Comparing the Components of Behavior Judgments Between American and Taiwanese Cultures
Yun Chuang, Jon-Fan Hu
Department of Psychology, National Cheng Kung University, Tainan City, Taiwan
Abstract
While observing others in the society, people make explanations and judgments about others' behaviors. Previous studies have indicated that people in Eastern and Western cultures are different in information processing, the sensitivities to various social cues, and intentional evaluations, all of which could affect behavior judgment. Therefore, there should be cultural differences in cognitive or emotional reactions as well, which is what the present study is examining. We adopted the vignettes stimuli and the questions developed by Knutson et al. (2010) to measure the how Taiwanese participants think and react while making behavior judgments. And then, we conducted a factor analysis on our observations and compared the results with the ones obtained in the original study of the stimuli. It was found that the same number of factors and almost the same components for each factor as the previous study did. However, we found that for the Taiwanese participants, emotional aversion was more related to the norm violation, while for the American participants, according to the original study, aversion was more related to the social affect. The results of this comparison have demonstrated cultural differences between Taiwan and the United States in how aversion is evoked by observing others’ behaviors.
Keywords: judgment, cultural difference, social norms, aversion
