Shinobu Kitayama: University of Michigan Department of Psychology

There is a general consensus that the history of voluntary settlement in the western frontier constitutes a major element of American individualism. Yet, if voluntary settlement is a causal factor that promoted tacit beliefs and practices of independent agency, there should be similar beliefs and practices among a group of people even in the midst of an entirely different cultural ethos of interdependence as long as the group had undergone voluntary settlement in the recent past. We thus examined residents of Japan’s northern island (Hokkaido). Hokkaido was extensively settled by ethnic Japanese from the 1870’s for several decades. Many of the current residents of Hokkaido are the descendents of the original settlers from this period. As predicted, Japanese socialized and/or immersed in Hokkaido were nearly as likely as European Americans in North America to commit a dispositional bias in causal attribution, to associate happiness with personal achievement, and to show a personal dissonance effect wherein self-justification is motivated by a threat to personal self-images. In contrast, these marker effects of independent agency were largely absent for non-Hokkaido residents in Japan. Implications for theories of cultural change are discussed.