The IAFOR
Academic Review
Volume 1 | Issue 1

In this edition
Cornering the Muses: A Multifaceted
Approach to Measuring Creativity
Meta-analysis of Intelligence Scoresof ‘Street Children’ in Developing
Countries
Can Personality Types be Predictedby Social Media Network Structures?
Applying Culture Bound Theory to
Acute Social Withdrawal (Hikikomori)Influence of Emotional Induction andFree or Forced Affiliation on In-group
and Out-group Trust Attitude
Cognitive Change among Foreign
Managers in Japan’s IT Sector

Essays in Psychology & theBehavioural Sciences
ISSN: 2188-9570

THE IAFOR ACADEMIC REVIEW

3

CONTENTS

18

12

1-2

12-17

Editorial Committee

Meta-analysis of

Introduction

Intelligence Scores

An introduction to theof ‘Street Children’ inlatest edition of The IAFOR

Developing Countries

Academic Review by

Graham Pluck, Chuo

Michael Liam Kedzlie

University, Japan and Daniel
Banda-Cruz, Universidad

3-11

San Francisco de Quito,

Cornering the Muses: A

EcuadorMultifaceted Approach to
Measuring Creativity

18-26

Brian Birdsell, Hirosaki

Can Personality Types be

University, Japan

Predicted by Social Media
Network Structures?

Matthew Escobido & Gillian
Stevens, Asian Institute ofManagement, Singapore
27-30
Applying Culture Bound
Theory to Acute Social
Withdrawal (Hikikomori)
Maree Sugai, Tohoku
University of Community
Service and Science, Japan
31-38
Influence of Emotional
Induction and Free orForced Affiliation on In-

THE IAFOR ACADEMIC REVIEW

27

39

31
group and Out-group Trust
Attitude
Pierluigi Diotaiuti, Angelo
Marco Zona, Luigi Rea,
Department of Human,
Social and Health Sciences,
University of Cassino andSouth Latium, Italy
39-47
Cognitive Change among
Foreign Managers inJapan’s IT Sector
William Baber, Kyoto
University, JapanThe IAFOR Academic Review
Volume 1 | Issue 1

Editorial Committee
Rev. Professor Stuart Picken – Chairman of the IAB
Dr. Joseph Haldane – IAFOR Executive Director
Mr. Michael Liam Kedzlie – IAFOR Research andPolicy Manager
IAB Psychology Advisory Chairs
Professor Dexter Da Silva – Professor of Educational
Psychology, Keisen University, Japan
Dr. Monty Satiadarma – Clinical Psychologist, andFormer Rector, Tarumanagara University, Indonesia
Professor Jiro Takai – Professor of Psychology,
Nagoya University, Japan
IAFOR Publications © Copyright 2014
ISSN: 2188-9570

Editorial Committee Introduction
Intelligence Scores of ‘Street Children’ in Developing
Countries, reveals how unsupervised 'street children'
spending much of their living in the inner city urban
environments and in conditions of extreme poverty, aregenerally not attending school and are found to havehigh rates of psychological traumas and substance abuse.
Their paper reveals that these children suffer multiple
deprivations and exposure to factors mitigating theirnormal neurocognitive development. Pluck and BandaCruz suggest that because of this, the children’s
attainment of optimal intellectual functioning ishindered. They consider that this circumstance will haveongoing implications for any interventions aiming atbringing these children back into mainstream society,such as through reintegration into educational programs.
Although limited by the dearth of research on the topic,
the current results by Pluck and Banda-Cruz suggest thatthe multiple deprivations suffered by street children indeveloping countries tend to impair normal
neurocognitive development, but that the extent of thisvaries by culture.

