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.