Error-related brain activity reveals self-centric motivation: Culture matters.

Abstract

To secure the interest of the personal self (vs. social others) is considered a fundamental human motive, but the nature of the motivation to secure the self-interest is not well understood. To address this issue, we assessed electrocortical responses of European Americans and Asians as they performed a flanker task while instructed to earn as many reward points as possible either for the self or for their same-sex friend. For European Americans, error-related negativity (ERN)—an event-related-potential component contingent on error responses—was significantly greater in the self condition than in the friend condition. Moreover, post-error slowing—an index of cognitive control to reduce errors—was observed in the self condition but not in the friend condition. Neither of these self-centric effects was observed among Asians, consistent with prior cross-cultural behavioral evidence. Interdependent self-construal mediated the effect of culture on the ERN self-centric effect. Our findings provide the first evidence for a neural correlate of self-centric motivation, which becomes more salient outside of interdependent social relations.

Culturally non-preferred cognitive tasks require compensatory attention: a functional near infrared spectroscopy (fNIRS) investigation

“…Consistent with the patterns found in previous 2 cross-cultural work (e.g., Kitayama and Park 2014;Kitayama et al 2003;Masuda and Nisbett 2001), Asian Americans responded faster (M = 790.3 ms, SE = 85.8) than European Americans (M = 1111.9 ms, SE = 67.3). This cultural difference, however, was not dependent on task type.…”

When gift-giving produces dissonance: Effects of subliminal affiliation priming on choices for one's self versus close others

“…Our results suggest that priming an interdependent social orientation reduces the salience of this concern. Indeed, previous research suggests that in individualistic cultures, greater interdependence is negatively related to pursuit of self-centered rewards (Kitayama & Park, 2012) and that reminders of values beyond one's immediate self (e.g. social life) allows one to transcend egocentric concerns (Crocker, Niiya, & Mischkowski, 2008).…”

A Culture–Behavior–Brain Loop Model of Human Development

“…Moreover, the studies using a mediation analysis have demonstrated that the cultural group difference in brain activity engaged in different stimuli/tasks (e.g., TPJ activity during self-reflection [36] or neural activity in response to error responses [72]) can be partially or fully explained by a specific cultural value (e.g., interdependence).…”