[Effects of group entitativity on the judgment of collective intentionality and responsibility].

Two studies investigated whether observers perceive collective intention and responsibility of a task group when a group member (i.e., a member of a company's board) committed a corporate crime. In Study 1, undergraduate students read a scenario describing a criminal case, in which the degree to which the group (i.e., the company's board) was likely to be perceived as a coherent acting agent (i.e., "entitativity") was manipulated. The results revealed that the perception of collective intentionality led to perceived responsibility of the group, and then to less favorable attitudes toward the company. However, there were no effects of entitativity on perceived intentionality and responsibility. With a refined experimental design, Study 2 showed that high group entitativity induced a high level of perceived intentionality and responsibility, particularly when the crime was directly relevant to the mission as a company (i.e., food manufacturing of a food company). Implications of these findings for other research areas such as business and law are discussed.

Culture and neuroscience: How Japanese and European Canadians process social context in close and acquaintance relationships.

Recent cultural psychology findings suggest that social orientation affects neural social attention. Whereas independent cultures process people as separate from social context, interdependent cultures process people as dependent on social context. This research expands upon these findings, investigating what role culture plays in people's neural processing of social context for two relationship contexts, close and acquaintance relationships. To investigate, we had European Canadian and Japanese participants rate the emotions of center faces in face lineups while collecting ERP data. Lineups were either congruent, with all faces showing similar emotions, or incongruent, with center face emotions differing from background faces. To investigate relationship types, we framed face lineups to be in close or acquaintance relationships. We found that for acquaintances, only Japanese processed incongruent social context as meaningful, as seen through N400 incongruity effects. Contrasting with these patterns, only European Canadians showed N400 incongruity effects for close relationships. These patterns were seen whether or not the two groups noticed the emotional conflict, as seen by N2 incongruity effects. Finally, we found that social orientation was differentially related to the neural incongruity effects for the two relationships. These findings further elucidate the nuances of how culture affects neural social attention.

N400 incongruity effect in an episodic memory task reveals different strategies for handling irrelevant contextual information for Japanese than European Canadians.

East Asians/Asian Americans show a greater N400 effect due to semantic incongruity between foreground objects and background contexts than European Americans (Goto, Ando, Huang, Yee, & Lewis, 2010). Using analytic attention instructions, we asked Japanese and European Canadians to judge, and later, remember, target animals that were paired with task-irrelevant original (congruent), or novel (incongruent) contexts. We asked: (1) whether the N400 also shows an episodic incongruity effect, due to retrieved contexts conflicting with later-shown novel contexts; and (2) whether the incongruity effect would be more related to performance for Japanese, who have been shown to have more difficulty ignoring such contextual information. Both groups exhibited episodic incongruity effects on the N400, with Japanese showing more typical N400 topographies. However, incongruent-trial accuracy was related to reduction of N400s only for the Japanese. Thus, we found that the N400 can reflect episodic incongruity which poses a greater challenge to Japanese than European Canadians.