Attending inside or outside: A Japanese-US comparison of spontaneous memory of group information

Abstract

A recent review of empirical evidence disconfirmed the widely-held view that North Americans are less collectivistic than East Asians. However, previous research has proposed that the motivations underlying group behaviours differ across cultures: North Americans are more strongly motivated to acquire and maintain higher in-group status relative to outgroups, whereas East Asians tend to emphasize maintenance of reciprocal relationships within in-groups. We tested this hypothesis by examining the pattern of attentional allocation in group situations using a memory task. As predicted, compared to Japanese, memory performance among Americans was biased towards intergroup status difference over intragroup relationship information.