Cultural Influences In Psychological Research

Introduction

Cultural differences has been one of the research interests of psychologists since culture shape how we perceive the outside word. Culture does influence process of perception and attention. During the process of perception, people from western culture tend to be context-independent while people from eastern culture tend to be context-dependent. These cultural differences can be attributed to different social practices (Nisbett, & Miyamoto, 2005). Some scholars also proposed that cultural differences influence formation of individualism and collectivism, which further influence many factors, including cognitive style (Oyserman, & Lee, 2008). Among all daily life concepts, death is a concept that seems relevant and, at the same

Participants were shown a video displaying several fish swimming around in the sea. One blue fish then moved to right side of screen while the remaining fish left in the left side of screen. Participants were then asked to interpret whether the blue fish was influenced by internal or external forces. Europeans made a more independent attribution that the blue fish tried to influence the other fish. In contrast, Chinese participants made a more interdependent attribution that the blue fish was influenced by the remaining fish (Morris & Peng,

In this case, language served as cognitive cue to reinforce cultural-specific self-construal. Experiments, using Chinese or English as medium of instructions, showed that when Chinese was used, which represents collectivistic culture, interdependent self-construal was observed. When English was used, which represents individualistic culture, independent self-construal was observed (Kemmelmeier & Cheng, 2004).

Some scholars tried to explain this relationship by cultural accommodation, which proposes that language reinforces culturally-desirable values and behaviours (Bond & Yang, 1982; Yang & Bond, 1980).That is, individuals try to act in a way that is favourable by the culture of language they are speaking. Researchers supported this hypothesis by response patterns of bilingual individuals. When these individuals responded in their native language, they would try to present and behave in a desirable manner according to the culture of their native language. When the same group of individuals responded in their secondary language, similar pattern of accommodation to culture of secondary language was found (Ralston, Cunniff & Gustafson,