United States-China differences in cognition and perception across 12 tasks: Replicability, robustness, and within-culture variation.

Abstract

Cultural differences between the United States and China have been investigated using a broad array of psychological tasks measuring differences between cognition, language, perception, and reasoning. Using online convenience samples of adults, we conducted two large-scale replications of 12 tasks previously reported to show differences between Western and East Asian cultures. Our results showed a heterogeneous pattern of successes and failures: five tasks yielded robust cultural differences, while five showed no difference between cultures, and two showed a small difference in the opposite direction. We observed moderate reliability for all multitrial tasks, but there was little relation between task scores. As in prior work, cross-cultural differences in cognition (in those tasks showing differences) were not strongly related to explicit measures of cultural identity and behavior. All of our tasks, data, and analyses are openly available for reuse, providing a foundation for future studies that seek to establish a robust and replicable science of cross-cultural difference. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2024 APA, all rights reserved).