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Individualism and the field viewpoint: Cultural influences on memory perspective
Consciousness and Cognition 21 (2012) 1498–1503
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Short Communication
Individualism and the field viewpoint: Cultural influences on memory perspective Maryanne Martin a,⇑, Gregory V. Jones b a b
Department of Experimental Psychology, University of Oxford, South Parks Road, Oxford OX1 3UD, UK Department of Psychology, University of Warwick, Coventry CV4 7AL, UK
a r t i c l e
i n f o
Article history: Received 10 April 2011 Available online 4 June 2012 Keywords: Memory perspective Field viewpoint Observer viewpoint Cultural variables Individualism
a b s t r a c t Two perspectives from which memories can be retrieved have been distinguished: field resembles the view from the first-person vantage point of original experience, whereas observer resembles the view from the third-person vantage point of a spectator. There is evidence that the incidences of the two types of perspective differ between at least two different cultural groups. It is hypothesised here that this is a special case of a more general relation between memory perspective and cultural individualism, such that field and observer perspectives are more prevalent among people from, respectively, relatively individualist and relatively collectivist societies. Memory perspectives adopted by participants from a range of different countries were recorded, and were found to vary in the predicted manner. Regression analysis showed that the potential effects of three other cultural variables – uncertainty avoidance, masculinity and, to a lesser extent, power distance – were eclipsed by the influence of individualism, and the implications are discussed. Ó 2012 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
1. Introduction Early work (e.g., Nigro & Neisser, 1983; Robinson & Swanson, 1993) has established that two different modes of retrieval from memory can be distinguished. With a field perspective, people experience remembered scenes as though participating in the scenes themselves whereas, with an observer perspective, people experience remembered scenes as though acting as an outside spectator; the distinction may also be described as equivalent to reporting in the first person versus reporting in the third person. Subsequent work has shown that the perspective adopted may have a significant influence upon what people remember. McIsaac and Eich (2002) asked people to carry out a number of task sequences (e.g., throwing a small foam basketball into a hoop), and then elicited recall of the sequences with participants asked to adopt either a field or an observer perspective. They found that reports of psychological processes were more frequent with field than with observer perspective, whereas reports of physical appearances were more frequent with observer than with a field appearance. A similar result has been observed even without enactment. Bagri and Jones (2009) asked people simply to read passages describing the task sequences used by McIsaac and Eich (2002), and found that recall of the psychological processes described in the passages was more accurate when participants adopted a field rather than an observer perspective; greater accuracy with a field perspective has also been reported by Kim, Ciovica, Cho, and St. Clair (in a conference paper cited by Rice, 2010). Because the memory perspective adopted can influence the content of what is retrieved from memory, it can be readily appreciated that there is evidence of an important relation to the incidence of intrusive memories in general and to posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) in particular. When Williams and Moulds (2008) examined intrusive memories among the
⇑ Corresponding author. Fax: +44 1865 310447. E-mail addresses: [email protected] (M. Martin), [email protected] (G.V. Jones). 1053-8100/$ - see front matter Ó 2012 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.concog.2012.04.009
M. Martin, G.V. Jones / Consciousness and Cognition 21 (2012) 1498–1503
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general population, they found that instructing participants with a natural field perspective to switch to an observer perspective significantly lowered their judgements of distress and vividness, whereas switching in the reverse direction did not have a comparable effect. In a clinical group, on the other hand, Kenny et al. (2009) assessed the severity of PTSD over a 12 month period using CAPS (Clinician-Administered PTSD Scale), and found that both initially and at 12 months, CAPS was higher for those with an observer than with a field perspective. Further, for those with an initial field perspective, CAPS at 12 months was higher if they changed to an observer perspective than if they had remained with a field perspective. There is also evidence that memory perspective plays a role in other psychological disorders. People with social phobia are more likely than control participants to have an observer perspective for social situations (Wells, Clark, & Ahmad, 1998) and for highly anxious situations (Coles, Turk, Heimberg, & Fresco, 2001). Potentially of widest relevance are the links which are emerging with depression (e.g., Bergouignan et al., 2008). Thus Kuyken and Moulds (2009) have reported that, across individuals in a population of people with depression, a greater incidence of field perspective at pre-treatment was linked to lower levels of depression post-treatment. They noted that if the observer perspective encourages evaluative self-focus (e.g., ‘‘I am unlikeable’’; Kuyken & Moulds, 2009, p. 626) then this may be problematic in depression. Given the indications of links between memory perspective and mental illness, it would appear to be useful to investigate whether the predominant pattern of memory perspective which is adopted naturally varies for different groups. Initial