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 lab. 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 behavioral 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，西方国家人群相较于东亚人群，展现出更强的独立型自我构念（independent self-construal）与分析式（基于规则）认知风格；东亚人群则更倾向于互依型自我构念（interdependent self-construal）与整体式（基于关系）认知风格。针对这一跨文化差异，学界提出了生态文化假说（ecocultural hypothesis），该假说将当代心理差异与祖先在生存方式及社会凝聚性层面的差异相联系：西方思维模式形成于独居放牧的生活环境，该环境培育了独立特质；东亚思维模式则诞生于集体水稻农耕的社会背景，由此催生了互依特质。本研究报告了两项在实验室环境下检验该生态文化假说的实验。两项实验中，参与者均需完成两项预设任务之一，这两项任务旨在复刻独居劳作与集体协作的核心要素。在每项任务实施前后，参与者均需完成独立-互依型自我构念以及分析-整体式认知的心理测量量表。研究未发现可靠证据表明，独居或集体任务能按照假说预测的方向对各项测量指标产生影响，这一结果并不支持生态文化假说。不过，该结果也存在其他潜在解释：其一，本研究使用的启动任务（priming tasks）无法恰当且充分地模拟与生存方式相关的行为实践；其二，尽管此前诸多研究声称发现了此类启动效应，但这类心理测量指标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调控。