One of the central missions of The International
Academic Forum or IAFOR is to provide avenues foracademics and researchers to explore international,
intercultural and interdisciplinary. One of the ways inwhich we do this is through our in-house magazine Eye,our various conference proceedings, our peer reviewed
Journals, and now beginning in 2015 our special editions’of the IAFOR International Academic Review.
In this the first issue of the IAFOR International
Academic Review we the editorial committee bring
together a selection of the most interesting contributions
from our recent Asian Conferences on Psychology andthe Behavioral Sciences. The papers selected by theeditorial committee for this special edition on Psychology
and Behavioral Sciences certainly reflect theinternational, intercultural and interdisciplinary missionthat IAFOR is fostering. They enable us to examine andreflect on critical areas for future discussion andintellectual inspiration.
Brian Birdsell, of Hirosaki University, Japan opens thisedition with Cornering the Muses: A Multifaceted Approach
to Measuring Creativity. In his paper Birdsell considers
that creativity is far from a straightforward constructwithin the field of psychology. His paper attempts touncover some of the complexity and uncertainty
surrounding it. It provides an overview of creativity, it’s
importance in society, the various stereotypes andcontradictory assumptions attached to it, and the search
for a working definition of what the creativity actuallymeans. The paper also focuses on a multi-dimensional
approach to measuring creativity in order to grasp themany different aspects of it. Birdsell looks at ways tomeasure the creative process by using divergent thinking
tests. He examines the creative product and subsequentassessment test, and also the creative personality test bothfrom a personality trait perspective, as well as, from abiographical inventory of creative behavior andaccomplishments. Birdsell considers, that though all themethods are rather standard within the field, they are
most often administered in isolation. His view is thatbringing them together into one study can broaden theconcept of creativity and add understanding to how thedifferent aspects relate to each other. The paper reveals
that the creative process appears to be one area that canbe developed and expanded further, especially by utilizing
creative metaphors, as an instrument for measuring how
people combine and connect highly dissonant concepts inboth new and insightful ways.
Graham Pluck, from Chuo University, Japan and Daniel
Banda-Cruz, from the Universidad San Francisco de
Quito, Ecuador, in their study Meta-analysis ofMatthew Escobido and Gillian Stevens from the Asian
Institute of Management, Philippines ‘Can Personality
Type be Predicted by Social Media Network Structures?’examine how social media platforms have become an
integral part of how we live our lives. In particular for
those generations who have grown up in the digital worldand use these platforms to connect and communicate
with many different individuals and groups. Escobido
and Stevens show how personality profiling now
underpins many facets of our lives. They use the example
of digital marketing campaigns that target specificaudience groups by using information gleaned from how
a person actually engages with social media. Their paper
presents an initial summary of work undertaken by themto explore the nature of structural patterns represented byan individual’s Psychological Type, as defined by their
MBTI type and specific aspects of their social network
data, as defined within the context of their Facebook
connections and usage. Their initial findings suggest thatthe virtual world is able to reflect personality differencesthat exist in the external world.
In her paper Applying Culture Bound Theory to Acute Social
Withdrawal (Hikikomori), Maree Sugai from Tohoku
University of Community Service and Science in Japan,
highlights the identification of factors that implicate acultural bound theory, both in the socio demographic
orientation of Hikikomori, and in the physicalmanifestation of `opting out` by `shutting in.` Sugai
includes a comparison of those factors from a control
culture with the related social expectation withdrawal of a1

administration of the emotional stimuli. Diotaituti, Zona
and Rea reveal that social and emotional intelligence ofthe subject is a factor that mediates between the
induction and trust in the in-group and the out-group,and that negative induction reduces confidence in themembers of their own group in a much more significant
way than in the out group members and yet more in theforced social categorization.

runaway. It uses as a baseline for analysis, Japan`s
position in three of the cultural value indices as definedby Hofstede, namely the dimensions of: individualism(IDV), power distance (PDI), and uncertainty avoidance(UAI). Through this Sugai seeks to analyse how, in
conjunction with educational norms, peer behavioural
patterns, employment expectations within a society, andcultural values can determine how an individuals social
withdrawal and `opting out` may be present. It is Sugai’scontention that Hikikomori is not a social situation thatis disappearing in Japan, even though it is no longer the
hot topic it was over a decade ago. Sugai believes that as
popular interest wanes and the media inevitably moves its
attention on to the next cult like phenomenon among
young people who behave differently, the growing
Hikikomori population of over one million suffers should
not be forgotten. Sugai considers that educators are in aprime position to facilitate change and questions that
often teaching styles that may actually play a critical rolein the responsibility for such a huge, national, culturally
specific, social epidemic that is not vanishing like its
members, but is instead rampant and growing.

William Baber, of Kyoto University, Japan is the final
paper presented in this special Psychology and Behavioral
Sciences edition. Titled ‘Cognitive Change among Foreign
Managers in Japan's IT Sector,’ Baber considers thatthough there is a large volume of research on foreign
worker adjustment in Japan, little research has taken on
the issue of cognitive change. His study opines that Japanis considered a "difficult" culture for foreigners to access,and has been lagging as a topic of business study since
the end of the Bubble Era two decades ago. However
Baber argues that Japan is nevertheless a major employer
of foreign IT workers and is increasingly innovative
within that sector. The paper is based upon an original
qualitative study taken between Winter 2012 and Spring
2014, which included nine cases interviews. According toBaber these interviews reveal the changes that haveoccured in cognitive style and management stylepreferences. The case studies presented and discussed byBaber were based on Nisbett's (2003) holistic andanalytic cognitive styles, Berry's (1980) acculturation
scheme and Adler and Gundersen's (2007) concept ofsynergy with implications for foreign workers and their
managers in Japan.

