Americans Process Social Events Similarly Despite Differences in Cultural Beliefs

What is it about?

Do Americans all process their social worlds in the same way? Or do we use different perceptual tools to make sense of what we see around us? This paper shows that members of the same culture (here, the U.S. English language culture) process events quite similarly, despite individual differences in feelings about different types of people and behavior. We form impressions most similarly when evaluating how good or bad different social actors and behaviors seem, with more individual differences in the way we process social dominance and impressions of the target of a behavior.

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Why is it important?

This paper provides the first test of a long-standing scholarly claim that impression formation processes are widely shared within cultures, supporting a key premise of more than 50 years of work in sociological social psychology. It also provides the first test of two factors long presumed to predict individual differences in impression formation – cultural expertise and gender. While cultural expertise affects how respondents process social events, I find no significant gender differences in event processing.