Vu Tuong-Van, Finkenauer Catrin, Huizinga Mariette, Novin Sheida, Krabbendam Lydia
Faculty of Behavioural & Movement Sciences, Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, Amsterdam, the Netherlands.
Department of Interdisciplinary Social Sciences, Utrecht University, Utrecht, the Netherlands.
PLoS One. 2017 Aug 23;12(8):e0183011. doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0183011. eCollection 2017.
This study investigated whether individualism and collectivism (IC) at country, individual, and situational level influence how quickly and accurately people can infer mental states (i.e. theory of mind, or ToM), indexed by accuracy and reaction time in a ToM task. We hypothesized that collectivism (having an interdependent self and valuing group concerns), compared to individualism (having an independent self and valuing personal concerns), is associated with greater accuracy and speed in recognizing and understanding the thoughts and feelings of others. Students (N = 207) from individualism-representative (the Netherlands) and collectivism-representative (Vietnam) countries (Country IC) answered an individualism-collectivism questionnaire (Individual IC) and were randomly assigned to an individualism-primed, collectivism-primed, or no-prime task (Situational IC) before performing a ToM task. The data showed vast differences between the Dutch and Vietnamese groups that might not be attributable to experimental manipulation. Therefore, we analyzed the data for the groups separately and found that Individual IC did not predict ToM accuracy or reaction time performance. Regarding Situational IC, when primed with individualism, the accuracy performance of Vietnamese participants in affective ToM trials decreased compared to when primed with collectivism and when no prime was used. However, an interesting pattern emerged: Dutch participants were least accurate in affective ToM trials, while Vietnamese participants were quickest in affective ToM trials. Our research also highlights a dilemma faced by cross-cultural researchers who use hard-to-reach populations but face the challenge of disentangling experimental effects from biases that might emerge due to an interaction between cultural differences and experimental settings. We propose suggestions for overcoming such challenges.
本研究调查了国家、个人和情境层面的个人主义与集体主义（IC）是否会影响人们推断心理状态（即心理理论，ToM）的速度和准确性，这通过ToM任务中的准确性和反应时间来衡量。我们假设，与个人主义（具有独立自我并重视个人关切）相比，集体主义（具有相互依存的自我并重视群体关切）在识别和理解他人的思想和情感方面具有更高的准确性和速度。来自个人主义代表性国家（荷兰）和集体主义代表性国家（越南）的学生（N = 207）（国家层面的IC）回答了一份个人主义 - 集体主义问卷（个人层面的IC），并在执行ToM任务之前被随机分配到个人主义启动、集体主义启动或无启动任务（情境层面的IC）。数据显示，荷兰和越南群体之间存在巨大差异，这些差异可能无法归因于实验操纵。因此，我们分别分析了两组的数据，发现个人层面的IC并不能预测ToM的准确性或反应时间表现。关于情境层面的IC，当以个人主义启动时，越南参与者在情感ToM试验中的准确性表现相比于以集体主义启动和无启动时有所下降。然而，出现了一个有趣的模式：荷兰参与者在情感ToM试验中准确性最低，而越南参与者在情感ToM试验中速度最快。我们的研究还凸显了跨文化研究人员面临的一个困境，他们研究难以接触到的人群，但面临着将实验效应与可能因文化差异和实验设置之间的相互作用而产生的偏差区分开来的挑战。我们提出了克服此类挑战的建议。
