Data from: Experimental priming of independent and interdependent activity does not affect culturally-variable psychological processes

Cultural psychologists have shown that people from Western countries exhibit more independent self-construal and analytic (rule-based) cognition than people from East Asia, who exhibit more interdependent self-construal and holistic (relationship-based) cognition. One explanation for this cross-cultural variation is the ecocultural hypothesis, which links contemporary psychological differences to ancestral differences in subsistence and societal cohesion: Western thinking formed in response to solitary herding, which fostered independence, while East Asian thinking emerged in response to communal rice farming, which fostered interdependence. Here, we report two experiments that tested the ecocultural hypothesis in the laboratory. In both, participants played one of two tasks designed to recreate the key factors of working alone and working together. Before and after each task, participants completed psychological measures of independent–interdependent self-construal and analytic–holistic cognition. We found no convincing evidence that either solitary or collective tasks affected any of the measures in the predicted directions. This fails to support the ecocultural hypothesis. However, it may also be that our priming tasks are inappropriate or inadequate for simulating subsistence-related behavioural practices, or that these measures are fixed early in development and therefore not experimentally primable, despite many previous studies that have purported to find such priming effects.

文化心理学家已证实，西方国家个体展现出更强的独立型自我构念（independent self-construal）与分析性（基于规则）认知模式，而东亚个体则更倾向于互依型自我构念（interdependent self-construal）与整体性（基于关系）认知模式。针对这一跨文化差异，现有解释之一为生态文化假说（ecocultural hypothesis），该理论将当代心理差异追溯至祖先在生计方式与社会凝聚层面的差异：西方思维模式形成于独居放牧的生存环境，该环境培育了个体独立性；而东亚思维模式则诞生于集体稻作农耕的社会场景，由此催生了互依性取向。本研究通过两项实验室实验对生态文化假说进行验证。两项实验中，参与者均需完成两类任务之一，旨在复刻独自工作与协作共事的核心情境要素。每项任务实施前后，参与者均需完成独立-互依型自我构念与分析-整体性认知的心理测评量表。研究结果未发现确凿证据表明，独居或协作任务能按预期方向对上述测评指标产生影响，这一结果不支持生态文化假说。不过，这一结果也可能源于：其一，本研究采用的启动任务（priming tasks）不适用于或不足以模拟生计相关的行为实践；其二，上述心理特质在个体发展早期便已固化，因此无法通过实验手段进行启动——尽管此前诸多研究声称观测到了此类启动效应。