Social representations of world history were assessed using the open-ended questions, “What are the most important events in world history?” and “Who are the most influential persons in world history in the last 1,000 years?”Data from six Asian and six Western samples showed cross-cultural consensus. Historical representations were (a) focused on the recent past, (b) centered around politics and war, and (c) dominated by the events of the World Wars and (d) the individual Hitler, who was universally perceived as negative. (e) Representations were more Eurocentric than ethnocentric.(f) The importance of economics and science was underrepresented.(g) Most cultures nominated people (more than events) idiosyncratic to their own culture. These data reflect power relations in the world and provide resources and constraints for the conduct of international relations. The degree of cross-cultural consensus suggests that hybridity across Eastern and Western cultures in the representation of knowledge may be underestimated.

In individualistic English-speaking cultures such as Australia, the United Kingdom, or the United States, attitudes and behavioun are often believed to be consistent. By contrast, in the Japanese culture, people may be primarily conceptualized as embedded within social contexts; the belief in consistency between attitudes and behaviour (the ABC belie0 may be less strong and behavioun seen to be less consistent with attitudes. In this paper, we report two studies designed to examine the hypothesis that the strength of ABC beliefs underlies inferences in attributions of behaviour to attitudes. In Study 1, the relation of ABC beliefs to attitude attributions was examined in a sample of Australian undergraduate students. In Study 2, ABC beliefs and attitude attributions were compared in Australia and in Japan. As predicted, the ABC beliefs of Australians were related to the extremity of attributions for unconstrained behaviours and the Australians had stronger ABC beliefs than the Japanese. The results arc discussed in relation to global cultural dimensions of individualism and collectivism.

In response to the COVID-19 pandemic, many Governments are instituting mobile tracking technologies to perform rapid contact tracing. However, these technologies are only effective if the public is willing to use them, implying that their perceived public health benefits must outweigh personal concerns over privacy and security. The Australian federal government recently launched the ‘COVIDSafe’ app, designed to anonymously register nearby contacts. If a contact later identifies as infected with COVID-19, health department officials can rapidly followup with their registered contacts to stop the virus’ spread. The current study assessed attitudes towards three tracking technologies (telecommunication network tracking, a government app, and Apple and Google’s Bluetooth exposure notification system) in two representative samples of the Australian public prior to the launch of COVIDSafe. We compared these attitudes to usage of the COVIDSafe app after its launch in a further two representative samples of the Australian public. Using Bayesian methods, we find widespread acceptance for all tracking technologies, however, observe a large intention-behaviour gap between people’s stated attitudes and actual uptake of the COVIDSafe app. We consider the policy implications of these results for Australia and the world at large.

Are human individuals universally seen to be more real entities (or more entitative, to use Campbell 's, 1958, term) than social groups? Although the individual may be seen to be more entitative than social groups in the West, it is unclear whether this is the case in other cultures, especially in East Asia. Two aspects of perceived entitativity are distinguished: psychological essentialism (belief in the presence of essence-like unchangeable properties) and agency (perception that a social entity is an agent), and examined for four social targets (individual, family, friendship group, and society) in three Englishspeaking cultures (Australia, UK, and USA), three East Asian cultures (Hong Kong, Japan, and Korea), and two continental European cultures (Belgium and Germany). In all cultures, the individual person was seen to possess essence-like unchangeable characteristics more than social groups (i.e. essentialized). As for agency, the individual person was seen to be more agentic than groups in Western cultures, but both individuals and groups were conferred an equal level of agency in East Asia. Individuals may be universally more essentialized than friendship groups and societies, but not always seen to be more agentic, than social groups. Implications of the results for conceptions of individualism and collectivism are discussed.

Group impressions are dynamic configurations. The tensor product model (TPM), a connectionist model of memory and learning, is used to describe the process of group impression formation and change, emphasizing the structured and contextualized nature of group impressions and the dynamic evolution of group impressions over time. TPM is first shown to be consistent with algebraic models of social judgment (the weighted averaging model; N. Anderson, 1981) and exemplar-based social category learning (the context model; E. R. Smith & M. A. Zárate, 1992), providing a theoretical reduction of the algebraic models to the present connectionist framework. TPM is then shown to describe a common process that underlies both formation and change of group impressions despite the often-made assumption that they constitute different psychological processes. In particular, various time-dependent properties of both group impression formation (e.g., time variability, response dependency, and order effects in impression judgments) and change (e.g., stereotype change and group accentuation) are explained, demonstrating a hidden unity beneath the diverse array of empirical findings. Implications of the model for conceptualizing stereotype formation and change are discussed.