Cultural Influences on Distance Judgments (6-27-08)

People from Eastern and Western cultures make different spatial judgments. Spatial judgments relate to line choices at supermarkets and selecting travel routes, for example. Research has determined that (as reported in an article related press release): “Independent thinkers [more probably from Western cultures] are more likely to misjudge distance when they need to take multiple features into account (like how winding a road is). Interdependent things [more probably from Eastern cultures] are less likely to make distance errors but more prone to other kinds of spatial errors (such as when intersecting lines on a map make one side of the line appear longer than the other). . . .Our data indicate that individuals with an independent (vs. interdependent self-construal are more likely to pay attention to only the focal aspects of stimuli and to ignore the context and background information in forming spatial judgments, resulting in biases. In contrast, interdependents are capable of going beyond the most salient dimension (e.g., direct distance) and incorporating other information (e.g., line configuration) in their judgments, leading to greater accuracy in these tasks.”

Aradhna Krishna, Rongrong Zhou, and Shi Zhang. 2008. “The Effect of Self-Construal on Spatial Judgments.” Journal of Consumer Research, in press.