Pierluigi Diotaiuti, Angelo Marco Zona, and Luigi Rea,of the Department of Human, Social and Health
Sciences, University of Cassino and South Latium, Italy,
provide a fascinating article titled ‘Influence of Emotional
Induction and Free or Forced Affiliation on In-group and
Out-group Trust Attitude.’ Their paper revisits priorstudies on social categorization that understands
Emotional Induction as a determinant of intra-groupfavoritism and inter-group discrimination. Diotaituti,
Zona and Rea studied 100 college students andadministered to them the two scales taken from the MPP
test to assess empathy, pro-sociality, sociability,interpersonal trust, self-esteem, social desirability,
cynicism, management of their own impression. They
then divided the participants into four experimental
conditions: positive and negative emotional induction,
free or forced social categorization. Diotaituti, Zona and
Rea also submitted to the subjects an IAT so as tomeasure the change in the attitude of trust or distrust
towards the in-group and out-group with respect to the

Finally the editorial committee of the IAFOR
International Academic Review would like to thank ourconference chairs Professor Monty Satiadarma from
Tarumanagara University, Indonesia and Professor
Dexter De Silva from Keisen University, Japan for theircontinual guidance with our Psychology and Behavioral
Sciences conference program and publications. We also
would like to thank the many delegates who attended ourconferences and who submitted academic papers to ourprevious proceedings.

Michael Liam Kedzlie
Editorial Committee Member
The IAFOR International Academic Review

2Cornering the Muses: A Multifaceted
Approach to Measuring Creativity
BRIAN BIRDSELL, HIROSAKI UNIVERSITY, JAPAN
resource of the 21st century, and this importance is quite
visible in the European Commission’s declaring 2009 to
be the “Year of Creativity and Innovation” (European
Commission, 2008). This view is not restricted to theWest, as the Singaporean government, too, has describedcreativity as a necessity for the advancement of thenation’s economy, technology, and education (Tan,2000).

Abstract
Creativity is far from a straightforward construct within
the field of psychology, and this paper attempts touncover some of the complexity and uncertainty around
it. The paper first provides a brief overview of creativity,
it’s importance in society, various stereotypes andcontradictory assumptions attached to it, and the search
for a working definition of what the terms actuallymeans. It then focuses on a multi-dimensional approach
to measuring creativity in order to grasp the manydifferent aspects of it. Ways to measure the creative
process using the highly popular divergent thinking tests,
the creative product and subsequent assessment, and thecreative personality both from a personality trait
perspective, as well as, from a biographical inventory ofcreative behavior and accomplishments are all examined.
Though all the methods are rather standard within thefield, they are most often administered in isolation.
Bringing them together into one study can broaden theconcept of creativity and add understanding to how thedifferent aspects relate to each other. The creative process
appears to be one area that can be developed andexpanded, especially by utilizing creative metaphors, as afurther instrument for measuring how people combine
and connect highly dissonant concepts in new andinsightful ways.

The Many Sides of Creativity
Creativity, though, is bound by numerous stereotypes
and misperceptions and often people believe that to becreative one needs to be “mad, weird, neurotic or at least
unusual” (Isaken, 1987, p. 2). Many researchers label thisthe “mad-genius stereotype” (Kaufman, Bromley, &Cole, 2006) or the “lone nut” stereotype (Plucker,
Beghetto, & Dow, 2004). Despite those who are trying
to disentangle creativity from this lone genius myth(Montuori & Purser, 1995), these stereotypes still seemto be part of the common folk belief in society andpopularized by the media, which often writes about
linking madness and depression to genius and creativity(Adams, 2014). Most research that looks at theconnection between madness and creativity (Andreasen,
1987) (Jamison, 1993), however tends to focus oneminent creators, those whom have made a significant
impact in their field. On the other hand, everyday
creativity has actually been shown to be an importantpart of the mental health of the individual for it involves
important characteristics such as having a willingness totake risks, being open to new ideas, and being flexible(Cropley, 1990).

