#1
Title: How do Easterners Reason about Causation? Evidence that Analogical Reasoning, rather than Holistic Thinking, May Explain Cultural Differences in Causal Assignment.

Presenter(s): Elizabeth Gilbert and Chi-Yue Chiu
Affiliation(s): Nanyang Technological University, Singapore

Easterners and Westerners assign causation differently, suggesting that the two cultures may be using different underlying processes when assessing “the cement of the universe.” Yet though decades of research has documented the processes that Westerners use when assessing causation, very little research addresses the process for Easterners. This study thus tests a novel hypothesis: that, compared to Westerners, Easterners rely more on analogical reasoning (i.e., mapping known relationships onto a new domain), and not simply holistic thinking (i.e., thinking about a lot of factors), when assessing causation. Singaporean and American students were asked to generate advice about “understanding how to be successful” at college. Some participants were asked to generate analogies (e.g., “the early bird gets the worm”) whereas others were asked to generate “factors” (e.g., “get an early start on your work”).  Compared to Americans, Singaporeans reported that it was easier to generate analogies.  Moreover, the easier it was to generate analogies, the higher participants scored on a measure of relational thinking; and conversely the harder it was to generate factors, the lower participants scored on the relational measure. Importantly, this latter finding is inconsistent with traditional models of holistic causal reasoning. Thus, these results provide evidence that relationship-based analogical thinking (and not simply general holistic thinking in which one thinks about lots of factors) may better explain how East Asians understand causation than traditional holistic models.

#2
Title: Sources for Trusting Most People: How National Goals for Socializing Children Promote the Contributions made by Trust of the In-Group and the Out-Group

Presenter(s): Yiming Jing(1) and Michael Harris Bond(2)
Affiliation(s): (1)University of Delaware, USA, (2) Hong Kong Polytechnic University, China

Considerable cultural variation exists in the radius of trust, such that in some cultures “trust in most people” refers to both the in-group and the out-group, whereas in others it is limited to the in-group. To better understand this cultural variability, we proposed a model suggesting how national goals for socializing children moderate the contributions made by the employee’s level of in-group trust and out-group trust to his/her level of trust in most people. We argue that, on the one hand, child socialization for Self-directedness facilitates the overall trust-building process, which in turn strengthens the linkage of the employee’s in-group trust and out-group trust to his/her trust in most people. On the other hand, child socialization for Civility attenuates in-group bias towards out-groups, which in turn enlarges the employee’s circle of trust by enhancing the linkage between out-group trust and trust in most people.   Our model was tested against employee data across 48 countries from the World Values Survey (2005-2007), using a two-level HLM analysis. Consistent with our hypotheses, the employee’s level of trust in his/her family and trust in people known personally are predictors of trust in most people for all national groups, but stronger predictors in countries emphasizing socialization for Self-directedness (ps < .01); the employee’s trust in out-groups is likewise a predictor of trust in most people for all national groups, but a stronger predictor in countries emphasizing socialization for Self-directedness as well as for Civility (ps < .01). Our findings have important implications for cross-cultural management.

#1
Title: Cultural Styles of Cognition and their Influence on Emotion Recognition

Presenter(s):Janxin Leu(1), Yay-hyung Cho(2) and Phoebe Ellsworth(2)
Affiliation(s): (1)HopeLab, USA (2) University of Michigan, USA

The role of culture in the recognition of basic emotions is usually limited to cultural variability in display rules. The overarching goal of current research is to deepen the understanding of the cultural variability on emotion recognition by demonstrating that cultural styles of cognition (i.e., holistic versus analytical) may deeply pattern the psychological processes by which basic emotions are recognized. Past research in cognition has also shown that East Asians tend to show a greater reliance on external attribution than internal attribution when compared with European Americans (Choi; Morris & Peng, 1994). East Asians, on average, explain emotional expressions using more external attributions (e.g., references to the environment) and fewer internal attributions (e.g. References to someone’s personality) compared with European Americans (Leu et al., in prep.). In this study, we randomly assigned East Asian and European Americans participants to view emotional expressions paired with a story that either contradicted in valence (e.g. positive face with negative situation) or did not. We tested whether East Asians’ greater external attribution and minimal internal attribution of emotional expressions was related to their increased tolerance of contradiction, in comparison to European Americans. Our results supported our hypotheses by showing less change across the conditions for East Asians than for European Americans in both situational and dispositional attributions. Future directions and implications are discussed as well.