evidence that this is the case has been reported by Cohen and Gunz (2002). Cohen and Gunz found that, among students in Canada, a group of people who were born in Asia, whom they called Easterners, were more likely to possess an observer perspective than another group of people who were born in North America, whom they called Westerners. Surprisingly little research appears to have been triggered by this striking finding, however, though a comparable difference has been observed by Sutin and Robins (2007) for groups described as Asian and Caucasian. Why should people from different regions tend to retrieve their memories in different ways? At this early stage of understanding, it appears appropriate to explore whether variation in memory perspective is linked to changes in more general cultural variables. Probably the most extensively explored set of cultural variables is that proposed by Hofstede (1983, 2001), and we have recently shown (Papadatou-Pastou, Martin, Munafò, & Jones, 2008) that they may be used to predict even the distributions of left- and right-handedness across countries (see also Martin, Papadatou-Pastou, Jones, & Munafò, 2010; Vuoksimaa & Kaprio, 2010). The Hofstede cultural variable which has been employed most extensively in psychological investigation is that of individualism (versus collectivism), and it seems plausible to hypothesise that variation in memory perspective may be a function of this dimension, as follows. It has been proposed by Hofstede (1983, 2001) that an individualistic culture is one in which reliance upon oneself is relatively pronounced. Evidence has been reported that individualism is both a reliable and a valid index of cultural differences (Schimmack, Oishi, & Diener, 2005), and meta-analysis has shown it to be a significant influence in a substantial corpus of 83 studies (Oyserman, Coon, & Kemmelmeier, 2002). In the present context, it may be hypothesised that the predominant way in which a person tends to retrieve memories is subject to influence by the overall levels of cultural individualism to which the person has been exposed. In particular, higher levels of individualism would be expected to be associated with the vantage point of the individual remembering with a field perspective, whereas lower levels of individualism would be associated with the observer perspective available to spectators. The present study directly examines whether higher and lower levels of cultural individualism are related to the adoption of field and observer perspectives, respectively. Three further cultural variables described by Hofstede (1983, 2001) are also potentially of relevance, namely, uncertainty avoidance, power distance, and masculinity. In brief, uncertainty avoidance refers to the degree of formalisation within a culture, power distance refers to the degree of social inequality within a culture, and masculinity refers to the degree of differentiation in gender roles within a culture. None of these latter three variables appears to provide a clear mapping onto the field/observer distinction, and thus a priori they seem less likely to be predictive of memory perspective. In order to dissect the possible relations between memory perspective and a set of multivalent cultural variables, a study was carried out to examine a wider range of affiliations than the binary groupings studied previously (Cohen & Gunz, 2002; Sutin & Robins, 2007). 2. Method 2.1. Participants These were 100 students (37 female) tested in Oxford individually or in small groups, comprising 26 different nationalities (the largest contributions from outside Britain were from China and the USA). Mean age was 22.2 years (SD = 3.7). 2.2. Procedure Participants were provided with a questionnaire which, along with demographic items, contained a series of questions relating to their memories for receiving an important piece of news. Five items assessed the contents of memory, namely, memory for Place (How well can you remember where you were, when you first heard the news?), for Activity (How well can you remember what you were doing ...), for Source (How well can you remember the source from which you first heard the news ...), for Self (How well can you remember the particular clothes that you were wearing ...), and for Other (If there was anybody else present when you first heard the news, how well can you remember the particular clothes that they were
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wearing? If no-one else was there, leave this question blank.) For each of these memory attributes there was a response scale ranging from 1 (Not at all) to 7 (Extremely well). A sixth memory attribute, Self Advantage, was constructed subsequently for use in analysis as a difference score (Self minus Other) potentially sensitive to memory perspective and individualism. Memory perspective was then probed: When you are remembering how you first heard the news, is your predominant impression one of viewing the situation around you as if looking out through your eyes, or is it one of viewing yourself from an external point of view? A seven-point response scale for memory perspective was used, ranging from 3 (Entirely looking out through my eyes) to +3 (Entirely observing myself from an external point of view); this has previously been shown to provide a satisfactory scale for the range from field to observer (e.g., Coles et al., 2001; Wells et al., 1998). For 69 of the participants (28 female), three attributes of the remembered image were also assessed on a response scale from 1 to 5. These were vividness – How vivid is the image? (from Very vague to Very vivid); realism – How real does the image seem? (from Not at all real to Very real); and emotionality – When you focus on the image, how intense are the feelings and emotions (of any kind) that you feel? (from Not at all intense to Very intense). Finally, the numerical estimates of cultural variables used in the analyses derived from those reported by Hofstede (2001).
