How culture influences perspective taking: differences in correction, not integration

Individuals from East Asian (Chinese) backgrounds have been shown to exhibit greater sensitivity to a speaker’s perspective than Western (U.S.) participants when resolving referentially ambiguous expressions. We show that this cultural difference does not reflect better integration of social information during language processing, but rather is the result of differential correction: in the earliest moments of referential processing, Chinese participants showed equivalent egocentric interference to Westerners, but managed to suppress the interference earlier and more effectively. A time-series analysis of visual-world eye-tracking data found that the two cultural groups diverged extremely late in processing, between 600 and 1400 ms after the onset of egocentric interference. We suggest that the early moments of referential processing reflect the operation of a universal stratum of processing that provides rapid ambiguity resolution at the cost of accuracy and flexibility. Late components, in contrast, reflect the mapping of outputs from referential processes to decision-making and action planning systems, allowing for a flexibility in responding that is molded by culturally specific demands

Shifts Along the American Religious-Secular Spectrum

This paper examines three dimensions of American religion--belonging, behavior and belief--by creating a single, unified scale of religiosity and testing it with the American Religious Identification Survey (ARIS) and the General Social Survey (GSS). It shows that certain combinations of those three variables are far more common than others, and demonstrates changes over time in the percentage of people belonging to each cluster, with a trend toward diminishing religiosity. The paper identifies socio-demographic and geographic factors that are associated with the religiosity cluster to which a person belongs. The paper examines the ability of the new scale to predict how people will answer questions on contentious societal issues, using belief in evolution as a case study. The most religious definitely reject human evolution while the most secular definitely believe in it

Religious, Spiritual and Secular: The emergence of three distinct worldviews among American college students

AMERICAN RELIGIOUS IDENTIFICATION SURVEY. A Report based on the ARIS 2013 National College Student Surve

Executive control influences linguistic representations

Although it is known that words acquire their meanings partly from the contexts in which they are used, we proposed that the way in which words are processed can also influence their representation. We further propose that individual differences in the way that words are processed can consequently lead to individual differences in the way that they are represented. Specifically, we showed that executive control influences linguistic representations by influencing the coactivation of competing and reinforcing terms. Consequently, people with poorer executive control perceive the meanings of homonymous terms as being more similar to one another, and those of polysemous terms as being less similar to one another, than do people with better executive control. We also showed that bilinguals with poorer executive control experience greater cross-linguistic interference than do bilinguals with better executive control. These results have implications for theories of linguistic representation and language organization