of the eye and brain are invariant. In fact, vision scientists adhering to this view might claim that individual differences in perception only arise when there are physiological differences in the eye (e.g., lens shape, color vision deficiencies, etc.) or brain that can help explain differences in perception. This viewpoint was strengthened by high profile linguistic and

Investigating the effects of cultural-mindset priming on evaluation of job performance behaviors

“…These predictions have been supported by many experimental studies that have used self- construal priming techniques (e.g., Choi, Connor, Wason, & Kahan, 2016 ; Haberstroh et al, 2002 ; Kühnen & Oyserman, 2002 ). These effects have been very well summarized by Oyserman and Lee (2008) in a meta-analytic review of the cultural priming literature.…”

“…Prior research has shown that activation of an interdependent self-construal induces context dependent information processing, i.e. the tendency to process stimuli while paying attention to their relations to the entire field ( Choi, Connor, Wason, & Kahan, 2016 ; Kühnen, Hannover, & Schubert, 2001 ; Kühnen & Oyserman, 2002 ). The present study extends this phenomenon to the organizational context by demonstrating that increasing accessibility to a context dependent thinking style increases raters’ sensitivity to contextual behaviors and most likely that is why they tend to place higher weights on OCBs when making overall performance judgments.…”

“…Originally, Markus and Kitayama (1991) had proposed that individuals in Western or individualistic cultures have predominantly independent self-construals, whereas individuals in Eastern or collectivistic cultures tend to have interdependent self-construals. However, subsequent researchers (e.g., Choi, Connor, Wason, & Kahan, 2016 ; Kühnen, Hannover, & Schubert, 2001 ; Suh, Diener, & Updegraff, 2008 ) have shown that individuals possess both independent and interdependent orientations of the self, and this sense of self influences cognition and behavior when individualistic or collectivistic value orientations are activated in a given situation. Specifically, Kühnen, Hannover, and Schubert (2001) developed a procedure called mindset priming to identify the mechanisms through which self-construal affects human cognitive processing.…”

“…Thus, by comparing responses after individualism or collectivism is primed using self-construal primes, researchers can examine the extent to which psychological differences on dependent variables are actually due to the increased accessibility of individualistic or collectivistic mindset produced as a result of priming. While priming research has been done within the context of attention, visual perception and cognition ( Choi, Connor, Wason, & Kahan, 2016 ; Haberstroh, Oyserman, Schwarz, Kühnen, & Ji, 2002 ; Kühnen & Oyserman, 2002 ), no research till date has investigated its effects in performance appraisal context. In the current study we investigate the influence of individual level cultural values on the evaluation of job performance behaviors (i.e.…”

Regulatory Focus and Self-Construal as Determinants of the Majority Rule in Individual Decision Making

“…Accumulative research also suggests that self-construal impacts human perception and cognition in a various ways, including for example, relational and well-being assessment (Cross & Morris, 2003), changes in visual scenes (Choi, Connor, Wason, & Kahan, 2016), organizational events (Pekerti & Kwantes, 2011), and opinion formation (e.g., Ybarra & Trafimow, 1998) in which the use of a subjective heuristic (e.g., the majority rule) may be involved. Selfconstrual refers to views of self and how a person defines the self in relation to others.…”