#2
Title: Cultural Variation in Perceptions of Assistance in Academic Contexts

Presenter(s): Taraneh Mojaverian, Heejung S. Kim
Affiliation(s): University of California, Santa Barbara, USA

In previous research (Mojaverian & Kim, 2013), we found that solicited support, or help that is directly sought by the support recipient, and unsolicited support, or assistance given without previous recipient request, have different cultural implications for psychological well-being. The current research examines how perceptions of receiving help in an educational setting differ cross-culturally. European American and Asian American participants read a classroom scenario between a teaching assistant and a student during which the student received solicited or unsolicited assistance and then answered questions about their perceptions of the interaction and reported about their own academic assistance use, in order to examine how solicited and unsolicited assistance are perceived in different cultures and how these perceptions influence personal assistance utilization.  Results found that Asian Americans had more positive perceptions of unsolicited assistance when rating assistance recipients and assistance providers and reported greater unsolicited assistance in their personal experiences compared to European Americans.

#3
Title: You Better Think About Buddha! Buddhist Priming as Promoting Prosociality and Reducing Prejudice

Presenter(s): M. Clobert(1, 2), V. Saroglow(1), & K. K. Hwang(3)
Affiliation(s): (1) Université catholique de Louvain, Belgium, (2) Belgian National Fund for Scientific Research, Belgium, (3) National Taiwan University, Taiwan

Does Buddhism really promote tolerance and prosociality? Based on theoretical and empirical cross-cultural and cross-religious evidence, we hypothesized that Buddhist concepts, in difference from those of Christian religion, foster not only prosociality but also tolerance. In Experiment 1, Westerners of Christian tradition (N = 128) subliminally primed with Buddhist words showed greater prosociality and lower implicit ethnic and religious prejudice versus those primed with neutral or Christian words. This effect was mediated by increased compassion. In Experiment 2, among Taiwanese of Buddhist/Taoist tradition (N = 122), both Buddhist and Christian primes increased prosociality compared with neutral primes, but only Buddhist primes decreased ethnic and religious prejudice. Tolerance of contradiction mediated the positive effect of Buddhism on reducing religious prejudice. These results suggest that the general idea that religion paradoxically promotes both proscociality and prejudice lacks cross-cultural sensitivity: Buddhism consistently promotes positive social attitudes and behaviors, even with respect to outgroups.

#4
Title: Listening and Culture: Evidence from behavioral and physiological studies

Presenter(s): Jessica LeClair, Jessica Cornick, and Heejung S. Kim
Affiliation(s): University of California, Santa Barbara, USA

Cross-cultural research suggests that culture can influence even basic cognitive processes like perception and attention (Nisbett & Miyamoto, 2005; Nisbett & Masuda, 2006). Such differences, particularly between East Asians and Westerners, reflect a difference in cognitive styles: East Asians tend to be more holistic attending to the entire field, while Westerners tend to be more analytic attending primarily to the object independent of its context (Nisbett et al., 2001). The present research examines cultural variation in auditory processing using both behavioral and physiological measures. In the poster, we will report the results of two studies conducted with European American and East Asian participants. The first study examined cultural differences in the recall of target auditory material presented with none, neutral, or social background noise. We predicted and found that East Asians were more distracted by background noise compared to European Americans, as evidenced by poorer recall of target material presented with background noise. The second study investigated a physiological correlate of the differences in recall by comparing cultural differences in stress responses (i.e., blood pressure) to the background noise conditions. Cardiovascular reactivity has been linked to exposure to behavioral stressors (Obrist et al., 1987) and has been implicated in cognitive performance (Pase et al., 2013). Specifically, increased blood pressure is associated with decreased cognitive function. In this study, we predicted and found that Asian Americans exhibited greater cardiovascular reactivity to background noise especially in the social noise condition, compared to European Americans, which suggests potential physiological and health implications for cultural differences in cognitive styles.

