International Journal of Psychology, 2014 Vol. 49, No. 3, 208–210, DOI: 10.1002/ijop.12019
Cultural differences in the primacy effect for person perception Kenji Noguchi1 , Akiko Kamada2 , and Ilan Shrira3 1
Department of Psychology, University of Southern Mississippi, Long Beach, MS, USA Department of Psychology, Bunkyo University, Koshigaya, Japan 3 Department of Psychology, Loyola University Chicago, Chicago, IL, USA 2
P
revious work has shown there are robust differences in how North Americans and East Asians form impressions of people. The present research examines whether the tendency to weigh initial information more heavily—the primacy effect—may be another component of these cultural differences. Specifically, we tested whether Americans would be more likely to use first impressions to guide person perception, compared to Japanese participants. In this experiment, participants read a vignette that described a target person’s behaviour, then rated the target’s personality. Before reading the vignette, some trait information was given to create an expectation about the target’s personality. The data revealed that Americans used this initial information to guide their judgments of the target, whereas the Japanese sample based their judgments on all the information more evenly. Thus, Americans showed a stronger primacy effect in their impression formation than Japanese participants, who engaged in more data-driven processing. Keywords: Culture; Social cognition; Person perception.
In recent years there has been a great deal of research addressing cultural differences in social cognition, especially when comparing people from North American and East Asian cultures (Kitayama & Cohen, 2007; Nisbett, Peng, Choi, & Norenzayan, 2001). To take one example, North Americans tend to emphasize dispositional factors when explaining another person’s behaviour, whereas East Asians are more likely to focus on situational factors, showing a weaker correspondence bias (Choi, Nisbett, & Norenzayan, 1999; Morris & Peng, 1994). This finding can be understood in the context of cultural differences in terms of analytical Vs. holistic thinking styles (Nisbett et al., 2001). More common in North American culture, analytical thinking focuses on the attributes of a stimulus object (e.g., the person), assigning it to a familiar category and using schematic knowledge of the category to explain and predict the object’s behaviour. In contrast, the holistic thinking dominant in East Asian culture cause people to attend to both the object and the field as a whole, explaining and predicting events based on an interaction between the object and field, such as situational constraints on the person (Nisbett et al., 2001). Consistent with this holistic
thinking style, East Asians tend to be more sensitive to contextual information when thinking about other people (Choi & Nisbett, 1998; Knowles, Morris, Chiu, & Hong, 2001; Masuda & Nisbett, 2001; Miyamoto & Kitayama, 2002), which may contribute to an attenuated correspondence bias. Another person perception bias, perhaps one of the most pervasive, is the primacy effect. The primacy effect is the tendency of first impressions to have a disproportionate influence on judgments of others, with perceivers slow to revise their impressions once formed (Anderson, 1971). Surprisingly, thus far there has been little discussion of how the primacy effect in person perception varies across cultures. In this report, we propose that the primacy effect is stronger among North Americans relative to East Asians. This hypothesis follows from an understanding of the analytical/schematic thinking style of North Americans, which lead them to focus on the attributes of the stimulus object (the person) in order to understand its behaviour. When thinking about others, therefore, Americans may seize upon the initial information they encounter about the person and use it to guide subsequent processing
Correspondence should be addressed to Kenji Noguchi, Department of Psychology, University of Southern Mississippi, 730 East Beach Blvd., Long Beach, MS 39560, USA. (E-mail: [email protected]). We thank Masatake Ikemi as well as the undergraduate research assistants in the Dolores Albarracin’s lab for their assistance with data collection.