3. Results Over all participants, the mean values of the cultural variables were 63.7 (SD = 28.8) for individualism, 45.3 (SD = 21.7) for uncertainty avoidance, 49.9 (SD = 21.0) for power distance, and 59.6 (SD = 12.8) for masculinity. For memory contents, the mean values were 6.75 (SD = 0.82) for place, 6.45 (SD = 1.17) for activity, 6.74 (SD = 0.91) for source, 2.33 (SD = 1.85) for self, 1.91 (N = 80, SD = 1.49) for other, and 0.49 (N = 80, SD = 1.34) for self advantage. For image variables, the mean values were 3.94 (SD = 0.82) for vividness, 3.36 (SD = 1.20) for realism, and 3.20 (SD = 1.16) for emotionality. For memory perspective, the mean level was 0.65 (SD = 2.04). ANOVA showed that memory perspective was not significantly influenced by gender, F(1, 96) = 0.67, or by the presence/absence of another person, F(1, 96) = 1.08, or by the interaction between these two factors, F(1, 96) = 1.89. ANOVAs also confirmed that individualism was not significantly related to these two factors, and nor were any of the other three cultural variables. Fig. 1 summarises the relation observed between mean memory perspective and cultural individualism across countries. For this summary, all participants were rank ordered by individualism and then divided into successive groups each containing nine participants, except group size was increased when this was necessary to prevent splitting of participants from a single country between groups. For each resulting group, Fig. 1 plots mean memory perspective against midpoint individualism. There appears to be a general trend for mean perspective to decrease (i.e., for a change to occur from observer perspective toward field perspective) as individualism increases, and this was examined by regression analysis over all participants. First, the correlations between memory perspective and the four cultural variables are shown in Table 1. It can be seen that there was a significant relation of perspective with individualism, and also with power distance. Individualism was also significantly related to power distance and to masculinity. Second, memory perspective was regressed on the four cultural variables, and shown to be significantly determined by them, R2 = .210, F(4, 95) = 6.33, p < .001. Table 2 summarises the regression model, and it can be seen that individualism made a significant unique contribution, as did also cultural masculinity. Thus because power distance was not significant in terms of unique contribution (though significant overall), and masculinity was not significant overall (though significant in terms of unique contribution), individualism was the only one of the four cultural dimensions which influenced memory perspective significantly both overall and in terms of its unique contribution. A further regression analysis showed that any tendency for the dependence of memory perspective on individualism to contain a quadratic component in addition to the linear (see Fig. 1) was not significant, F(1, 97) = 1.39.
Fig. 1. Mean memory perspective (observer and field correspond to positive and negative values, respectively) as a function of cultural individualism.
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M. Martin, G.V. Jones / Consciousness and Cognition 21 (2012) 1498–1503 Table 1 Correlations between memory perspective and cultural variables.
* ***
Variable
Memory perspective
Memory perspective Individualism Uncertainty avoidance Power distance Masculinity
–
Individualism
Uncertainty avoidance
.410***
Power distance .356*** .855*** .107
.012 .103 –
–
Masculinity .103 .221* .031 .191
– –
p < .05. p < .001.
Table 2 Regression of memory perspective on cultural variables. Cultural variable Individualism Uncertainty avoidance Power distance Masculinity *
B
SE(B) .031 .005 .003 .032
.013 .009 .017 .015
t
b .438 .053 .026 .203
2.48* 0.58 0.15 2.18*
p < .05.
It should be noted, however, that although the preceding analyses demonstrate that memory perspective is strongly related to the cultural variable of individualism, it is logically possible that contributions from one or more of the other cultural variables studied – in particular, power distance – are partially obscured due either to reduced variance or to collinearity (or both). First, on variance, the distribution of individualism possessed the highest SD among the four cultural variables, and Levene’s test showed that there was a significant heterogeneity in variance among them, F(3, 396) = 33.12, p < .001; in particular, sample variance was significantly greater for individualism than for power distance, F(1, 198) = 19.70, p < .001, and thus less opportunity was provided for control by the latter variable to be demonstrated. Second, on collinearity, a rule of thumb sometimes adopted indicates that a correlation of magnitude greater than .90 between two independent variables is likely to make it difficult to choose between them due to multicollinearity, and this criterion was approached for individualism and power distance (r = .855). However, a more precisely targeted rule for regression is that multicollinearity is excessive if the Variance Inflation Factor (VIF) for any of the independent variables in the regression is greater than 10 (Freund, Wilson, & Sa, 2006). Further examination of the regression of memory perspective on the four cultural variables showed that this criterion was not approached either for individualism or for power distance, VIF = 3.77 and 3.73, respectively (with lower values for the remaining two independent variables), and thus the reliable apportioning of predictiveness between individualism and power distance was not endangered by excessive collinearity. There was no significant relation between memory perspective and any of the memory content attributes: place, r(98) = 0.06; activity, r(98) = 0.15; source, r(98) = 0.12; self, r(98) = 0.07; other, r(78) = 0.05; and self advantage, r(78) = 0.09. For the image variables, memory perspective was significantly related to emotionality, r(98) = 0.38, p = .001 (thus higher levels of emotionality were linked to the observer perspective), but memory perspective was not linked to vividness, r(98) = 0.04, or realism, r(98) = 0.07. Hierarchical regression analysis indicated that the contribution to determining memory perspective made by emotionality additional to that made by the cultural variables was of marginal significance, DR2 = .041, F(1, 63) = 3.89, p = .053. The inclusion of emotionality left individualism as the only cultural variable to make a significant unique contribution in the saturated equation for memory perspective, B = .040, SE(B) = .015, b = .580, t = 2.76, p = .008. 4. Discussion To what extent are a person’s basic cognitive processes influenced by broad aspects of the culture within which that person has lived? The present study found clear evidence that the characterisation of cultures in terms of their locations on a continuum between individualism and collectivism is predictive of the way in which people within the cultures tend to retrieve their memories. People from cultures with higher and lower levels of individualism were more likely to possess a field and an observer perspective, respectively. This result is in agreement with the pioneering finding of Cohen and Gunz (2002) that the field and the observer perspective were more likely to be found among people from North America and from Asia, respectively, because Hofstede (1983, 2001) found levels of cultural individualism in general to be relatively higher and lower, respectively, in these areas. Rice (2010) has argued that the need to accommodate the effect of cultural difference is an important additional constraint upon the attempt to interpret memory perspective theoretically in terms of associated processes of self-regulation (Sutin & Robins, 2008). Indeed, Wu and Keysar (2007) have presented evidence that the utilisation of
