Of Mice and Culture: How Beliefs About Knowing Affect Habits of Thinking

Hiroaki Morio; Saiwing Yeung; Kaiping Peng; Susumu Yamaguchi

doi:10.3389/fpsyg.2022.917649

Of Mice and Culture: How Beliefs About Knowing Affect Habits of Thinking

Front Psychol. 2022 Jul 12:13:917649. doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2022.917649. eCollection 2022.

Authors

Hiroaki Morio¹, Saiwing Yeung², Kaiping Peng³, Susumu Yamaguchi⁴

Affiliations

¹ Faculty of Informatics, Kansai University, Osaka, Japan.
² Zillow Group, Seattle, CA, United States.
³ Department of Psychology, Tsinghua University, Beijing, China.
⁴ Department of Social Psychology, The University of Tokyo, Tokyo, Japan.

Abstract

Recent research suggests that individuals from East Asian and Western cultures differ in the degree to which they hold a folk world view known as naïve dialecticism, which is characterized by tolerance for contradiction, expectation of change, and cognitive holism. The current research utilizes the Mouse Paradigm to investigate the dynamic nature of naïve dialecticism in real time by measuring individuals' fluctuations in judgment during the process of contemplation. The results showed cultural differences in dynamic measures of evaluation process: Japanese participants took more time to stabilize their thought and showed more fluctuations in their judgment than American participants. These cultural differences were fully mediated by individual differences in levels of naïve dialecticism as measured by the level of dialectical self-views. Implications for cultural psychology and the psychology of dialectical thinking are discussed.

Keywords: ambivalence; attitude structure; cultural differences; moment-to-moment evaluations; naïve dialecticism.