Cultural Influences on the Perception of Interaction Episodes

Abstract

Most of our interactions take place within the frame work of culture-specific c social episodes. The cognitive representations people have about such social encounters should thus reflect the salient characteristics of their surrounding culture. Subjects from two very different cultures, Hong Kong (Chinese) and Australia (Western), provided judgments about their implicit representation of 27 social episodes common in both environments, analyzed using an Individual Differences Multi-dimensional Scaling (INDSCAL) procedure. We found significant differences in the cognitive representation of episodes, which were strongly related to the dominant features of the two cultures (see Hofstede, 1980). In addition, individual demographic, personality, and attitudinal variables were also related to episode perceptions in a culture-specific pattern. These results are discussed in terms of the influence of culture on cognition.