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actual visual perspective information provided by another person (a process analogous to some extent with the adoption of an observer memory perspective) is also subject to the influence of culture, occurring more fluently among Chinese than among American participants. More generally, Ross and Wang (2010) have reviewed evidence that a relatively broad spectrum of processes linked to the operation of autobiographical memory may be influenced by east–west cultural differences. The present analysis was able to proceed beyond that of Cohen and Gunz (2002) and Sutin and Robins (2007) because the relatively large number of countries from which the participants in the present study were drawn allowed two important conclusions to be drawn. First, cultural individualism is predictive of memory perspective in terms of the significance of both its overall and its unique contribution. Second, three other cultural dimensions – uncertainty avoidance, power distance, and masculinity – do not match this level of predictiveness. It should be noted that the observed importance of individualism in determining memory perspective is also consistent in general terms with the theoretical formulation of Cohen and colleagues (Cohen & Gunz, 2002; Cohen, Hoshino-Browne, & Leung, 2007) who hypothesised that a greater emphasis on interdependence among individuals in East Asian cultures (e.g., Heine, Lehman, Markus, & Kitayama, 1999; Triandis, 1996) was responsible for the tendency they observed toward an observer perspective. Although power distance was not found to contribute significant unique predictive power with regard to memory perspective, people from cultures with higher and lower levels of power distance were significantly more likely to possess an observer and a field perspective, respectively. Power distance refers to the degree to which power is differentiated within a society (Hofstede, 2001) and it may be that the onlooking stance of the observer is more widespread in cultures with greater differentiation. Comparisons with individualism have sometimes been rendered difficult by a high correlation between the two, such as the value reported by Arrindell et al. (2004) of r = 0.92 (thus estimates for power distance and independence are relatively low and high, respectively, for USA, and relatively high and low, respectively, for China). Further, in the present study, the opportunity for predictive control by power distance to be displayed was to some extent restricted by limited sample variance. The present results hence provide support for calls for increased investigation of the role of power distance in relation to individualism (e.g., Kirkman, Lowe, & Gibson, 2006; Oyserman, Kemmelmeier, & Coon, 2002). Indeed, Taras, Kirkman, and Steel (2010) have recently reviewed research on cultural influences across a broad range of organizational behaviour and concluded that Hofstede’s cultural dimensions all possess predictive powers for this area which are of a similar magnitude, even though power distance, uncertainty avoidance, and masculinity had been utilised in research much less often than individualism. A subsidiary finding in the present study was that the intensity of emotion with regard to a remembered image was linked to the perspective with which it was viewed. The existence of links between emotion and memory perspective has been well established since the work of Robinson and Swanson (1993). However, the nature of the relation observed here was unexpected, because higher levels of emotion were associated with the observer perspective. In contrast, more intense emotion has previously been reported to be associated with a field perspective in a range of situations (although a limitation of such research is that it has generally been highly restricted in its range of cultural sampling). Thus Berntsen and Rubin (2006) found that switching from a field to an observer perspective lowered the levels of both positive and negative emotions, Holmes, Coughtrey, and Connor (2008) found that imagining positive descriptions produced more positive affect when a field perspective was adopted, and McIsaac and Eich (2004) found for patients with posttraumatic stress disorder that more anxiety was encountered by those who had a field perspective. Observer perspective may often be associated with less intense affect because the person is usually recalling an event in which they identify themselves as the primary actor, and increased immersion in the event owing to a field perspective would be expected to intensify affect. In the present case, however, the person may identify themselves as having only a secondary role as the receiver of news. If affect in the receiver is determined more by the news itself, then it may be particularly intense for the person with an observer perspective. This hypothesis remains speculative, however, until further evidence is obtained of a link between observer perspective and increased affect when occupying a secondary role. Indeed recent evidence suggests it is possible that any such relation may be modulated by more specific patterns which are present within the general category of observer perspective. Rice and Rubin (2011) have shown that there are consistent differences among observer perspectives as a function of memory content, such that memories of swimming and of demonstrating a skill, for example, have been found to be associated with viewpoints in front of and behind the individual, respectively. Finally, the present study has reported evidence of an effect of cultural individualism upon memory perspective. Is the effect necessarily exerted environmentally? There is evidence from fMRI of differential brain localisation for field and observer perspective (Eich, Nelson, Leghari, & Handy, 2009), similar to that found for the control of visual perspectives (e.g., Lambrey et al., 2008), but of course detailed patterns of localisation may in principle be responsive to differences in experience among different cultures. A more radical alternative is presented by the possibility of genetic control of memory perspective. Lemogne et al. (2009) have reported evidence that memory perspective may be influenced by the interaction between a person’s level of stress and the type of 5-HTTLPR allele that they possess. However, Sutin (2009) has expressed caution about inferring a wider relation between memory perspective and genetics, and at present it does not appear necessary to have recourse to such a relation in explaining the observed cultural phenomenon. References Arrindell, W. A., Eisemann, M., Oei, T. P. S., Caballo, V. E., Sanavio, E., Sica, C., et al (2004). Phobic anxiety in 11 nations: Part II. Hofstede’s dimensions of national cultures predict national-level variations. Personality and Individual Differences, 37, 627–643.