#5
Title: Does Image of Individualism Differ between Japan and the United States? Analyses of Inside and Outside the Head

Presenter(s): Yuji Ogihara, Hitoshi Tominaga, Chikako Kameda, Shota Abutsuka, Kaori Sakai & Yukiko Uchida
Affiliation(s): Kyoto University, Japan

This study examined whether the image of individualism differs between Japan and the U.S. Recently, individualistic systems and values have drastically entered into Japanese society. However, previous research has shown that individualistic values deteriorated positive interpersonal relationships and decreased subjective well-being in Japan, but did not in the U.S. (Ogihara & Uchida, under review). In the present study, we investigated this issue in another way by comparing the image of individualism across cultures. In Study 1, Japanese and American undergraduate students reported the valence of the image of individualism, and generated five statements about individualism. We found that in Japan individualism is perceived more negatively compared to in the U.S. Furthermore, in Japan, individualism is regarded as being selfish or egocentric, and causing loneliness or isolation. In Study 2, we examined how Japanese and American people used the word “individualism” on the Internet. We calculated the co-occurrence frequency of the word “individualism” with target words by using Google Search. The results showed that people in Japan tend to use the word “individualism” with the words “unhappiness”, “selfish/self-centered”, and “loneliness/isolation” more frequently than those in the U.S. In sum, we found that the image of individualism differs between Japan and the U.S. Our findings suggested that individualism in Japan has negative effects on interpersonal relationships.

#6
Title: Differences between Indian and US Citizens in Beliefs about Social Status and Status Hierarchies

Presenter(s): Beatrice Alba and Doris McIlwain
Affiliation(s): Macquarie University, Australia

Participants (n = 339) were administered a set of 19 items written by the researchers examining beliefs about social status and status hierarchies.  The data were factor analysed using a Promax rotation, which revealed three factors, two of which had eigenvalues above one.  One of these factors included items measuring the belief that people generally do not care about having high social status.  The other factor included items measuring the belief that the world is hierarchical, and that having high status is beneficial.  The sample was recruited through MTurk.com and included a range of nationalities, however a large number of Indian citizens (n = 190) and a reasonable portion of US citizens (n = 89) participated in the study.  Therefore, participants from India and the US were compared with each other on the scale factors, and Indians were significantly higher on both.  The finding that Indians are more likely than Americans to believe that people do not care about status, but are also more likely to believe that the world is a hierarchical place may be due to significant cultural differences between the two countries regarding status and social hierarchy.  Possible explanations for these differences will be explored.  Differences between the two groups were also examined on a number of other measures including: self-esteem, social dominance orientation, narcissism, hypersensitive narcissism, depression, anxiety and stress, interpersonal dominance, and the Big Five.

#7
Title: Future Evidence of Self-Enhancement Leads to Subjective Well-Being in Chinese: The Phenomenological Responses to Autobiographical Memories

Presenter(s): Xu Siyu, Zhao Mengxiao,and Allan B.I. Bernardo
Affiliation(s): University of Macau, Macau SAR China

The self-enhancement motive, or the goal of enhancing one’s self-worth, is said to be a universal motive; but some have argued that this motive is irrelevant to collectivistic cultures, particularly in East Asian cultures.  This study provides evidence for the universality of self-enhancement by examining whether self-enhancement relates to subjective well-being of a sample of Chinese individuals (N=129), in the same way as in North American samples.  Evidence for self-enhancement was derived from ratings of phenomenological responses to autobiographical memories of emotional events. The results indicated a positive affect bias: Chinese participants indicated more intense phenomenological responses to memories of pride compares to memories of shame (consistent with self-enhancement and self-protection, respectively).  More importantly, multiple regression analysis indicated that intensity ratings of phenomenological responses to pride positively predicted subjective well-being scores (=.21) even after the influence of self-esteem (=.39) and relational self-esteem (=.19) were accounted for; ratings of phenomenological responses to shame did not predict subjective well-being.  The scores are discussed as further evidence for the positive impact of the self-enhancement motive in Chinese individuals, consistent with the universalist perspective on self enhancement.

#8
Title: A Culture-by-Situation Perspective on the Endowment Effect

Presenter(s): Matthias S. Gobel, Tiffanie Ong, and Adam Harris
Affiliation(s): University College London, UK

The psychological phenomenonthat owners(potential sellers) value objects more than non-owners (potential buyers) is known as the endowment effect. Previous research found that endowment effects are attenuated in East Asian compared to Western cultures. These findings are consistent with more interdependent self-concepts and reduced self-enhancement motivation among East Asians. Yet, East Asian self-concepts are flexible and often situation-specific. We examined whether social contexts influenced endowment effects among East Asian and Western participants. In two studies, we asked participants to imagine being the owner or buyer or a coffee mug, and using this mug in either a public (open plan office) or private (home office) social context. Study found endowment effects among Asian British students in private but not public contexts. Study 2 demonstraetd that when imagining public contexts, British but not Malaysian owners valued coffee mugs more than buyers. When imanining private contexts, however, participants from both cultures showed endowment effects. The implications of these findings for understanding mechanisms of endowment effects in East Asian and Western cultures are discussed. Our findings advance the literature on cultural differences in consumer psychology and pinpoint the social contexts in which endowment effects occur across cultures.

