Abstract:

Dialecticism refers to a set of folk knowledge maintained in Eastern Asian people’s ideology characterized by holistic cognition, change expectation and contradiction tolerance. In this paper, we developed an implicit measure of dialecticism to test how dialectical concept was linked with Eastern Asian participants’ self-concept. In two studies, we found that Chinese participants associated “dialectical” words with “self” words and “non-dialectical” words with “other” words significantly faster than the opposite association. Furthermore, they associate “friend” words with “dialectical” words and “enemy” words with “non-dialectical” words with faster response. These results demonstrated that Eastern Asian participants would more likely to link self-concept together with dialectical concepts.

Key words: naïve dialecticism, implicit association test, self, culture, thinking style