Psychologists have suggested that people from different cultures use different cognitive processes when they reason. Nisbett (2003), for example, proposes that East Asians tend to think holistically, dialectically, and on the basis of their experience, whereas Westerners tend to think analytically, logically, and abstractly. It follows that East Asians should tolerate contradictions to a greate...

Although pettiness, defined as the tendency to get agitated over trivial matters, is a facet of neuroticism which has negative health implications, no measure exists. The goal of the current study was to develop, and validate a short pettiness scale. In Study 1 (N = 2136), Exploratory Factor Analysis distilled a one-factor model with five items. Convergent validity was established using the Big...

This study investigated differences in risk-perception among U.S., Spanish, West German, and Brazilian drivers. Subjects estimated the risk involved in slide-projected traffic scenes. The scenes, photographed in the United States and Spain, were rated for the amount of risk by using a seven-point scale. The subject groups in each country included younger, middle-aged, and older nonprofessional ...

Decisions to help those in need are essential for human development and survival. Previous studies have demonstrated the "identified effect", in which one identifiable individual typically invokes stronger feelings of compassion and receives greater aid than statistical victim. However, this preference might be influenced by cultural differences. In the current study, Chinese respondents' ratin...

challenge for public services in European societies that host large immigrant communities and that are facing new immigration flows. Concurrently, welfare states are changing, and often, as in the Netherlands, an active role for citizens, as well as partnerships between government, professional expertise and civil society are deemed crucial for the welfare state’s survival. If the ideal of citi...

This study presents the result of a cross-cultural study of negative attitude towards robots. A questionnaire was presented to Dutch, Chinese, German, Mexican, American (USA) and Japanese participants based on the Negative Attitude towards Robots Scale (NARS). The American participants were least negative towards robots, while the Mexican were most negative. Against our expectation, the Japanes...

Previous research has suggested that Asian Americans (AAs) are less likely to mobilize social support, and find support to be less helpful, when compared with European Americans (EAs). In a 10-day daily diary study of AA and EA college students, we hypothesized that AAs would activate support less frequently than EAs for both stressful and positive events, a cultural difference that would be me...

This paper examines the question: How do cultural differences influence students’ perceptions of Web-based learning? Research on cultural differences by Hofstede [1] [2] is used as a foundation to study students’ perceptions of Webbased learning. A survey of an on-line course has been conducted, linking the students’ cultural background to usage patterns, attitudes towards Web-based learning in...

This study investigated differences in driver self-assessment among U.S., Spanish, and West German drivers. Subjects responded to 14 questions that used five-point semantic scales dealing with driver performance and abilities. Pairs of questions, concerning the same driving-related aspects, differed by requesting a self-assessment on an absolute basis and in relation to the average driver. The ...

In the light of the existing literature on the issue of cross-cultural interface design, we carried out a smallscale study in order to check whether we could find cultural differences in local web sites. First, the experiment was conducted for university web sites. Our hypotheses with regard to cross-cultural variation were based on the well-known theory of Hofstede [6]. Contrary to Hofstede’s ...