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Short Communication
Individualism and the field viewpoint: Cultural influences on memory perspective Maryanne Martin a,⇑, Gregory V. Jones b a b
Department of Experimental Psychology, University of Oxford, South Parks Road, Oxford OX1 3UD, UK Department of Psychology, University of Warwick, Coventry CV4 7AL, UK
a r t i c l e
i n f o
Article history: Received 10 April 2011 Available online 4 June 2012 Keywords: Memory perspective Field viewpoint Observer viewpoint Cultural variables Individualism
a b s t r a c t Two perspectives from which memories can be retrieved have been distinguished: field resembles the view from the first-person vantage point of original experience, whereas observer resembles the view from the third-person vantage point of a spectator. There is evidence that the incidences of the two types of perspective differ between at least two different cultural groups. It is hypothesised here that this is a special case of a more general relation between memory perspective and cultural individualism, such that field and observer perspectives are more prevalent among people from, respectively, relatively individualist and relatively collectivist societies. Memory perspectives adopted by participants from a range of different countries were recorded, and were found to vary in the predicted manner. Regression analysis showed that the potential effects of three other cultural variables – uncertainty avoidance, masculinity and, to a lesser extent, power distance – were eclipsed by the influence of individualism, and the implications are discussed. Ó 2012 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
1. Introduction Early work (e.g., Nigro & Neisser, 1983; Robinson & Swanson, 1993) has established that two different modes of retrieval from memory can be distinguished. With a field perspective, people experience remembered scenes as though participating in the scenes themselves whereas, with an observer perspective, people experience remembered scenes as though acting as an outside spectator; the distinction may also be described as equivalent to reporting in the first person versus reporting in the third person. Subsequent work has shown that the perspective adopted may have a significant influence upon what people remember. McIsaac and Eich (2002) asked people to carry out a number of task sequences (e.g., throwing a small foam basketball into a hoop), and then elicited recall of the sequences with participants asked to adopt either a field or an observer perspective. They found that reports of psychological processes were more frequent with field than with observer perspective, whereas reports of physical appearances were more frequent with observer than with a field appearance. A similar result has been observed even without enactment. Bagri and Jones (2009) asked people simply to read passages describing the task sequences used by McIsaac and Eich (2002), and found that recall of the psychological processes described in the passages was more accurate when participants adopted a field rather than an observer perspective; greater accuracy with a field perspective has also been reported by Kim, Ciovica, Cho, and St. Clair (in a conference paper cited by Rice, 2010). Because the memory perspective adopted can influence the content of what is retrieved from memory, it can be readily appreciated that there is evidence of an important relation to the incidence of intrusive memories in general and to posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) in particular. When Williams and Moulds (2008) examined intrusive memories among the
⇑ Corresponding author. Fax: +44 1865 310447. E-mail addresses: [email protected] (M. Martin), [email protected] (G.V. Jones). 1053-8100/$ - see front matter Ó 2012 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.concog.2012.04.009
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general population, they found that instructing participants with a natural field perspective to switch to an observer perspective significantly lowered their judgements of distress and vividness, whereas switching in the reverse direction did not have a comparable effect. In a clinical group, on the other hand, Kenny et al. (2009) assessed the severity of PTSD over a 12 month period using CAPS (Clinician-Administered PTSD Scale), and found that both initially and at 12 months, CAPS was higher for those with an observer than with a field perspective. Further, for those with an initial field perspective, CAPS at 12 months was higher if they changed to an observer perspective than if they had remained with a field perspective. There is also evidence that memory perspective plays a role in other psychological disorders. People with social phobia are more likely than control participants to have an observer perspective for social situations (Wells, Clark, & Ahmad, 1998) and for highly anxious situations (Coles, Turk, Heimberg, & Fresco, 2001). Potentially of widest relevance are the links which are emerging with depression (e.g., Bergouignan et al., 2008). Thus Kuyken and Moulds (2009) have reported that, across individuals in a population of people with depression, a greater incidence of field perspective at pre-treatment was linked to lower levels of depression post-treatment. They noted that if the observer perspective encourages evaluative self-focus (e.g., ‘‘I am unlikeable’’; Kuyken & Moulds, 2009, p. 626) then this may be problematic in depression. Given the indications of links between memory perspective and mental illness, it would appear to be useful to investigate whether the predominant pattern of memory perspective which is adopted naturally varies for different groups. Initial evidence that this is the case has been reported by Cohen and Gunz (2002). Cohen and Gunz found that, among students in Canada, a