© 2013 International Union of Psychological Science
CULTURE AND THE PRIMACY EFFECT
and judgments, leading to a primacy effect. In contrast, people in East Asian cultures are more sensitive to contextual cues and more likely to adjust their impressions based on new information, so first impressions will not be weighed as heavily. Indeed, Knowles et al. (2001) suggested that East Asians automatically correct their dispositional attributions about others because they pay more attention to a person’s situational constraints, whereas North Americans are less likely to modify their initial attributions. Furthermore, North Americans also tend to have a higher “need for consistency” (Petrova, Cialdini, & Sills, 2007), so once they form an impression of someone, they may be more motivated to ignore or explain away inconsistent information they encounter (Peng & Nisbett, 1999). We tested whether there would be differences in the primacy effect between a sample of Americans and Japanese, who were all exposed to a vignette that described the behaviours of a target person. Before reading the vignette, however, everyone was given information about the target’s personality (some traits) in order to create a particular expectation of her. We then manipulated the content of the vignette. In one condition the target behaved consistently with the initial expectation, and in other condition she behaved inconsistently with the trait information. This allowed us to determine how much participants relied on this expectation when they later made judgments about the target. METHOD Participants One hundred fifty-nine students (70% women) from the University of Florida and 135 students (67% women) from Bunkyo University in Japan were participants. Mean ages were 19.43 (SD = 2.24) in the US and 19.87 (SD = 1.41) in Japan. Procedure Our procedure was adapted from Hastie and Kumar (1979). Participants were told that their task would be to evaluate the personality of a target person whose behaviours would first be described to them. Before presenting the vignette of the target’s behaviours, everyone was given some trait information about her that led to an expectation that she was kind. Specifically, the traits described the target person as kind, considerate, warm, unselfish and cooperative. Participants then read the vignette describing her behaviour. The vignette contained 17 sentences, seven of which described behaviours that were consistent with kindness (e.g., “On the way to her school, Amy (Sachiko in Japan) saw a friend who was taking shelter from the rain, so Amy let © 2013 International Union of Psychological Science
209
her friend walk under Amy’s umbrella with her to go to school”), and nine neutral sentences that were unrelated to kindness (e.g., “When Amy woke up, she noticed that it was raining”). We manipulated whether the target behaved consistently or inconsistently with the initial expectation by altering one sentence in the story. In the “inconsistent cue” condition, the ninth sentence of the vignette described an unkind behaviour (“After dinner, Amy went back home without stopping by her sick friend’s house”). In the “consistent cue” condition, this sentence described a kind behaviour (“After dinner, Amy took the lecture notes to her sick friend, as well as some ice cream”). Both vignettes began with a neutral sentence, and four of the first eight sentences were kind (Vs. neutral) behaviours. The critical ninth sentence appeared near the middle of the story. Dependent measure After reading the vignette, participants were asked to rate Amy’s personality along six traits: kindness, trustworthiness, considerateness, faithfulness, coldness and inconsiderateness, each on a 7-point scale ranging from 1 (not applicable at all) to 7 (very applicable). An overall kindness rating was computed by averaging the six items together, with the final two items reverse-scored. The Chronbach’s α for the six traits was .85. When the vignette contained the inconsistent cue (the unkind behaviour), we predicted Japanese participants would rate the target person as less kind than Americans, whereas Americans’ judgments of kindness would correspond more to the initial expectation (kindness) and less to her subsequent behaviour. RESULTS The design was a 2 (Culture: US, Japan) × 2 (Target cue: consistent, inconsistent) analysis of variance (ANOVA). The findings revealed main effects for both target cue, F(1, 290) = 107.28, p < .001, η2 p = .26, and culture, F(1, 290) = 13.06, p < .001, η2 p = .03. Participants in the consistent cue condition judged the target person as kinder and Americans judged the target person as kinder than Japanese did overall. However, these main effects were qualified by a two-way interaction of culture × target cue, F(1, 290) = 5.76, p = .017, η2 p = .01 (see Table 1). Simple effect analyses indicated that there was no cultural difference of target ratings in the consistent cue condition, p = .394, but the Americans rated her as significantly kinder than Japanese participants in the inconsistent cue condition, p < .001, as we hypothesized. Hence, this supported the idea that the impressions of Americans were guided by the initial information, while the impressions of Japanese participants were more strongly affected by the subsequent inconsistent information.
