Within-culture variation in field dependence/independence: A region-level investigation across China

Abstract

Field dependence/independence (FDI), refers to one's preferred style in perceiving one's surroundings, either analytically and individually, or globally and collectively, and has been a popular topic in recent cross- and within-culture research. Previous researchers have suggested that members of individualist and collectivist cultures differ in the degree to which they perceive objects either analytically and context-independently or holistically and context-dependently. Cross-culture variation in FDI has been thoroughly studied, whereas within-culture investigations have seldom been undertaken. We explored the within-culture variation of FDI with 593 Chinese colleague students, via administering the Embedded Figures Test. As we predicted, results showed that participants from the more individualist north China area exhibited stronger degrees of field independence than did their more collectivist southern counterparts. We have supported and extended the notion that culture affects individual experiences on a basic perceptual level with new within-culture data.

Chinese Regional Differences and Commonality in Field-Independence and Field-Dependence: An Implicit Biculturalism Model

“…Recently, a series of studies ( Talhelm et al, 2018 ; Xu and Xin, 2019 ; Zhu et al, 2019 ; see Talhelm, 2020 , for a review) have confirmed and manifested the north-south difference in China. Consistent with the north-south regional distribution of psychological differences are other research findings on individualism and collectivism ( Ma et al, 2016 ) and field-dependence and -independence ( Peng et al, 2018 ). Together, these studies point to a northern Chinese cultural-cognitive system featuring analytic and field-independent cognitions, independent self-construal, and individualism; and a southern Chinese cultural-cognitive system featuring holistic and field-dependent cognitions, interdependent self-construal, and collectivism.…”

“…Validity was tested by correlating the EFT with the Rod-and-Frame test ( r = 0.49, p < 0.05). Peng et al (2018) has already applied the test to their survey and developed clear instructions on how to perform the task, which was in line with previous studies (e.g., Hao et al, 2013 ). In the present experiment, participants had to complete as many of the nine tasks in each session within 4 min, which was timed to suit university students.…”

“…Participants in the present experiment were 92 college students drawn from an earlier survey ( Peng et al, 2018 ) using the extreme groups approach ( Preacher et al, 2005 ). The survey covered 593 students in several colleges in Mainland China, 259 of whom were born in southern regions of China and the rest were born in northern regions.…”

“…Compared to the original scores, T scores have the advantage that they can be used to set a normative threshold for field-independence. Given that the average EFT performance was around 55 (original score was 12) demonstrated by plenty of previous research (e.g., Jing, 2016 ; Peng et al, 2018 ), we set a threshold ( T = 55) as the cut-off between field-independence and field-dependence, which has been adopted in Peng et al (2018) .…”

“…The study reported below applied the research strategy of Kühnen and his associates to test implicit biculturalism of northern and southern Chinese. Participants were selected from the bigger sample in Peng et al’s (2018) survey to represent northern and southern Chinese who were, respectively, field-independent and field-dependent. Three months after the survey, they were either individualism- or collectivism-primed.…”