Abstract
Cultural approaches focused on the influences of individualist and collectivist norms describe the relationship between an individual and his or her social surroundings. The current study had a twofold purpose. The primary goal was to investigate whether Brazilians, like other collective peoples, displayed more group self-representations, categorized items more relationally and paid more attention to context than Americans. A secondary concern was to investigate if counter-cultural primes played a role in activating either collective or individual selves. Both American (n = 100) and Brazilian (n = 101) participants were assigned either to a no-prime condition or a counter-cultural prime condition and then were asked to rate emotion cartoons, categorize items, complete the Twenty Statement Test, and choose a representative object. As expected, unprimed Brazilian participants displayed more collectivist patterns on emotional and cognitive tasks than Americans. However, Brazilians offered more individualist self-representations than American participants. Priming only had a marginal effect on item categorization. These findings, along with the strengths and limitations of this study and suggestions for future research, are discussed.
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