210
NOGUCHI, KAMADA, SHRIRA TABLE 1 Mean scores on the trait rating of kindness Trait rating
Americans Japanese
Consistent cue
Inconsistent cue
6.22a (0.90) 6.10a (0.75)
5.43b (0.82) 4.84c (0.89)
Our study only used college students as participants and employed only one type of person perception task. Both these limitations should be addressed in future studies. Manuscript received February 2013 Revised manuscript accepted May 2013 First published online November 2013
Note: Standard deviations are in parentheses. Different subscripts indicate values are significantly different at p < .05.
REFERENCES DISCUSSION We found that Americans showed a stronger primacy effect in their information processing than Japanese participants, who engaged in more data-driven processing. Americans’ expectation of the target guided their judgments of her, while Japanese participants were more sensitive to subsequent behavioural information. We think it is important to mention, however, that our results do not speak to the accuracy of perceivers’ judgments—the primacy effect may or may not lead to greater accuracy—but rather they help us understand how perceivers from the two cultures make judgments. These processing styles can be thought of as different strategies, each with their own advantages and disadvantages. For example, relying on expectations may save time and free up cognitive resources, but can cause perceivers to neglect new information. As mentioned earlier, North Americans display a stronger correspondence bias because they tend to ignore situational constraints, whereas East Asians consider a wider range of contextual information when making person judgments (Choi & Nisbett, 1998). Gilbert and Malone (1995) proposed that the attribution process occurs in two stages. The first stage involves an automatic tendency to make dispositional attributions, and the second stage is a correction process in which perceivers take situational factors into account and modify their judgments. However, because the second stage is slower and more effortful, it is sometimes skipped, leading to the correspondence bias. By contrast, the data-driven style by East Asians focuses more energy on the second stage. More generally, cross-cultural research could use this expectancyVs. data-driven distinction to generate hypotheses about other phenomena related to how people’s expectations influence their perceptions (e.g., placebo effects, the false consensus effect, self-fulfilling prophecies).
Anderson, N. H. (1971). Integration theory and attitude change. Psychological Review, 78, 171–206. Choi, I., & Nisbett, R. E. (1998). Situational salience and cultural differences in the correspondence bias and in the actorobserver bias. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 24, 949–960. Choi, I., Nisbett, R. E., & Norenzayan, A. (1999). Causal attribution across cultures: Variation and universality. Psychological Bulletin, 125, 47–61. Gilbert, D. T., & Malone, P. S. (1995). The correspondence bias. Psychological Bulletin, 117, 21–38. Hastie, R., & Kumar, A. P. (1979). Person memory: Personality traits as organizing principles in memory for behaviors. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 37, 25–38. Kitayama, S., & Cohen, D. (Eds.) (2007). Handbook of cultural psychology. New York, NY: Guildford Press. Knowles, E. D., Morris, M. W., Chiu, C., & Hong, Y. (2001). Culture and the process of person perception: Evidence for automaticity among East Asians in correcting for situational influences on behavior. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 27, 1344–1356. Masuda, T., & Nisbett, R. E. (2001). Attending holistically versus analytically: Comparing the context sensitivity of Japanese and Americans. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 81, 922–934. Miyamoto, Y., & Kitayama, S. (2002). Cultural variation in correspondence bias: The critical role of attitude diagnosticity of socially constrained behavior. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 83, 1239–1248. Morris, M. W., & Peng, K. (1994). Culture and cause: American and Chinese attributions for social and physical events. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 67, 949–971. Nisbett, R. E., Peng, K., Choi, I., & Norenzayan, A. (2001). Culture and systems of thought: Holistic vs. analytic cognition. Psychological Review, 108, 291–310. Peng, K., & Nisbett, R. E. (1999). Culture, dialectics, and reasoning about contradiction. American Psychologist, 54, 741–754. Petrova, P. K., Cialdini, R. B., & Sills, S. J. (2007). Consistencybased compliance across cultures. Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, 43, 104–111.