group of people who were born in Asia, whom they called Easterners, were more likely to possess an observer perspective than another group of people who were born in North America, whom they called Westerners. Surprisingly little research appears to have been triggered by this striking finding, however, though a comparable difference has been observed by Sutin and Robins (2007) for groups described as Asian and Caucasian. Why should people from different regions tend to retrieve their memories in different ways? At this early stage of understanding, it appears appropriate to explore whether variation in memory perspective is linked to changes in more general cultural variables. Probably the most extensively explored set of cultural variables is that proposed by Hofstede (1983, 2001), and we have recently shown (Papadatou-Pastou, Martin, Munafò, & Jones, 2008) that they may be used to predict even the distributions of left- and right-handedness across countries (see also Martin, Papadatou-Pastou, Jones, & Munafò, 2010; Vuoksimaa & Kaprio, 2010). The Hofstede cultural variable which has been employed most extensively in psychological investigation is that of individualism (versus collectivism), and it seems plausible to hypothesise that variation in memory perspective may be a function of this dimension, as follows. It has been proposed by Hofstede (1983, 2001) that an individualistic culture is one in which reliance upon oneself is relatively pronounced. Evidence has been reported that individualism is both a reliable and a valid index of cultural differences (Schimmack, Oishi, & Diener, 2005), and meta-analysis has shown it to be a significant influence in a substantial corpus of 83 studies (Oyserman, Coon, & Kemmelmeier, 2002). In the present context, it may be hypothesised that the predominant way in which a person tends to retrieve memories is subject to influence by the overall levels of cultural individualism to which the person has been exposed. In particular, higher levels of individualism would be expected to be associated with the vantage point of the individual remembering with a field perspective, whereas lower levels of individualism would be associated with the observer perspective available to spectators. The present study directly examines whether higher and lower levels of cultural individualism are related to the adoption of field and observer perspectives, respectively. Three further cultural variables described by Hofstede (1983, 2001) are also potentially of relevance, namely, uncertainty avoidance, power distance, and masculinity. In brief, uncertainty avoidance refers to the degree of formalisation within a culture, power distance refers to the degree of social inequality within a culture, and masculinity refers to the degree of differentiation in gender roles within a culture. None of these latter three variables appears to provide a clear mapping onto the field/observer distinction, and thus a priori they seem less likely to be predictive of memory perspective. In order to dissect the possible relations between memory perspective and a set of multivalent cultural variables, a study was carried out to examine a wider range of affiliations than the binary groupings studied previously (Cohen & Gunz, 2002; Sutin & Robins, 2007). 2. Method 2.1. Participants These were 100 students (37 female) tested in Oxford individually or in small groups, comprising 26 different nationalities (the largest contributions from outside Britain were from China and the USA). Mean age was 22.2 years (SD = 3.7). 2.2. Procedure Participants were provided with a questionnaire which, along with demographic items, contained a series of questions relating to their memories for receiving an important piece of news. Five items assessed the contents of memory, namely, memory for Place (How well can you remember where you were, when you first heard the news?), for Activity (How well can you remember what you were doing ...), for Source (How well can you remember the source from which you first heard the news ...), for Self (How well can you remember the particular clothes that you were wearing ...), and for Other (If there was anybody else present when you first heard the news, how well can you remember the particular clothes that they were
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wearing? If no-one else was there, leave this question blank.) For each of these memory attributes there was a response scale ranging from 1 (Not at all) to 7 (Extremely well). A sixth memory attribute, Self Advantage, was constructed subsequently for use in analysis as a difference score (Self minus Other) potentially sensitive to memory perspective and individualism. Memory perspective was then probed: When you are remembering how you first heard the news, is your predominant impression one of viewing the situation around you as if looking out through your eyes, or is it one of viewing yourself from an external point of view? A seven-point response scale for memory perspective was used, ranging from 3 (Entirely looking out through my eyes) to +3 (Entirely observing myself from an external point of view); this has previously been shown to provide a satisfactory scale for the range from field to observer (e.g., Coles et al., 2001; Wells et al., 1998). For 69 of the participants (28 female), three attributes of the remembered image were also assessed on a response scale from 1 to 5. These were vividness – How vivid is the image? (from Very vague to Very vivid); realism – How real does the image seem? (from Not at all real to Very real); and emotionality – When you focus on the image, how intense are the feelings and emotions (of any kind) that you feel? (from Not at all intense to Very intense). Finally, the numerical estimates of cultural variables used in the analyses derived from those reported by Hofstede (2001).