Introduction
Research into creativity is very much an interdisciplinary
endeavor spreading across such diverse fields as business(Amabile, Conti, Coon, Lazenby, & Herron, 1996)(Amabile, 1996) (Andriopoulos, 2001), linguistics andlanguage education (Carter, 2004) (Albert, 2006)(Maybin, 2007), psychology (Eysenck, 1993), andnaturally the fine arts (Mace & Ward, 2002) just to namea few. Creativity has also been widely studied from across-cultural perspective (Lubart, 1990) (Lubart, 1999)(Lubart, 2010) (Kaufman & Sternberg, 2006) (Morris &Leung, 2010), analyzed historically (Simonton, 1999),
and examined to find what kind of relationship it haswith intelligence and personality (Barron & Harrington,1981) (Batey & Furnham, 2006).
In addition, creativity has a broad and all-inclusive lure,
as something essential to the well being of society. As
Toynbee (1964) states, giving “a fair chance to potential
creativity is a matter of life and death for a society” (p. 4).
Florida (2002) describes it as the most important

Another area with contradicting views towards creativity
is its association with a certain naiveté popularized by
Picasso’s famous quote, “Every child is an artist. The
problem is how to remain an artist once we grow up.”Gardner (1993) also details the blend of childlike andadultlike characteristics in many of the leading creativeminds of this past century noting how Einstein tried topreserve such childlike features as curiosity and defianceof convention. Following in Einstein’s proclivity towards
childlike features for enhancing creativity, it is believedthat "When Richard Feynman faced a problem he wasunusually good at going back to being like a child,ignoring what everyone else thinks and saying, 'Now,
what have we got here?'" (Feynman, 1995). Yet at thesame time creativity requires a certain amount of3

Though slippery as this construct may appear, recently
researchers have narrowed down this medley ofdefinitions and have shown some accord in reaching anagreed upon description of this term. Stein (1953)
provides one of the earlier working frameworks for adefinition of it, as he states, “The creative work is a novel
work that is accepted as tenable or useful or satisfying bya group in some point in time” (p. 311). Novelty without
being useful is simply something bizarre and odd, whilesomething useful without being novel is somethingcommon, everyday and conventional. These two concepts
must come together for something to be consideredcreative. Later the word “appropriate” and useful”
replaced the words “tenable” and “satisfying.” Sternberg
and Lubart (1995) describe novelty as being statisticallyunusual, original, unpredictable, with the power tosurprise, which Bruner (1962) calls an “effective surprise”
and states that it is a distinctive feature of creativity. Thiselement of surprise has also been labeled the“nonobvious” (Simonton, 2011). Boden (2004) further
elaborates on the meaning of surprise, which is either thestate of seeing this creative product, such as an innovative
idea, as fitting into a way of thinking that you alreadyhad, but failed to ever realize or, as seeing the idea as an
impossibility and yet contrary to this impossibility
someone has come up with it. Others have added one
other key element to creativity and that is “adaptability,”
which is the “ability to respond adaptively to the needs
for new approaches and new products” (Barron, 1988, p.
80).

cognitive complexity. This cognitive complexity enables
one “to integrate conflicting, ambiguous or novel
information” (Charlton & Bakan, 1988, p. 318), which isalso essential to avoiding functional fixedness. Avoiding
functional fixedness is the ability to see multiple
responses to a question or alternative solutions to a
problem and not being fixed in seeing only one single
answer. So the concept of creativity seems to be terribly
loaded with contradictions and myths, with science andpopular media, viewing it either as a mental process that
regresses to some primordial state or a highly evolved
process that pushes the boundaries of complexity.
The actual word creativity is commonly used in suchbroad contexts from describing Picasso’s Guernica to a
wordplay in a daily tabloid that the critic and historian,Jacques Barzun stated, “… in contemporary culture, noidea is so appealing, no word put to more frequent andvaried use, than creativity.” He goes on to say thatcreativity “extends over all of art and science, naturally,
and it takes us beyond these to the basic conditions ofmodern society, to education, to our view of the humanmind and what we conceive to be the goal of life itself”(Barzun, 1989, p. 338). To better differentiate this wideranging use of the term creativity, researchers distinguishbetween the magnitude of creativity by calling the workof geniuses on one side of the cline, eminent creativity,
and the other side, everyday creativity (Richards, 1990).
Often these will be expressed as “Big-C” creativity and“little-c” creativity, respectively. Though helpful indistinguishing the wide contrast that the word creativity
can exemplify, it does not clarify what creativity actuallyis.

