I Like You Because You Think in the “Right” Way: Culture and Ideal Thinking

Abstract

Holistic reasoning is dominant in East Asia but in America, analytic reasoning is. However, relatively less effort has been made to understand the implications of these cultural differences for everyday social interactions with others. Thus, the present work investigated the effects of cognitive style on interpersonal liking and their cultural variations. In doing so, we focused on an impression-formation paradigm and tested whether a culturally representative thinker would be positively evaluated. In two studies, Koreans evaluated a holistic person more positively than an analytic one whereas the opposite was the case for Americans. Furthermore, cultural differences in evaluation remained significant even after controlling for participants' own reasoning style or their similarity to the targets. We also found that different weights were given to different aspects of reasoning in two cultures; wisdom was more important for Koreans whereas rationality was so for Americans in predicting overall preferences.