© 2013 International Union of Psychological Science
Cultural differences in the primacy effect for person perception Kenji Noguchi1 , Akiko Kamada2 , and Ilan Shrira3 1
Department of Psychology, University of Southern Mississippi, Long Beach, MS, USA Department of Psychology, Bunkyo University, Koshigaya, Japan 3 Department of Psychology, Loyola University Chicago, Chicago, IL, USA 2
P
revious work has shown there are robust differences in how North Americans and East Asians form impressions of people. The present research examines whether the tendency to weigh initial information more heavily—the primacy effect—may be another component of these cultural differences. Specifically, we tested whether Americans would be more likely to use first impressions to guide person perception, compared to Japanese participants. In this experiment, participants read a vignette that described a target person’s behaviour, then rated the target’s personality. Before reading the vignette, some trait information was given to create an expectation about the target’s personality. The data revealed that Americans used this initial information to guide their judgments of the target, whereas the Japanese sample based their judgments on all the information more evenly. Thus, Americans showed a stronger primacy effect in their impression formation than Japanese participants, who engaged in more data-driven processing. Keywords: Culture; Social cognition; Person perception.
In recent years there has been a great deal of research addressing cultural differences in social cognition, especially when comparing people from North American and East Asian cultures (Kitayama & Cohen, 2007; Nisbett, Peng, Choi, & Norenzayan, 2001). To take one example, North Americans tend to emphasize dispositional factors when explaining another person’s behaviour, whereas East Asians are more likely to focus on situational factors, showing a weaker correspondence bias (Choi, Nisbett, & Norenzayan, 1999; Morris & Peng, 1994). This finding can be understood in the context of cultural differences in terms of analytical Vs. holistic thinking styles (Nisbett et al., 2001). More common in North American culture, analytical thinking focuses on the attributes of a stimulus object (e.g., the person), assigning it to a familiar category and using schematic knowledge of the category to explain and predict the object’s behaviour. In contrast, the holistic thinking dominant in East Asian culture cause people to attend to both the object and the field as a whole, explaining and predicting events based on an interaction between the object and field, such as situational constraints on the person (Nisbett et al., 2001). Consistent with this holistic
thinking style, East Asians tend to be more sensitive to contextual information when thinking about other people (Choi & Nisbett, 1998; Knowles, Morris, Chiu, & Hong, 2001; Masuda & Nisbett, 2001; Miyamoto & Kitayama, 2002), which may contribute to an attenuated correspondence bias. Another person perception bias, perhaps one of the most pervasive, is the primacy effect. The primacy effect is the tendency of first impressions to have a disproportionate influence on judgments of others, with perceivers slow to revise their impressions once formed (Anderson, 1971). Surprisingly, thus far there has been little discussion of how the primacy effect in person perception varies across cultures. In this report, we propose that the primacy effect is stronger among North Americans relative to East Asians. This hypothesis follows from an understanding of the analytical/schematic thinking style of North Americans, which lead them to focus on the attributes of the stimulus object (the person) in order to understand its behaviour. When thinking about others, therefore, Americans may seize upon the initial information they encounter about the person and use it to guide subsequent processing
Correspondence should be addressed to Kenji Noguchi, Department of Psychology, University of Southern Mississippi, 730 East Beach Blvd., Long Beach, MS 39560, USA. (E-mail: [email protected]). We thank Masatake Ikemi as well as the undergraduate research assistants in the Dolores Albarracin’s lab for their assistance with data collection.
