The Relation among Culture, Personality, Cognition, and Behavior: At the individual level

Literature shows that East Asians hold a more complex interactionist theory regarding behavior and are held to reason holistically. This assumption makes East Asians believe that human behavior is always jointly determined by their personality and situation and that everything in the universe is related to everything else in some way. Therefore, East Asians possess relatively sophisticated attributional schemata, display greater hindsight bias, and are less susceptible to the correspondence bias, etc. However, these lines of research share the same limit—they only compare country differences; nevertheless, they tend to interpret these differences with theoretical concepts such as self-construals, collectivism-individualism, and holism. This study aimed to investigate the association among interdependent and independent self-construals, collectivism-individualism, holistic and analytic reasoning, attributional complexity, and behaviors. Study 1 investigated the association between culture and personality. In Study 2, participants were separated by interdependent self-construal, collectivism, holism, and attributional complexity. However, we didn’t have the same results with cross-culture researches. To exclude the confounding of tasks, we used an open-end task in Study 3—participants freely listed reasons for life events. Study 3 provided evidence that prosessing the East Asian cultural tendency could predict that individuals generated more external causes for explanation of life events: Individuals with higher interdependent self-construal or higher collectivism spontaneously attributed life events to the context. Besides, individuals with higher attributional complexity listed more reasons for life events. We think that there are some other ways that can explain the results found by past cross-culture research. If we use more appropriate measures and tasks, we will find that individuals with higher East Asian culture tendency spontaneously produce more external causes. This result may compensate for the insufficiency of cross-culture research.