#9
Title: Examination of Negative Attitude toward Help-seeking Behavior among Japanese

Presenter(s): Motoko Harihara
Affiliation(s): Tokyo Woman’s Christian University, Japan

Doi(1973) introduced amae as ‘a key concept for the understanding not only of the psychological makeup of the individual Japanese but of the structure of Japanese society as a whole’. Amae is defined as presumed acceptance of one’s inappropriate behavior or request (e.g., Yamaguchi, 2004), and it is typically considered that the Japanese often feel desire of amae because they are mutually dependent on the others. However, some studies have revealed that Asians are more reluctant to ask for support from close others than are European Americans. Then, why do Japanese need the indigenous concept, amae? One possibility is that the Japanese regard any trivial requests they make of others as inappropriate, and as being amae, because they share culture norms such that people should not bother the others. This study analyzed Japanese responses to one story in ‘Construction Site’, which is a children’s TV series created in the UK. In the story, three construction vehicles asked one front-end dumper to help them, and the dumper became exhausted while helping them. The lesson given at the end of the story is that the dumper should have said ‘no’ when he was asked for help. Most Japanese participants felt discomfort to the story and told that three vehicles who asked a favor to him should have refrained from asking. Cross-cultural differences in how and to what extent people seek help are discussed.

#10
Title: The Relationship Between Felt Misunderstanding and Social Perception

Presenter(s): Brandon W. Ng, James P. Morris, & Shigehiro Oishi
Affiliation(s): University of Virginia, USA

Prior work has demonstrated that human beings have a fundamental need to belong, and that when this need is not fulfilled, we become motivated to re-affiliate with others.  Social cues are a vital ingredient to forming new relationships, and an immense array of past research has shown that social exclusion and loneliness enhance, rather than impair, sensitivity to social cues.  In a similar vein, felt misunderstanding (the psychological experience of feeing misperceived or invalidated by others) can be conceptualized as a type of belongingness threat, and furthermore has been shown to be modulated by cultural self-construal style.  However, research exploring how felt misunderstanding shapes social perception remains impoverished.  In the present study, participants were randomly assigned to one of six emotional reliving conditions and then completed an emotional accuracy task.  We hypothesized that participants induced to feel misunderstood would demonstrate heightened empathic capacities, above and beyond negative (sad, angry) or positive (happy, understood) affective states in general.  Results showed that felt misunderstanding may not necessarily sharpen social perception, but rather that it may be moderated by other affective states.

#11
Title: Why should I Go Green? The Role of Interdependent Reasons for Going Green in US and Japan

Presenter(s): Vinai Norasakkunkit(1), Beth Morling(2), and Shinichi Koyama
Affiliation(s): (1) Gonzaga University, USA, (2) University of Delaware, USA, (3) Chiba University, Japan

Climate change symbolically and practically represents an inherently interdependent problem in which its negative consequences and potential solutions are shared. Yet, such problems may undermine those in less interdependent societies (i.e., US) to act (Hamedani et al., 2013). Given that there are Americans who regularly engage in green behaviors, are such Americans doing so for more interdependent reasons (e.g., “I do it because others expect me to do it.”) or are they doing it for more independent reasons (“I do it to make a difference in the world”). Is the role of interdependence in engaging in green behaviors as salient in more interdependent societies (e.g., Japan)? Ninety-nine Americans from the University of Delaware and 214 Japanese from Chiba University were asked to complete a survey related to how frequently they engaged in green behaviors. They were also asked to imagine themselves engaging in several hypothetical green behaviors that occur commonly on college campuses, as well as to respond to close-ended reasons (independent vs. interdependent) for doing so. As expected, high frequency Americans were significantly more interdependent in their reasoning for engaging in green behaviors than their low frequency counterparts. There was no relationship between independent reasons and frequency of engaging in green behaviors for Americans. In Japan, neither interdependent reasons nor independent reasons played a role in distinguishing the high frequency group from the low frequency group. The challenges of dealing with an inherently interdependent problem in a predominantly independent society are discussed with a view towards relevant follow-up studies.

