Do Cross-Cultural Psychological Differences Vary with Social Class, Age, and Gender? A Japan-U.S. Comparison of Cognitive Style and Social Orientation Shinobu Kitayama1 Mayumi Karasawa2 Igor Grossmann3 Jinkyung Na4 Michael E. W. Varnum5 Richard E. Nisbett1 1: University of Michigan; 2: Tokyo Woman’s Christian University; 3: University of Waterloo; 4: Sogang University; 5: Arizona State University Paper (excluding tables, figures, and references): 4343 words Research reported here was supported by the Russell Sage Foundation to R.E.N. and S.K., the International Max Plank Research LIFE Fellowship awarded to I.G., National Institute on Aging Grant 5RO129509-02, and National Science Foundation (NSF) Grant 2007: BCS 0717982 to R.E.N. and S.K. The views presented here are not necessarily those of the NSF. Address correspondence to S.K. ([email protected]), University of Michigan, Department of Psychology, 530 Church Street, Ann Arbor, MI 48109-1109. 1 Abstract Previous work assessing psychological tendencies across cultures suggests that East Asians are more holistic in cognition (e.g., extending attention to the context in object perception) and interdependent in social orientation (e.g., feeling happy when connected with others) than European Americans. However, little is known about the possible moderation of these findings by age and social class because of this literature’s near-exclusive focus on young and highly educated segments of the respective populations. The neglect of these demographic variables has persisted even though different theories predict divergent effects of such variables. Here, we addressed this gap by testing a comprehensive set of eleven holistic cognition measures and six interdependent social orientation measures in random samples of Japanese and Americans who varied in age, educational attainment, and gender (N = 666). The previously reported cultural variation proved highly stable across the subpopulations. Though other demographic factors played a significant role for both cognitive style and social orientation, their combined contribution was 14-18 times smaller than the effects of national culture. We discuss implications for the existing theories of culture. Key words: culture, cognitive style, social orientation, Japan, United States 2 Do Cross-Cultural Psychological Differences Vary with Social Class, Age, and Gender? A Japan-U.S. Comparison of Cognitive Style and Social Orientation Much of the work on culture in psychology has compared East Asians, including Japanese, Koreans, and Chinese, among others, and European Americans(Markus & Kitayama, 1991; Nisbett et al., 2001). This work has focused on habitual psychological tendencies, such as attending context vs. object(Kitayama et al., 2003; Masuda & Nisbett, 2001; Morris & Peng, 1994) and feeling happy when achieving social (rather than personal) goals(Kitayama et al., 2006; Mesquita, 2001). Existing evidence suggests that East Asians are relatively more holistic in cognition and more interdependent in social orientation than European Americans(Kitayama & Uskul, 2011). However, this literature nearly exclusively focused on college students, who are typically young, mostly well-off, and highly educated. It is therefore not clear whether the findings might depend on social class and age, even though different theoretical positions predict such moderations. Here, we report an extensive empirical study of seventeen psychological tasks assessing cognitive style and social orientation in European Americans and Japanese who varied in age, educational attainment, and gender. Cognitive style refers to the habitual tendency to process information either (i) holistically by incorporating context and using intuitive (e.g., similarity-based) inferences or (ii) more analytically by focusing on central objects and employing logical rules(Nisbett et al., 2001). By social orientation, we mean the habitual tendency to seek social interdependence, social embeddedness, and/or social harmony by often downplaying self-interests and personal goals(Markus & Kitayama, 1991). Prior work has shown that compared to European Americans, East Asians are both holistic in cognition and interdependent in social orientation(Kitayama & Uskul, 2011; Miyamoto, 2013), consistent with prior work showing that compared to European 3 Americans, East Asians are less individualistic or more collectivistic(Hofstede, 1984; Triandis, 1995). Although extensive, this work leaves behind one crucial question: How might the cultural variation be moderated by social class and age? Nevertheless, different lines of work suggested that the cultural variation in psychological tendencies may depend on social class and age. According to one time-honored tradition of thought (Bush, 