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Examined how applicability of activated cultural knowledge would moderate cultural priming effects. Research with Chinese undergraduate students who had extensive knowledge of Chinese and western culture, and with Chinese-born students at an American university, indicated that seeing American versus Chinese cultural primes affected perception of stimuli featuring salient individual versus group agency. American cultural primes elicited fewer attributions to the group in the high-salience versus low-salience condition. (SM)

Three studies support the proposal that need for closure (NFC) involves a desire for consensual validation that leads to cultural conformity. Individual differences in NFC interact with cultural group variables to determine East Asian versus Western differences in conflict style and procedural preferences (Study 1), information gathering in disputes (Study 2), and fairness judgment in reward allocations (Study 3). Results from experimental tests indicate that the relevance of NFC to cultural conformity reflects consensus motives rather than effort minimization (Study 2) or political conservatism (Study 3). Implications for research on conflict resolution and motivated cultural cognition are discussed., (((c) 2007 APA, all rights reserved).)

This study tested whether priming of cultural symbols activates cultural behavioral scripts and thus the corresponding behaviors, and also whether the behaviors activated are context-specific. Specifically, to activate the cultural knowledge of Chinese-American bicultural participants, we primed them with Chinese cultural icons or American cultural icons. In the control condition, we showed them geometric figures. Then, the participants played the Prisoner's Dilemma game with friends or strangers (the context manipulation). As expected, participants showed more cooperation toward friends when Chinese cultural knowledge was activated than when American cultural knowledge was activated. By contrast, participants showed a similarly low level of cooperation toward strangers after both Chinese and American culture priming. These findings not only support previous evidence on culture priming of social judgment and self-construals, but also (a) provide the first evidence for the effects of culture priming on behaviors and (b) demonstrate the boundary condition of culture priming.

Social identity approaches assume that social identification affects both self-conception and intergroup orientation. The authors contend that such social identification effects are accentuated when people hold a fixed view of human character and attribute immutable dispositions to social groups. To these individuals, social identities are immutable, concrete entities capable of guiding self-conception and intergroup orientation. Social identification effects are attenuated when people hold a malleable view of human character and thus do not view social identities as fixed, concrete entities. The authors tested and found support for this contention in three studies that were conducted in the context of the Hong Kong 1997 political transition, and discussed the findings in terms of their implications for self-conceptions and the meaning of social identification.