Reader Comments
Post a new comment on this article
Post Your Discussion Comment
Please follow our guidelines for comments and review our competing interests policy. Comments that do not conform to our guidelines will be promptly removed and the user account disabled. The following must be avoided:
- Remarks that could be interpreted as allegations of misconduct
- Unsupported assertions or statements
- Inflammatory or insulting language
Thank You!
Thank you for taking the time to flag this posting; we review flagged postings on a regular basis.
closeWas there an effect for Ethnicity in Studies 2 to 4?!
Posted by timtak on 05 Feb 2015 at 10:04 GMT
Ethnicity was mentioned as having no effect in study one, but only gender seems to be mentioned in subsequent studies.
I would have thought that at good American West Coast university there would be quite a lot of East Asian American students and I hypothesise that East Asians would be effected to a greater degree by science priming, whereas the Westerners may not be effected at all! I am probably wrong, about this but I would be very grateful if you would let us know.
I would like to try this out on my Japanese students. Please would you be so kind as to share with me, or the world, the rape vignette? I believe that both the science and non-science primes are available in the paper and in the response to the "30" points/questions respectively.
There is no need to read the rest.
I think that this science priming effect may be another type, or the other type, of Objective Self Awareness. As my only research shows, Japanese (and possibly East Asians) are unaffected by self-reflecting mirrors. Objective Self Awareness research seems to me to show an ambivalence, or fuzzyness, in the way that "Objective" is interpreted: reflexivity, or perhaps social reflexivity, neutrality, allocentrism (as in Cohen's theorisation), or as an object (what is an object?), or visually (since most of the manipulations involve cameras and mirrors).
While our paper carried the usual cross-cultural psychology banner suggesting that OSA research is about manipulating allocentric-ness, and that the mirror in the heads of the Japanese suggests that they are chronically social, this in fact contradicts the majority of Objective Self Awareness research, which finds that Objective Self Awareness promotes *private* self-awareness, and for example resistance to persuasion. In my own view OSA is about social reflexivity and visuality. The Japanese can see and judge themselves visually even without mirrors.
There are two ways that one can "see" and judge oneself. The other way is the way proposed by the majority of self-evaluation theorists, such as Mead, Bakhtin and I believe Adam Smith; linguistically. Language, they claim, allows us to evaluate ourselves from the point of view of another. And I think that linguistically may be virtually synonymous with scientifically - one can see oneself as a set of propositions to be tested. Am I Caucasian, tall, kind? So, the scientific priming may have encouraged those without much in the way of linguistic self-appraisal, without a "generalised other" in the linguistic domain, to model a linguistic intra-psychic other (super ego, generalised other, superaddressee), and become pro-social, just as mirrors encourage Western people to be pro-social by providing them with a visual other, that Japanese and Chinese generally have.
This would also explain the "paradox" in Ma-Kellams other research, that East Asians seem to be more somatic and yet less viscerally aware of internal bodily states since, I believe, that the somaticity of East Asians and their emphasis on "face" is due to their self-conceptualising taking place in the eye of the other. East Asian somaticity may be therefore a visual one, focusing on the face, clothing, and surfaces, resulting in visual psycho-pathologies (as mentioned on ResearchGate), but conversely a lower awareness of internal bodily states.
I think that visual awareness is coextensive with so called Masuda and Nisbett's "contextual awareness" since to Westerners the visual is mere context, whereas language is focal. For East Asians, especially Japanese, face is focal and language is fluff or "rikutsu" in Japanese.
I have tried to provide Japanese with a mirror of language in the past but failed. The Japanese are used to speaking to others, just as Westerners are used to be being seen by others. But in the absence of others and mirrors, Westerners can't see themselves, and according to Mori Arimasa at least, the Japanese speak off into the blue as it were becuase they have no linguistic intra-psychic other, so just getting them to speak is insufficient. Japanese need to be made to speak, and to be made aware of the "objectivity," provided and described by statements.
Finally to say that science and language provide no more than a mirror, a social-reflexivity (an awareness of oneself as an other) is to say that the world of science is a world of convention, or linguistic agreement, and does not exist 'objectively' in that ghostly Kantian sense at all.