Reading focus
Syllabus: How Do We Understand Ourselves and Other People?
Return to correspondence bias and compare task conditions, perceived evidence, and sampled populations. Use the later-evidence note to distinguish different cultural comparisons.
Why you’re reading it. Test how far the path's explanations travel and why context must be measured rather than assumed from a national label.
A question to consider. How would you investigate a cultural difference if the same essay was persuasive in one setting but weak in another?
Why this reading
A cultural comparison becomes more informative when it tests when a difference appears. These studies vary the essay evidence and judgment procedure to examine inferences about an author writing under instruction.
Before you read
Diagnosticity means how informative evidence is about the question being asked. A correspondent inference attributes an attitude matching the observed behavior. Here, online judgment means judgment while processing information, not an internet study.
Read for
- Compare the short, unpersuasive essays with the longer, persuasive essays and ask what changed together.
- Keep the manipulated task conditions separate from the nonrandomized cultural comparison.
- Distinguish measured thought reports from the additional attentional mechanism proposed in the discussion.
Consider afterwards
- Two groups interpret an assigned speech differently. What would you check about its meaning, persuasiveness, and perceived constraints before attributing the difference to culture?
Editorial context
The American participants were exchange students in Japan; neither group represents a whole culture. Many Labs 2 found a large overall correspondence effect without the simple WEIRD-versus-less-WEIRD difference. The original authors' subsequent analysis identified a U.S.–Japan contrast and examined contextual moderators. These comparisons ask different questions; neither warrants a rule that one culture is biased and another is not.