© 2013 International Union of Psychological Science
CULTURE AND THE PRIMACY EFFECT
and judgments, leading to a primacy effect. In contrast, people in East Asian cultures are more sensitive to contextual cues and more likely to adjust their impressions based on new information, so first impressions will not be weighed as heavily. Indeed, Knowles et al. (2001) suggested that East Asians automatically correct their dispositional attributions about others because they pay more attention to a person’s situational constraints, whereas North Americans are less likely to modify their initial attributions. Furthermore, North Americans also tend to have a higher “need for consistency” (Petrova, Cialdini, & Sills, 2007), so once they form an impression of someone, they may be more motivated to ignore or explain away inconsistent information they encounter (Peng & Nisbett, 1999). We tested whether there would be differences in the primacy effect between a sample of Americans and Japanese, who were all exposed to a vignette that described the behaviours of a target person. Before reading the vignette, however, everyone was given information about the target’s personality (some traits) in order to create a particular expectation of her. We then manipulated the content of the vignette. In one condition the target behaved consistently with the initial expectation, and in other condition she behaved inconsistently with the trait information. This allowed us to determine how much participants relied on this expectation when they later made judgments about the target. METHOD Participants One hundred fifty-nine students (70% women) from the University of Florida and 135 students (67% women) from Bunkyo University in Japan were participants. Mean ages were 19.43 (SD = 2.24) in the US and 19.87 (SD = 1.41) in Japan. Procedure Our procedure was adapted from Hastie and Kumar (1979). Participants were told that their task would be to evaluate the personality of a target person whose behaviours would first be described to them. Before presenting the vignette of the target’s behaviours, everyone was given some trait information about her that led to an expectation that she was kind. Specifically, the traits described the target person as kind, considerate, warm, unselfish and cooperative. Participants then read the vignette describing her behaviour. The vignette contained 17 sentences, seven of which described behaviours that were consistent with kindness (e.g., “On the way to her school, Amy (Sachiko in Japan) saw a friend who was taking shelter from the rain, so Amy let © 2013 International Union of Psychological Science
209
her friend walk under Amy’s umbrella with her to go to school”), and nine neutral sentences that were unrelated to kindness (e.g., “When Amy woke up, she noticed that it was raining”). We manipulated whether the target behaved consistently or inconsistently with the initial expectation by altering one sentence in the story. In the “inconsistent cue” condition, the ninth sentence of the vignette described an unkind behaviour (“After dinner, Amy went back home without stopping by her sick friend’s house”). In the “consistent cue” condition, this sentence described a kind behaviour (“After dinner, Amy took the lecture notes to her sick friend, as well as some ice cream”). Both vignettes began with a neutral sentence, and four of the first eight sentences were kind (Vs. neutral) behaviours. The critical ninth sentence appeared near the middle of the story. Dependent measure After reading the vignette, participants were asked to rate Amy’s personality along six traits: kindness, trustworthiness, considerateness, faithfulness, coldness and inconsiderateness, each on a 7-point scale ranging from 1 (not applicable at all) to 7 (very applicable). An overall kindness rating was computed by averaging the six items together, with the final two items reverse-scored. The Chronbach’s α for the six traits was .85. When the vignette contained the inconsistent cue (the unkind behaviour), we predicted Japanese participants would rate the target person as less kind than Americans, whereas Americans’ judgments of kindness would correspond more to the initial expectation (kindness) and less to her subsequent behaviour. RESULTS The design was a 2 (Culture: US, Japan) × 2 (Target cue: consistent, inconsistent) analysis of variance (ANOVA). The findings revealed main effects for both target cue, F(1, 290) = 107.28, p < .001, η2 p = .26, and culture, F(1, 290) = 13.06, p < .001, η2 p = .03. Participants in the consistent cue condition judged the target person as kinder and Americans judged the target person as kinder than Japanese did overall. However, these main effects were qualified by a two-way interaction of culture × target cue, F(1, 290) = 5.76, p = .017, η2 p = .01 (see Table 1). Simple effect analyses indicated that there was no cultural difference of target ratings in the consistent cue condition, p = .394, but the Americans rated her as significantly kinder than Japanese participants in the inconsistent cue condition, p < .001, as we hypothesized. Hence, this supported the idea that the impressions of Americans were guided by the initial information, while the impressions of Japanese participants were more strongly affected by the subsequent inconsistent information.