#12
Title: Sexual Behavior in Costa Rica and the United States

Presenter(s): Gloriana Rodríguez-Arauz(1), Marisa Mealy(2), Vanessa Castro(3), Joanne DiPlacido (2), and Nairán Ramírez-Esparza (1)
Affiliation(s): (1)University of Connecticut, USA, (2) Central Connecticut State University, USA (3) Universidad de Costa Rica, Costa Rica

This study examined differences between Costa Ricans and Euro-Americans in perceptions of appropriate sexual behavior and definitions of sex. When compared to Costa Ricans, Euro- Americans were more likely to consider foreplay, oral sex, and intercourse to be appropriate in the early stages of a relationship. Costa Ricans considered these behaviors to be appropriate only after steadily dating someone for 3 months or more. Euro-Americans were more likely to consider anal sex and phone/cyber sex to be appropriate prior to serious commitment (i.e. marriage). Cultural differences were also found in the types of behaviors that were considered to be sex-related. Costa Ricans defined non-penetrative acts such as foreplay, oral sex, and phone/cyber sex as sex-related more often than their Euro-American counterparts. In fact, Euro-Americans rarely considered foreplay or phone/cyber sex to be sex-related and defined oral sex as sex-related only in certain contexts. Finally, both Costa Rican and Euro-American participants reported having had more lifetime sexual partners than penile–vaginal intercourse partners. The implications of the results are discussed in terms of differing cultural values.

#13
Title: An Investigation of Inter-caste Trust in Nepal

Presenter(s): Joanna Schug and Gagan Atreya
Affiliation(s): College of William & Mary, USA

Forty lower-caste and forty-two upper-caste Nepali participants played a trust game and a faith game. In the trust game, participants were assigned to the roles of a sender or a responder and engaged in a real-money economic transaction. First, senders determined how much of 100 rupees to send to a responder. Money sent to the responder was tripled, and the responder then decided whether to keep all of the allocated money, or split it evenly between themselves and the sender. All participants played the game with both a higher-caste and a lower-caste partner, and played the role of both the sender and responder. Following the trust game, participants played a faith game in which they chose from allocations made by upper and lower caste individuals to people from the same or different caste level, or a fixed sum. Results indicated that lower-caste participants showed an ingroup bias in trust behavior, and were more likely to return money entrusted to them when it was sent by other lower-caste members. Upper-caste individuals, however, did not show ingroup favoritism in trust or trustworthiness. In contrast to the results of the trust Game, the results of the Faith game showed that both upper and lower-caste participants were more likely to choose allocations made by ingroup members to other ingroup members, and both groups were more likely to choose allocations made by their ingroup to an outgroup member, suggesting that both groups assume that their own group will be more benevolent toward the outgroup.

#14
Title: Relationships among Self-Construal, Goal Motives, and Goal Outcomes and the Moderating

Presenter(s): Tao Jiang
Affiliation(s): Eastern Kentucky University, USA

This study intended to test a model which integrated different self-construal types, goal motivation types, and goal outcomes, and also to test the moderating effects of culture on the model. 250 American university students and 246 Chinese university students were recruited to test this model. All the participants completed several scales that measured the levels of three types of self-construal (independent, relational, and collective self-construal), four types of goal motive (relational autonomous reasons, RARs; relational controlled reasons, RCRs; personal autonomous reasons, PARs; personal controlled reasons, PCRs), goal-direct effort and progress, and two components of well-being (personal and collective self-esteem). The results showed that for people in both cultures, independent self-construal and collective self-construal predicts RARs, whereas relational self-construal did not predict RARs. Moreover, both PARs and RARs predicted effort and both effort and progress predicted two components of well-being. The results also showed that there was no moderating effect of culture on the entire model, but there was a tendency that culture might affect the relationships between some variables in the model. Specifically, independent self-construal had a relatively stronger association with PARs for Americans than for Chinese students, whereas collective self-construal had a relatively stronger association with PARs for Chinese students than for Americans. Moreover, RARs predicted progress only for Chinese people, whereas PARs predicted progress only for Americans. These findings provided a new perspective of how these constructs are related with each other when they are considered in a holistic way.

