FEATURE30 April 2015

Positive Attitude

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Social psychologist Sharon Shavitt thinks research insights from non-Western cultures must be incorporated when looking at sociocultural attitudes. Elina Halonen finds out more.

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Much of our knowledge of good questionnaire design is based on decades of research in social psychology on attention, memory and information processing. Over time, we have learned how to interpret the results of global studies in a way that takes into account other psychological findings such as acquiescence bias or extreme response bias, but what about the underlying concepts themselves? With 96% of the world’s psychology research being conducted on 12% of the world’s population (and most of it in the Western world), it’s possible some of our most fundamental concepts are going uncontested.

Social psychologist and fellow of the Society of Consumer Psychology Sharon Shavitt from University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, recently suggested a new theory of attitudes that highlights how differently they function in Western and non-Western cultural contexts. Reading the article, I was struck by the fundamental challenge this new theory is posing to us as an industry, so I wanted to ask her more questions.

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