3. Results Over all participants, the mean values of the cultural variables were 63.7 (SD = 28.8) for individualism, 45.3 (SD = 21.7) for uncertainty avoidance, 49.9 (SD = 21.0) for power distance, and 59.6 (SD = 12.8) for masculinity. For memory contents, the mean values were 6.75 (SD = 0.82) for place, 6.45 (SD = 1.17) for activity, 6.74 (SD = 0.91) for source, 2.33 (SD = 1.85) for self, 1.91 (N = 80, SD = 1.49) for other, and 0.49 (N = 80, SD = 1.34) for self advantage. For image variables, the mean values were 3.94 (SD = 0.82) for vividness, 3.36 (SD = 1.20) for realism, and 3.20 (SD = 1.16) for emotionality. For memory perspective, the mean level was 0.65 (SD = 2.04). ANOVA showed that memory perspective was not significantly influenced by gender, F(1, 96) = 0.67, or by the presence/absence of another person, F(1, 96) = 1.08, or by the interaction between these two factors, F(1, 96) = 1.89. ANOVAs also confirmed that individualism was not significantly related to these two factors, and nor were any of the other three cultural variables. Fig. 1 summarises the relation observed between mean memory perspective and cultural individualism across countries. For this summary, all participants were rank ordered by individualism and then divided into successive groups each containing nine participants, except group size was increased when this was necessary to prevent splitting of participants from a single country between groups. For each resulting group, Fig. 1 plots mean memory perspective against midpoint individualism. There appears to be a general trend for mean perspective to decrease (i.e., for a change to occur from observer perspective toward field perspective) as individualism increases, and this was examined by regression analysis over all participants. First, the correlations between memory perspective and the four cultural variables are shown in Table 1. It can be seen that there was a significant relation of perspective with individualism, and also with power distance. Individualism was also significantly related to power distance and to masculinity. Second, memory perspective was regressed on the four cultural variables, and shown to be significantly determined by them, R2 = .210, F(4, 95) = 6.33, p < .001. Table 2 summarises the regression model, and it can be seen that individualism made a significant unique contribution, as did also cultural masculinity. Thus because power distance was not significant in terms of unique contribution (though significant overall), and masculinity was not significant overall (though significant in terms of unique contribution), individualism was the only one of the four cultural dimensions which influenced memory perspective significantly both overall and in terms of its unique contribution. A further regression analysis showed that any tendency for the dependence of memory perspective on individualism to contain a quadratic component in addition to the linear (see Fig. 1) was not significant, F(1, 97) = 1.39.
Fig. 1. Mean memory perspective (observer and field correspond to positive and negative values, respectively) as a function of cultural individualism.
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M. Martin, G.V. Jones / Consciousness and Cognition 21 (2012) 1498–1503 Table 1 Correlations between memory perspective and cultural variables.
* ***
Variable
Memory perspective
Memory perspective Individualism Uncertainty avoidance Power distance Masculinity
–
Individualism
Uncertainty avoidance
.410***
Power distance .356*** .855*** .107
.012 .103 –
–
Masculinity .103 .221* .031 .191
– –
p < .05. p < .001.
Table 2 Regression of memory perspective on cultural variables. Cultural variable Individualism Uncertainty avoidance Power distance Masculinity *
B
SE(B) .031 .005 .003 .032
.013 .009 .017 .015
t
b .438 .053 .026 .203
2.48* 0.58 0.15 2.18*
p < .05.
It should be noted, however, that although the preceding analyses demonstrate that memory perspective is strongly related to the cultural variable of individualism, it is logically possible that contributions from one or more of the other cultural variables studied – in particular, power distance – are partially obscured due either to reduced variance or to collinearity (or both). First, on variance, the distribution of individualism possessed the highest SD among the four cultural variables, and Levene’s test showed that there was a significant heterogeneity in variance among them, F(3, 396) = 33.12, p < .001; in particular, sample variance was significantly greater for individualism than for power distance, F(1, 198) = 19.70, p < .001, and thus less opportunity was provided for control by the latter variable to be demonstrated. Second, on collinearity, a rule of thumb sometimes adopted indicates that a correlation of magnitude greater than .90 between two independent variables is likely to make it difficult to choose between them due to multicollinearity, and this criterion was approached for individualism and power distance (r = .855). However, a more precisely targeted rule for regression is that multicollinearity is excessive if the Variance Inflation Factor (VIF) for any of the independent variables in the regression is greater than 10 (Freund, Wilson, & Sa, 2006). Further examination of the regression of memory perspective on the four cultural variables showed that this criterion was not approached either for individualism or for power distance, VIF = 3.77 and 3.73, respectively (with lower values for the remaining two independent variables), and thus the reliable apportioning of predictiveness between individualism and power distance was not endangered by excessive collinearity. There was no significant relation between memory perspective and any of the memory content attributes: place, r(98) = 0.06; activity, r(98) = 0.15; source, r(98) = 0.12; self, r(98) = 0.07; other, r(78) = 0.05; and self advantage, r(78) = 0.09. For the image variables, memory perspective was significantly related to emotionality, r(98) = 0.38, p = .001 (thus higher levels of emotionality were linked to the observer perspective), but memory perspective was not linked to vividness, r(98) = 0.04, or realism, r(98) = 0.07. Hierarchical regression analysis indicated that the contribution to determining memory perspective made by emotionality additional to that made by the cultural variables was of marginal significance, DR2 = .041, F(1, 63) = 3.89, p = .053. The inclusion of emotionality left individualism as the only cultural variable to make a significant unique contribution in the saturated equation for memory perspective, B = .040, SE(B) = .015, b = .580, t = 2.76, p = .008. 4. Discussion To what extent are a person’s basic cognitive processes influenced by broad aspects of the culture within which that person has lived? The present study found clear evidence that the characterisation of cultures in terms of their locations on a continuum between individualism and collectivism is predictive of the way in which people within the cultures tend to retrieve their memories. People from cultures with higher and lower levels of individualism were more likely to possess a field and an observer perspective, respectively. This result is in agreement with the pioneering finding of Cohen and Gunz (2002) that the field and the observer perspective were more likely to be found among people from North America and from Asia, respectively, because Hofstede (1983, 2001) found levels of cultural individualism in general to be relatively higher and lower, respectively, in these areas. Rice (2010) has argued that the need to accommodate the effect of cultural difference is an important additional constraint upon the attempt to interpret memory perspective theoretically in terms of associated processes of self-regulation (Sutin & Robins, 2008). Indeed, Wu and Keysar (2007) have presented evidence that the utilisation of
