Cultural Asymmetry Between Perceptions of Past and Future Personal Change

Frontiers in Psychology

article

Tieyuan Guo¹  Roy Spina² 

[1] University of Macau;University of Chichester, United Kingdom

关键词: culture;    change;    subjective temporal distance;    implicit theories;    memory;   

DOI  :  10.3389/fpsyg.2019.00885

学科分类：社会科学、人文和艺术（综合）

来源: Frontiers

【 摘 要 】

Research has shown that Westerners expect less change to occur in the future than they recall having occurred in the past. The present research investigated how recalled change and anticipated change may vary across cultures. Because Chinese perceive past times as being closer to the present than do Westerners, and people believe things tend to change more over a long period of time than over a short period of time, Chinese may perceive smaller changes from the past to the present than do Westerners. Consequently, the asymmetry between recalled change and anticipated change would disappear for Chinese. Four empirical studies revealed that for British participants, recalled changes in the past for personality, values, and the person as a whole were greater than anticipated changes in the future, whereas for Chinese, recalled changes in the past were similar in magnitude as anticipated changes in the future. Studies 2b and 3 further revealed that subjective temporal distance accounted for the cross-cultural differences in the asymmetry between recalled and anticipated changes.

【 授权许可】

CC BY