Department of Psychology, University of Waterloo, Waterloo, Ontario, Canada.
Psychol Sci. 2012 Oct 1;23(10):1059-66. doi: 10.1177/0956797612446025. Epub 2012 Aug 28.
People from different cultures vary in the ways they approach social conflicts, with Japanese being more motivated to maintain interpersonal harmony and avoid conflicts than Americans are. Such cultural differences have developmental consequences for reasoning about social conflict. In the study reported here, we interviewed random samples of Americans from the Midwest United States and Japanese from the larger Tokyo area about their reactions to stories of intergroup and interpersonal conflicts. Responses showed that wisdom (e.g., recognition of multiple perspectives, the limits of personal knowledge, and the importance of compromise) increased with increasing age among Americans, but older age was not associated with wiser responses among Japanese. Younger and middle-aged Japanese showed greater use of wise-reasoning strategies than younger and middle-aged Americans did. This cultural difference was weaker for older participants' reactions to interpersonal conflicts and was actually reversed for intergroup conflicts. This research has important implications for the study of aging, cultural psychology, and wisdom.
不同文化的人在处理社会冲突的方式上存在差异，与美国人相比，日本人更有动力维持人际关系和谐，避免冲突。这种文化差异对社会冲突推理有发展上的影响。在本研究中，我们采访了来自美国中西部的随机美国人和来自更大的东京地区的日本人，了解他们对群体间和人际冲突故事的反应。研究结果表明，美国人的智慧（例如，认识到多种观点、个人知识的局限性以及妥协的重要性）随着年龄的增长而增加，而在日本人中，年龄较大并不与更明智的反应相关。与年轻和中年美国人相比，年轻和中年日本人更倾向于使用明智的推理策略。这种文化差异在参与者对人际冲突的反应中较弱，而在群体间冲突的反应中则相反。这项研究对衰老研究、文化心理学和智慧具有重要意义。
