Immediate-Return Societies: What Can They Tell Us About the Self and Social Relationships in Our Society?

W hen researchers study their phenomena within a narrow range of participants (e.g., similar age, same culture), they cannot be sure if their results generalize to anyone outside of that range. This means they cannot be sure if their findings reflect context-free principles of behavior, or descriptive regularities bound to given local and historical contexts. To address this ambiguity, some social psychologists have begun to explore their findings using a wider range of samples. For example, they have compared Eastern and Western cultures (Triandis & Gelfand, 1998) or subgroups within a given culture, such as Americans of African, Asian, and European descent (Sinclair, Hardin, & Lowery, 2006).