#15
Title: Are Cooperative Individuals or Cooperative Groups generated depending on different types of trust? A multilevel analysis on resource management of rural communities in Japan

Presenter(s): Shintaro Fukushima, Yukiko Uchida, and Izuru Saizen
Affiliation(s): Kyoto University

There are two processes of cooperation: first-order cooperation which derives from the cooperative personality at individual level, and second-order cooperation which derives from the social norm at group level. It is stated that cooperation in Japan derives relatively from second-order cooperation which is based on avoidance of not being rejected by group members (Hashimoto & Yamagishi, 2013). It does not mean, however, that second-order cooperation is induced everywhere in Japan. It is necessary to investigate the source of the different processes of cooperation. The purpose of this study is to examine the hypothesis that the processes of cooperation are determined by the forms of social relationships; first-order cooperation is generated by social relationships with generalized others while second-order cooperation is generated by social relationships among group members. We conducted a questionnaire survey on 441 rural communities in Japan, and applied multilevel analysis for 7,229 respondents. As the index of cooperative behavior (dependent variable), we measured the principal component score of cooperation in 4 types of resource managements. As the indices of social relationships with generalized others and social relationships among group members (independent variables), trust in generalized others (General Trust: GT) and trust in community members (Community Trust: CT) were adopted, respectively. As a result, GT functioned to stimulate cooperative behaviors at individual level while CT functioned to stimulate cooperative behaviors at community level. It means that GT generates first-order cooperation while CT generates second-order cooperation. Thus, the process of cooperation derives from the forms of social relationships.

#16
Title: Can Value Predict Behavior? Cultural Variations in the Association between Pro-environmental Value and Behavior

Presenter(s): Kimin Eom(1), Heejung Kim(1), David Sherman(1), and Keiko Ishii(2)
Affiliation(s): (1) University of California, Santa Barbara, USA, (2) Kobe University, Japan

Reflecting the urgency of environmental issues, much psychological research has recently been conducted to understand and promote sustainable behavior. One of the prevalent assumptions in the research on pro-environmental behavior is that internal attributes such as pro-environmental attitudes, values, and beliefs are key factors in explaining the degree to which people engage in green behaviors. The current research questions this assumption by taking a cultural psychological perspective and suggests that the close link between pro-environmental values and behaviors may occur only in specific cultures, especially in European American cultural contexts for which internal attributes centrally define the self. Study 1, using the World Values Survey 2005 data, shows that there were significant cultural variations in the association between pro-environmental value and behavior across 46 countries and interestingly, the U.S. had the strongest link between pro-environmental values and behavior. Furthermore, focusing on two cultural groups, European Americans and Japanese, Study 2 shows that there may be culture-specific predictors of pro-environmental behavior. Specifically, the results showed that pro-environmental worldviews significantly predicted the degree of green product choice only among European Americans, whereas perceived social norms about pro-environmental engagement was a significant predictor of green product choice only among Japanese. These findings suggest that sustainable behavior may be motivated for different reasons across cultures and therefore, underscore the importance of taking a cultural perspective to understand environmental issues.

#17
Title: Does Collective Failure Increase Holistic Attention?

Presenter(s): Hitoshi Tominaga(1), Yukiko Uchida(1), Yuri Miyamoto(2), and Teruo Yamasaki(3)
Affiliation(s): (1) Kyoto University, Japan, (2) University of Wisconsin, USA, (3) Osaka Shoin Women's University, Japan

Previous studies suggested that cultural differences in contextual information sensitivity exist. Individuals in Asian cultures are more likely to incorporate contextual information, whereas those in North American cultures are more likely to ignore contextual information. (e.g., Masuda & Nisbett, 2001). In the present study, we examined what causes these differences. Based on the theory of Cultural Task
Analysis (Kitayama, Park, Sevincer, Karasawa, & Uskul, 2009) that explains how culture influences psychological processes with various cultural tasks, we examined the interaction between a cultural task and psychological processes required in such task. We hypothesized that “collective achievement” in a cooperation task encourages the capacity of incorporating contextual information in order to adjust own performance to other’s performance. In a cooperation situation, participants who failed the collective task attended more holistically in order to maintain cooperative relationships. In our experiment, participants were asked to conduct ensemble tasks that require collective achievement with others. Participants played the xylophone with a partner. We divided the participants into two groups (success vs. failure) according to their self-evaluation of the ensemble task. Then we conducted the Framed Line Test (Kitayama, Duffy, Kawamura & Larsen, 2003) to measure contextual information sensitivity. As a result, we found a significantly larger error difference between absolute tasks and relative tasks in the failure group than in the success group. Therefore, participants in the failure group attended more holistically than participants in the success group. These results provide evidence that tasks embedded in sociocultural environments may elicit distinctive patterns of perception.