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actual visual perspective information provided by another person (a process analogous to some extent with the adoption of an observer memory perspective) is also subject to the influence of culture, occurring more fluently among Chinese than among American participants. More generally, Ross and Wang (2010) have reviewed evidence that a relatively broad spectrum of processes linked to the operation of autobiographical memory may be influenced by east–west cultural differences. The present analysis was able to proceed beyond that of Cohen and Gunz (2002) and Sutin and Robins (2007) because the relatively large number of countries from which the participants in the present study were drawn allowed two important conclusions to be drawn. First, cultural individualism is predictive of memory perspective in terms of the significance of both its overall and its unique contribution. Second, three other cultural dimensions – uncertainty avoidance, power distance, and masculinity – do not match this level of predictiveness. It should be noted that the observed importance of individualism in determining memory perspective is also consistent in general terms with the theoretical formulation of Cohen and colleagues (Cohen & Gunz, 2002; Cohen, Hoshino-Browne, & Leung, 2007) who hypothesised that a greater emphasis on interdependence among individuals in East Asian cultures (e.g., Heine, Lehman, Markus, & Kitayama, 1999; Triandis, 1996) was responsible for the tendency they observed toward an observer perspective. Although power distance was not found to contribute significant unique predictive power with regard to memory perspective, people from cultures with higher and lower levels of power distance were significantly more likely to possess an observer and a field perspective, respectively. Power distance refers to the degree to which power is differentiated within a society (Hofstede, 2001) and it may be that the onlooking stance of the observer is more widespread in cultures with greater differentiation. Comparisons with individualism have sometimes been rendered difficult by a high correlation between the two, such as the value reported by Arrindell et al. (2004) of r = 0.92 (thus estimates for power distance and independence are relatively low and high, respectively, for USA, and relatively high and low, respectively, for China). Further, in the present study, the opportunity for predictive control by power distance to be displayed was to some extent restricted by limited sample variance. The present results hence provide support for calls for increased investigation of the role of power distance in relation to individualism (e.g., Kirkman, Lowe, & Gibson, 2006; Oyserman, Kemmelmeier, & Coon, 2002). Indeed, Taras, Kirkman, and Steel (2010) have recently reviewed research on cultural influences across a broad range of organizational behaviour and concluded that Hofstede’s cultural dimensions all possess predictive powers for this area which are of a similar magnitude, even though power distance, uncertainty avoidance, and masculinity had been utilised in research much less often than individualism. A subsidiary finding in the present study was that the intensity of emotion with regard to a remembered image was linked to the perspective with which it was viewed. The existence of links between emotion and memory perspective has been well established since the work of Robinson and Swanson (1993). However, the nature of the relation observed here was unexpected, because higher levels of emotion were associated with the observer perspective. In contrast, more intense emotion has previously been reported to be associated with a field perspective in a range of situations (although a limitation of such research is that it has generally been highly restricted in its range of cultural sampling). Thus Berntsen and Rubin (2006) found that switching from a field to an observer perspective lowered the levels of both positive and negative emotions, Holmes, Coughtrey, and Connor (2008) found that imagining positive descriptions produced more positive affect when a field perspective was adopted, and McIsaac and Eich (2004) found for patients with posttraumatic stress disorder that more anxiety was encountered by those who had a field perspective. Observer perspective may often be associated with less intense affect because the person is usually recalling an event in which they identify themselves as the primary actor, and increased immersion in the event owing to a field perspective would be expected to intensify affect. In the present case, however, the person may identify themselves as having only a secondary role as the receiver of news. If affect in the receiver is determined more by the news itself, then it may be particularly intense for the person with an observer perspective. This hypothesis remains speculative, however, until further evidence is obtained of a link between observer perspective and increased affect when occupying a secondary role. Indeed recent evidence suggests it is possible that any such relation may be modulated by more specific patterns which are present within the general category of observer perspective. Rice and Rubin (2011) have shown that there are consistent differences among observer perspectives as a function of memory content, such that memories of swimming and of demonstrating a skill, for example, have been found to be associated with viewpoints in front of and behind the individual, respectively. Finally, the present study has reported evidence of an effect of cultural individualism upon memory perspective. Is the effect necessarily exerted environmentally? There is evidence from fMRI of differential brain localisation for field and observer perspective (Eich, Nelson, Leghari, & Handy, 2009), similar to that found for the control of visual perspectives (e.g., Lambrey et al., 2008), but of course detailed patterns of localisation may in principle be responsive to differences in experience among different cultures. A more radical alternative is presented by the possibility of genetic control of memory perspective. Lemogne et al. (2009) have reported evidence that memory perspective may be influenced by the interaction between a person’s level of stress and the type of 5-HTTLPR allele that they possess. 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