Previous research suggests that members of East Asian cultures show a greater preference for dialectical thinking and sensitivity to context information than do Westerners. We suggest this difference is rooted in a greater chronic Fear of Isolation (FOI) in East Asians than in Westerners. To support this hypothesis, we manipulated FOI in a group of Westerners and assessed their relative preference for dialectical proverbs and sensitivity to context. For cross-cultural validation of our hypothesis, we assessed the relationship between chronic levels of FOI and dialectical reasoning in Koreans. Consistent with our proposal, both experimentally primed FOI (Experiment 1A and 2) and chronic levels of FOI (Experiment 1B) were positively related to relative preference for dialectical proverbs. This effect was independent of participantsÕ level of negative mood (Experiment 2). A third experiment showed that sensitivity to context was affected by FOI in a manner consistent with previous studies of cultural differences (Experiment 3).

Cultural psychology, and other social sciences (e.g. cultural anthropology, sociology), seek to document cultural variation, yet have difficulty providing strong empirical tests of explanations for that variation. It is argued here that an effective means of testing hypotheses regarding the origin of, and persistence and change in, cultural variation is by simulating cultural transmission in the lab using certain methods from experimental social psychology. Three experimental methods are reviewed: the transmission chain method, the replacement method, and the constant-group method. Although very few studies have explicitly simulated specific cross-cultural patterns, much potential exists for future investigations. This integration of small-scale experimental simulations and largescale observational or historical data is facilitated by an evolutionary framework for the study of culture, and has a precedent in the biological sciences, where experiments are used to simulate and explain the processes of biological evolution.

Our research is aimed at a systematic investigation of phenomena in the nexus of culture, technology and learning. The basic premise of our research is that social affordances of technologies might vary along cultural dimensions. The challenge for technological learning environments is that interacting through technology is not unproblematic. First, it makes interaction more difficult (Clark & Brennan, 1991; Olson & Olson, 2002). Second, it may not mean, feel and

Causal induction provides a nice test domain for examining the influence of individual-difference factors on cognition. The phenomena of both conditionalization and discounting reflect attention to multiple potential causes when people infer what caused an effect. We explored the hypothesis that individuals with an independent self-construal are relatively less sensitive to context (other causes) than are individuals with an interdependent self-construal in this domain. We found greater levels of conditionalization and data consistent with discounting for participants in whom we primed an interdependent self-construal than for participants in whom we primed an independent self-construal. Research on cultural differences and expertise has highlighted the presence of significant individual differences in performance on cognitive tasks that have often been thought to represent more universal cognitive tendencies

For more than a century, most psychologists have based their discussions of human thinking on the cardinal assumption that basic cognitive processes are the same for all normal adult human beings, whether in the plains of Central Asia, the villages of East Africa, or the

To be published in Behavioral and Brain Sciences (in press)

According to theories of cultural neuroscience, Westerners and Easterners may have distinct styles of cognition (e.g., different allocation of attention). Previous research has shown that Westerners and Easterners tend to utilize analytical and holistic cognitive styles, respectively. On the other hand, little is known regarding the cultural differences in neuroeconomic behavior. For instance, economic decisions may be affected by cultural differences in neurocomputational processing underlying attention; however, this area of neuroeconomics has been largely understudied. In the present paper, we attempt to bridge this gap by considering the links between the theory of cultural neuroscience and neuroeconomic theory of the role of attention in intertemporal choice. We predict that (i) Westerners are more impulsive and inconsistent in intertemporal choice in comparison to Easterners, and (ii) Westerners more steeply discount delayed monetary losses than Easterners. We examine these predictions by utilizing a novel temporal discounting model based on Tsallis ’ statistics (i.e. a q-exponential model). Our preliminary analysis of temporal discounting of gains and losses by Americans and Japanese confirmed the predictions from the cultural neuroeconomic theory. Future study directions, employing computational modeling via neural networks, are briefly outlined and discussed.

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Abstract: Software development effort estimates are frequently too low, which may lead to poor project plans and project failures. One reason for this bias seems to be that the effort estimates produced by software developers are affected by information that has no relevance for the actual use of effort. We attempted to acquire a better understanding of the underlying mechanisms and the robustness of this type of estimation bias. For this purpose, we hired 374 software developers working in outsourcing companies to participate in a set of three experiments. The experiments examined the connection between estimation bias and developer dimensions: Self-construal (how one sees oneself), thinking style, nationality, experience, skill, education, sex, and organizational role. We found that estimation bias was present along most of the studied dimensions. The most interesting finding may be that the estimation bias increased significantly with higher levels of interdependence, i.e., with stronger emphasis connectedness, social context and relationships. We propose that this connection may be enabled by an activation of one’s self-construal when engaging in effort estimation, and, a connection between a more interdependent self-construal and increased search for indirect messages, lower ability to ignore irrelevant context, and a stronger emphasis on socially desirable responses. 1

Online collaboration, in comparison to face-to-face collaboration, is advantageous in making multiparty teamwork possible at a very low cost. As multicultural multiparty collaboration becomes ubiquitous, it is crucial to understand how communication processes are shaped in the social and media environments that computer-mediated communication affords. We conducted a laboratory study investigating how different types of cultural asymmetry in group composition (Chinese of the majority versus American of the majority) and communication media (textonly versus video-enabled chatroom) influence conversational similarity between Chinese and Americans. The paper presents an analysis identifying that the selection of media and the cultural composition of the group jointly shape intercultural conversational closeness. Author Keywords Computer-mediated communication, communication accommodation, multiparty teamwork, cross-cultural communication, group brainstorming