44 Cultural Perspectives on Personality and Social Psychology
Sociocultural research is also offering new answers to
long-standing questions in psychological development. For
example, work by Cole and his colleagues (Cole & Enge-
stroem, 1995) has offered a novel process explanation of one
of the central theoretical problems of cognitive development
and language learning—explaining how individuals can ob-
tain a more powerful conceptual structure if they do not al-
ready in some way possess that structure, or how qualitative
and not merely quantitative developmental change may
occur. In research conducted on the teaching of reading, it has
been demonstrated that a range of mediational means, such as
simplified reading materials, expert guidance, and so on, are
available in everyday socialization contexts that support
learning to read. Thus, it is noted that many of the structures
entailed in the achievement of competence in reading exist
between persons before they appear as individual competen-
cies that may be manifest without this level of cultural
support. Equally, in another example, evidence has been ob-
tained to suggest that changes in children’s forms of social
participation explain some of the marked advances in cogni-
tive and social functioning that have been linked to the 5- to
7-year-old age shift among the schooled populations that
have been subject to most study by cognitive developmental
psychologists (Rogoff, 1996).
Cultural Social Psychological Traditions
of Cognitive Research
Cultural social psychological work on cognition has a more
recent history, tracing its origins most directly to early chal-
lenges to the universality of certain well-established attribu-
tional phenomena. It is giving rise to a rapidly growing
experimental literature that points to qualitative cultural vari-
ation in basic modes of cognitive processing.
In some of the early groundbreaking work in this tradition,
Shweder and Bourne (1984) challenged the completeness of
contemporary social psychological theories of social attribu-
tion. It was documented that, as compared with European-
Americans, Oriyan Hindu Indians place significantly greater
emphasis in person description on actions versus abstract
traits, with their person descriptions more frequently making
reference to the context. Thus, for example, their investiga-
tion revealed that whereas European-Americans are more
likely to describe a friend by sayingshe is friendly,Oriyan
Indians are more likely to describe the friend by sayingshe
brings cakes to my family on festival days.This type of cul-
tural difference, it was observed, was not explicable in terms
of the types of objective ecological or individual psychologi-
cal factors that had been emphasized in previous studies, such
as variation in schooling, literacy, socioeconomic status,
linguistic resources, or capacities for abstract thought. Rather,
the results appeared explicable only when taking into account
cultural factors. In particular, the trends were demonstrated to
reflect the contrasting cultural conceptions of the person and
related sociocultural practices emphasized in Hindu Indian
versus European-American cultural communities.
Subsequent cross-cultural developmental research on so-
cial attribution demonstrated that these types of cultural con-
siderations give rise to cultural variation in the paths and
endpoints of development (J. G. Miller, 1984, 1987). It was
documented that whereas European-American children show
an age increase in their reference to traits (e.g.,she is aggres-
sive) but no age-related change in their reference to contextual
considerations, Hindu Indian children show an age increase in
their references to the social context (e.g.,there are bad rela-
tions between our families) but no age increase in their refer-
ences to traits. More recently, this type of work has been
further extended to understanding the development of indi-
viduals’ conceptions of mind, with cultural work calling into
question claims that theory of mind understandings develop
spontaneously toward an end point of trait psychology—and
providing evidence that they proceed in directions that reflect
the contrasting epistemological assumptions of local cultural
communities (Lillard, 1998).
In other lines of work on social attribution and cognition,
culturally based social psychological research is calling into
question the universality of various attributional and cognitive
tendencies long assumed to be basic to all psychological func-
tioning, such as motives to maintain self-consistency or to
emphasize dispositional over situational information. Thus,
for example, it has been demonstrated that Japanese college
students tend to maintain weaker beliefs in attitude-behavior
consistency than do Australian college students (Kashima,
Siegal, Tanaka, & Kashima, 1992), while being less prone
than are Canadian college students to show cognitive disso-
nance biases—that is, tendencies to distort social perceptions
to make them more congruent with behavior (Heine & Leh-
man, 1997). Also, relative to European-Americans, various
East Asian populations have been documented to display
greater sensitivity to situational information in object percep-
tion and less vulnerability to the fundamental attributional
error (Ji, Peng, & Nisbett, 2000), a tendency to treat behaviors
as correspondent with dispositions.
New lines of research in this area are also linking cultural
views of the self and related cultural practices to variation in
fundamental styles of cognitive processing, such as tenden-
cies to privilege analytic versus dialectical epistemological
stances. In one illustration of such a cultural difference, ex-
perimental research has demonstrated that American under-
graduates tend to treat information in a polarized manner, as