title: Priming interdependence affects processing of context information in causal inference--but not how you might think.
abstract: Cultural mindset is related to performance on a variety of cognitive tasks. In particular, studies of both chronic and situationally-primed mindsets show that individuals with a relatively interdependent mindset (i.e., an emphasis on relationships and connections among individuals) are more sensitive to background contextual information than individuals with a more independent mindset. Two experiments tested whether priming cultural mindset would affect sensitivity to background causes in a contingency learning and causal inference task. Participants were primed (either independent or interdependent), and then saw complete contingency information on each of 12 trials for two cover stories in Experiment 1 (hiking causing skin rashes, severed brakes causing wrecked cars) and two additional cover stories in Experiment 2 (school deadlines causing stress, fertilizers causing plant growth). We expected that relative to independent-primed participants, those interdependent-primed would give more weight to the explicitly-presented data indicative of hidden alternative background causes, but they did not do so. In Experiment 1, interdependents gave less weight to the data indicative of hidden background causes for the car accident cover story and showed a decreased sensitivity to the contingencies for that story. In Experiment 2, interdependents placed less weight on the observable data for cover stories that supported more extra-experimental causes, while independents' sensitivity did not vary with these extra-experimental causes. Thus, interdependents were more sensitive to background causes not explicitly presented in the experiment, but this sensitivity hurt rather than improved their acquisition of the explicitly-presented contingency information.
authors.affiliation: Department of Psychology, Seton Hall University, 400 South Orange Ave., South Orange, NJ 07079, USA. Electronic address: kelly.goedert@shu.edu.
authors.forename: Kelly M
authors.initials: KM
authors.lastname: Goedert
authors.affiliation: Department of Psychology, The College of New Jersey, P.O. Box 7718, Ewing, NJ 08628, USA. Electronic address: grimm@tcnj.edu.
authors.forename: Lisa R
authors.initials: LR
authors.lastname: Grimm
authors.affiliation: Department of Psychology, The University of Texas at Austin, 108 E. Dean Keeton Stop A8000, Austin, TX 78712, USA. Electronic address: markman@psy.utexas.edu.
authors.forename: Arthur B
authors.initials: AB
authors.lastname: Markman
authors.affiliation: School of Law, University of Virginia, 580 Massie Road, Charlottesville, VA 22903, USA. Electronic address: spellman@virginia.edu.
authors.forename: Barbara A
authors.initials: BA
authors.lastname: Spellman
mesh_terms: D000293:Adolescent; D000328:Adult; D003469:Culture; D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D007858:Learning; D008297:Male; D013850:Thinking; D055815:Young Adult
keywords: 2340; 2343; 2360; Causal learning; Cell-weight inequality; Contingency learning; Cultural mindset; Self-construal