2014; Foucault, 1977), higher status individuals first develop cultural ideologies and associated practices to effectively govern the respective regions. For example, in Western European history, the Roman Christian Church may have played a crucial role in transforming traditional, kin-based social systems into more individualistic ones by discouraging kin-based organizations by a series of decrees (Schulz et al., 2019). Likewise, the value of social harmony, pervasive in East Asia, may have initially been adopted tactically by the landowners to encourage conformity to local norms to increase the production of a crop available, rice, which requires massive coordination of human labor(Talhelm et al., 2014). These socio-ecological and political considerations would suggest we might expect high-status individuals to show stronger evidence of predominant cultural mentalities. Scholars have also investigated culture within a broad scope of life-span development. In cognitive domains, for example, earlier theorizing distinguished between cognitive mechanics (evolution-based hard wares of the mind) and cognitive pragmatics (culture-based softwares of the mind(Baltes, 1993)). Based on this distinction, scholars have suggested that culture can influence cognitive mechanics at least when one is relatively young and the hard wares of the mind are supposedly still plastic. However, this cultural influence may diminish after early adulthood when plasticity of the brain hard wares wanes. Further, it may be overwhelmed by cognitive decline after that (D. C. Park et al., 1999). Hence, cultural variations in cognition may decrease with age in the domains of cognitive mechanics. In contrast, cognitive pragmatics is 4 based on learning of culture, which may accumulate over time. Hence, cultural variations in cognition may increase in the domains of cognitive pragmatics. To address these divergent theoretical possibilities, we tested samples of age- heterogeneous Japanese and Americans, with varying levels of educational achievement. We focused on the potential moderation of the cultural differences by gender by recruiting roughly equal numbers of males and females within each subgroup. They were administered a set of 17 tasks, 11 of which are designed to assess the degree of holistic cognition and the remaining six of which are designed to measure the degree of interdependent social orientation. See Supplementary Information for additional tasks included in the surveys conducted in each of the two countries. This effort enabled us to test whether both holistic cognitive style and interdependent social orientation might vary with social class, age, and gender. Based on prior work, we expected that lower social class(Igor Grossmann & Varnum, 2011), older age (Carstensen et al., 1999), and female gender (Cross et al., 2000) would be associated with relatively more holistic cognition and more interdependent social orientation. Last, but not least, prior cross-cultural work typically reported only a small number of tasks, often only one of them, at a time to study the cultural variation. This practice is a major limitation if one is to test whether the cultural variation can generalize beyond the unique task(s) assessed in a given study. We sought to overcome this limitation by treating the tasks as random factors(Judd et al., 2017). Methods Participants The current work was conducted in 2006-2009. The research protocol was approved by the Institutional Review Board of the University of Michigan (HUM00003112). We recruited age- stratified random community samples of Japanese in the Tokyo Metropolitan area and Americans in Washtenaw county, Michigan. In Japan we randomly selected names from a municipal registry. In the U.S. we randomly sampled names from a telephone directory. This 5 research was conducted in the period 2006-2009, a time at which a vast majority of individuals in Washtenaw County had landlines. As indicated in Table 1, we attempted to include an approximately equal number of participants of both sexes, and of each of three age groups (25- 39, 40-59, 60-79), as well as an adequate number of adults from lower socio-economic strata. We approximated social class by level of education, which has been previously proposed as the key factor that distinguishes different classes . In Japan, a survey company contacted participants first, with several questionnaires included in the mail survey. Participants Table 1 Demographics of the current samples in Japan and the United States. Age Education No Some Post Range Mean Colleg College college Grad e Female (84) 25-40 33.68 17 37 27 3 Young Male (93) 25-40 32.78 22 15 47 9 Middl Female (82) 41-56 47.82 18 33 31 JPN e Male (68) 41-55 48.63 14 5 45 4 Female (49) 60-75 66.59 22 18 9 0 Old