Abstract
Cultural psychologists have shown that people from Western, Educated, Industrialised, Rich, Democratic (WEIRD) countries often exhibit different psychological processing to people from less-WEIRD countries. The former exhibit more individualistic and less collectivistic social orientation, and more analytic and less holistic cognition, than non-Westerners. Yet the mechanisms responsible for maintaining this cultural variation are unclear. Immigration is an ideal ‘natural experiment’ for uncovering such mechanisms. We used a battery of psychological measures previously shown to vary cross-culturally to compare the social orientation and cognitive style of 286 residents of East London from three cultural backgrounds: (i) 1st-generation British Bangladeshi immigrants; (ii) 2nd-generation British Bangladeshis raised in the UK to Bangladeshi-raised parents; and (iii) non-migrants whose parents were born and raised in the UK. Model comparison revealed that individualism and dispositional attribution, typical of Western societies, are driven primarily by horizontal cultural transmission (e.g. via mass media), with parents and other family members having little or no effect, while collectivism, social closeness and situational attribution were driven by a mix of vertical/oblique cultural transmission (e.g. via family contact) and horizontal cultural transmission. These individual-level transmission dynamics can explain hitherto puzzling population-level phenomena, such as the partial acculturation of 2nd-generation immigrants on measures such as collectivism (due to the mix of vertical and horizontal cultural transmission), or the observation in several countries of increasing individualism (which is transmitted horizontally and therefore rapidly) despite little corresponding change in collectivism (which is transmitted partly vertically and therefore more slowly). Further consideration of cultural transmission mechanisms, in conjunction with the study of migrant communities and model comparison statistics, can shed light on the persistence of, and changes in, culturally-variable psychological processes.
Highlights
One of the most significant recent developments in psychology has been the documentation of systematic cross-cultural variation in psychological processes that were once thought to be human universals [1,2,3,4]
The culture-only regressions showed different effects of cultural group for the different measures (Table 4). 1st generation British Bangladeshis were more collectivistic than non-migrants, with the 2nd generation intermediate between the 1st generation and non-migrants (Fig 1A)
Despite the extensive documentation of cultural variation in human psychological processes, little research has examined the precise mechanisms by which this variation is transmitted, maintained and potentially transformed over time
Summary
One of the most significant recent developments in psychology has been the documentation of systematic cross-cultural variation in psychological processes that were once thought to be human universals [1,2,3,4]. When presented with object triads such as cow, chicken and grass, Westerners typically group objects according to formal rules (e.g. grouping cow and chicken because they are both members of a “farm animal” category) while East Asians typically group objects according to relationships (e.g. grouping cow and grass, because cows eat grass) [6,7]. Cross-cultural studies show unrealistic self-enhancement to be much reduced, and often entirely absent, in non-Western societies [11,12] These differences tap into broader cultural variation in social orientation: East Asians typically possess collectivistic or interdependent selves, defining themselves in terms of social relationships and roles, whereas Westerners typically possess more individualistic or independent selves, describing themselves in terms of intrinsic and individual psychological dispositions [13,14]. A recent review criticised the traditional focus within psychology on people from Western, educated, industrialised, rich, democratic (“WEIRD”) countries, who seem far from representative of our species as a whole [2]
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