210
NOGUCHI, KAMADA, SHRIRA TABLE 1 Mean scores on the trait rating of kindness Trait rating
Americans Japanese
Consistent cue
Inconsistent cue
6.22a (0.90) 6.10a (0.75)
5.43b (0.82) 4.84c (0.89)
Our study only used college students as participants and employed only one type of person perception task. Both these limitations should be addressed in future studies. Manuscript received February 2013 Revised manuscript accepted May 2013 First published online November 2013
Note: Standard deviations are in parentheses. Different subscripts indicate values are significantly different at p < .05.
REFERENCES DISCUSSION We found that Americans showed a stronger primacy effect in their information processing than Japanese participants, who engaged in more data-driven processing. Americans’ expectation of the target guided their judgments of her, while Japanese participants were more sensitive to subsequent behavioural information. We think it is important to mention, however, that our results do not speak to the accuracy of perceivers’ judgments—the primacy effect may or may not lead to greater accuracy—but rather they help us understand how perceivers from the two cultures make judgments. These processing styles can be thought of as different strategies, each with their own advantages and disadvantages. For example, relying on expectations may save time and free up cognitive resources, but can cause perceivers to neglect new information. As mentioned earlier, North Americans display a stronger correspondence bias because they tend to ignore situational constraints, whereas East Asians consider a wider range of contextual information when making person judgments (Choi & Nisbett, 1998). Gilbert and Malone (1995) proposed that the attribution process occurs in two stages. The first stage involves an automatic tendency to make dispositional attributions, and the second stage is a correction process in which perceivers take situational factors into account and modify their judgments. However, because the second stage is slower and more effortful, it is sometimes skipped, leading to the correspondence bias. By contrast, the data-driven style by East Asians focuses more energy on the second stage. More generally, cross-cultural research could use this expectancyVs. data-driven distinction to generate hypotheses about other phenomena related to how people’s expectations influence their perceptions (e.g., placebo effects, the false consensus effect, self-fulfilling prophecies).
Anderson, N. H. (1971). Integration theory and attitude change. Psychological Review, 78, 171–206. Choi, I., & Nisbett, R. E. (1998). Situational salience and cultural differences in the correspondence bias and in the actorobserver bias. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 24, 949–960. Choi, I., Nisbett, R. E., & Norenzayan, A. (1999). Causal attribution across cultures: Variation and universality. Psychological Bulletin, 125, 47–61. Gilbert, D. T., & Malone, P. S. (1995). The correspondence bias. Psychological Bulletin, 117, 21–38. Hastie, R., & Kumar, A. P. (1979). Person memory: Personality traits as organizing principles in memory for behaviors. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 37, 25–38. Kitayama, S., & Cohen, D. (Eds.) (2007). Handbook of cultural psychology. New York, NY: Guildford Press. Knowles, E. D., Morris, M. W., Chiu, C., & Hong, Y. (2001). Culture and the process of person perception: Evidence for automaticity among East Asians in correcting for situational influences on behavior. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 27, 1344–1356. Masuda, T., & Nisbett, R. E. (2001). Attending holistically versus analytically: Comparing the context sensitivity of Japanese and Americans. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 81, 922–934. Miyamoto, Y., & Kitayama, S. (2002). Cultural variation in correspondence bias: The critical role of attitude diagnosticity of socially constrained behavior. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 83, 1239–1248. Morris, M. W., & Peng, K. (1994). Culture and cause: American and Chinese attributions for social and physical events. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 67, 949–971. Nisbett, R. E., Peng, K., Choi, I., & Norenzayan, A. (2001). Culture and systems of thought: Holistic vs. analytic cognition. Psychological Review, 108, 291–310. Peng, K., & Nisbett, R. E. (1999). Culture, dialectics, and reasoning about contradiction. American Psychologist, 54, 741–754. Petrova, P. K., Cialdini, R. B., & Sills, S. J. (2007). Consistencybased compliance across cultures. Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, 43, 104–111.
© 2013 International Union of Psychological Science
