The authors investigated cultural differences in the way people perceive and represent temporal information. It was hypothesized that Chinese would attend to the past information more than would Canadians. In Studies 1 and 2, Canadian and Chinese participants read a description of a theft along with a list of behaviors that occurred in the past or present. Chinese participants rated behaviors that had taken place in the remote and recent past as more relevant to solving the case than did Canadians. Study 3 showed that Chinese participants recalled greater detail about past events than did Canadians. Studies 4A and 4B showed that Chinese perceived past events as being closer to the present than did Canadians, suggesting that Chinese had a greater awareness of the past. Overall, Chinese attended to a greater range of past information than did Canadians, which has significant theoretical and practical implications.

Four studies compared the stock market decisions of Canadians and Chinese. In two studies using simple stock market trends, compared with Chinese, Canadians were more willing to sell and less willing to buy falling stock. But when the stock price was rising, the opposite occurred: Canadians were more willing to buy and less willing to sell. A third study showed that for complex stock price trends, Canadians were strongly influenced by the most recent price trends: they tended to predict that recent trends would continue and made selling decisions without considering the rest of the trend patterns; whereas the Chinese made reversal predictions for the dominant trends and made decisions that took both recent and early trends into consideration. Study 4 replicated the finding with experienced individual investors. These findings are consistent with the previous literature on different lay theories of change held by Chinese and North Americans.

This article examines cultural differences in how people value future and past events. Throughout four studies, the authors found that European Canadians attached more monetary value to an event in the future than to an identical event in the past, whereas Chinese and Chinese Canadians placed more monetary value to a past event than to an identical future event. The authors also showed that temporal focus-thinking about the past or future-explained cultural influences on the temporal value asymmetry effect. Specifically, when induced to think about and focus on the future, Chinese valued the future more than the past, just like Euro-Canadians; when induced to think about and focus on the past, Euro-Canadians valued the past more than the future, just like Chinese.

This article discusses the many important differences in the thinking styles between Chinese and European North Americans (Americans and Canadians of European descent), as Chinese thought processes have always been difficult to comprehend. That is why Westerners have expressed serious curiosity about and appreciation of the philosophical endeavours of the Chinese and the cognitive strategies they use for everyday functioning. The term ‘thinking styles’ represents the ontological frameworks that people use intuitively to make sense of their social world. It describes how Chinese favor a more holistic framework in processing information, whereas European North Americans rely on a more analytical framework that emphasizes the use of formal logic and one-to-one relationships. It further elaborates the concept of zhong yong, or the doctrine of the mean, a concept central to understanding Chinese thinking, which encapsulates the virtues of pursuing the middle ground.

Based on previous research on cultural differences in analytic and holistic reasoning, Ihypothesized that when explaining events, North Americans would be more likely than East Asians to expect causes to resemble events with respect to magnitude (i.e., big events stem from big causes and small events stem from small causes). In addition, Ihypothesized that these differences would be explained by cultural differences in the tendency to reason analytically or holistically. In a series of studies, Canadian and Chinese participants judged the likelihood that high or low magnitude events were caused by high or low magnitude causes. Events included a disease outbreak, a delay in a business negotiation, and damage caused by a tornado moving through a city. In two studies, participants from both cultural groups expected events and their causes to correspond in magnitude. More importantly, as hypothesized, Canadians expected events and their causes to correspond in magnitude to a greater degree than did Chinese. In a third study, I ruled out a potential alternative explanation that Chinese may have simply been exhibiting a response bias. In a fourth study, in support of my hypothesis that these cultural differences were due to differences in the reasoning styles of Canadians and Chinese, I found that Canadians primed to reason holistically expected less cause-effect magnitude correspondence than did those primed to reason analytically. These findings have important theoretical implications for the research literature on attributions and on cultural and social cognition, as well as practical implications in the context of judgment and decision making.ii Co-AuthorshipLi-Jun Ji provided feedback on the design, analysis, and writing for each of the studies.Zhiyong Zhang and Li Ye were responsible for the data collection in China for each of the studies. Leandre Fabrigar provided feedback on the design and writing for each of the studies. Roy R. Spina, as first-author for each of the studies, was responsible for their conception, design, data collection, analysis, and write-up.iii