ABSTRACT
During the last several decades, while the volume of cross-cultural research has steadily increased, experimental social psychologists’ approach toward cross-cultural research on attitudes and attitude-relevant constructs seems to have gone through three stages or generations. In retrospect, we find that the first generation of cross-cultural research focused on identifying crosscultural similarities, which tended to demonstrate universality in attitudes or attitude-relevant constructs. Over time, however, a second stage or generation of cross-cultural research emerged, that focused on identifying culturespecific psychological phenomena and generated findings that demonstrated cross-cultural differences in attitudes and their related constructs. The third generation, for which we provide empirical evidence below, can be characterized as a synthesis of the first and second generations. In particular, it is an approach to understand the role played by culture in shaping basic psychological functioning. It seeks to demonstrate not only that underlying psychological processes may be similar across cultures, but also that the situations in which the phenomenon is manifested and the manner according to which it operates may be culture specific. Of course, these distinctions between three generations of research are not as clear-cut as described above and some overlaps among them are seen in the literature. Nonetheless, we think that the above distinctions among three stages or generations capture the Zeitgeist, or the most important research questions for most people, of cross-cultural research at the time.