Recently, the definition has emphasized the interactionof domain specific knowledge, the overall creative
process, and the importance the environment has on theindividual (or group) in the creation of this “creative
product.” There is also the influence of the social context
in determining the novelty and usefulness of this creative
product. The following definition is one of the morethorough and all encompassing definitions of creativity
and will be used as the working definition of creativity inthis paper.

Framing Creativity in a Definition
Defining creativity may seem straightforward on thesurface, but in reality it has been one of the more difficult
and tumultuous undertakings within the field ofcreativity research. A decade after Guilford (1950)
advocated a call to arms for more researchers to look at
the neglected subject of creativity, a place where many
psychologists “have feared to tread” (p. 444), Rhodes(1961) stated that the “The profusion (of definitions) was
enough to give one the impression that creativity is aprovince for pseudo-intellectuals” (p. 306). This
outpouring of definitions for creativity, which some haveestimated to number close to 60 that can be found in thepsychological literature (Taylor, 1988 in Furnham, Batey,
Anand, & Manfield, 2008), has left the term rather illdefined and unformed. As Sternberg (1988) further
states, “Few psychological constructs have proved moveelusive to define” (p. 126). Such is the elusiveness of thisterm that one of the leading scientists of the time, David
Bohm, along with the physicist David Peat (2010),
reinforces its ambivalent nature by stating that“something relevant may be said about creativity,
provided it is realized that whatever we say it is, there isalso something more and something different” (p. 226).

“Creativity is the interaction among aptitude,
process, and environment by which an individual orgroup produces a perceptible product that is bothnovel and useful as defined within a social context”(Plucker et al., 2004, p.90).

A Multifaceted Approach

4

Creative insight into a problem is often said to occur
through an “Aha experience” or “eureka effect,”
something that Poincaré wrote about happening to him
while waiting for a bus or for Archimedes while sitting ina bathtub. A new creative idea or thought that has neveroccurred to one before will metaphorically be comparedto some kind of illumination, as can be viewed in the
numerous light bulb visual metaphors that are often
associated with a creative idea. The thought that one

(2008) reemphasized the point that creativity anddivergent thinking are by no means identical terms, anddivergent thinking should be seen as just one aspect of amore complex creative process (Runco & Okuda, 1988).

could actually measure such a thing as creativity has often
been clouded with doubt and suspicion for how would
one go about measuring the “disordering of all thesenses” as stated by Arthur Rimbaud or the“impenetrable aspect of human existence” (Hausman,
1976, p. 3) and from these perceptions of creativity; it
was often assumed to be something immeasurable(Khatena, 1982). The early attempts to measure it were
often approached with some skepticism, and thecomplexity of undertaking such a task has been reviewed
extensively and critiqued (Hocevar, 1981).

Divergent thinking tasks are usually figural or verbal.
Common figural tasks ask the participants to complete
an unfinished picture or draw as many pictures as
possible from many pairs of circles or lines (for example:“o o” or “x x”) on the page. Common verbal tasks ask theparticipants to list alternative uses to a common everyday
objects like a brick, describe possible causes to a situation
in a picture, provide possible consequences to an unlikely
situation (just suppose everyone in the world only spoke
one language), or provide possible improvements to a
product like a bicycle (see Kaufman, Plucker, & Baer,
2008 for an outline of such activities).

Despite the suspicion surrounding the measurement ofcreativity, research into this trait continues to grow andthrive in many different academic disciplines. A
developing consensus among researchers views creativity
as being made up of multiple components (Amabile,
1996) (Batey et al., 2006) and therefore a multi-faceted
approach is the best method for trying to measure it.
Rhodes (1961) described the four dimensions ofcreativity to be person, process, product, and press. Thishas been labeled the four P’s of creativity. Using thesevarious dimensions of creativity may provide theresearcher a blueprint to better understand what it means
to be creative. In the following sections, I will first lookat the historically enduring measurement of Divergent
Thinking tests, which aim to measure creative potential
and part of the creative process; then look at the creative
product and ways to measure such products; and finallythe creative person.

The figural tasks can be scored with such measurements
as fluency (the number of pictures), originality (thestatistical uniqueness of the picture), elaboration (theamount of detail provided in the picture), and theabstractedness of the title. Verbal tasks can be scored forfluency, originality, and elaboration (Kaufman, et al.,2008). The TTCT, however, recommends training for
those who use that test for administrative and scoring
purposes, yet many researchers will use their own form of
divergent thinking tasks and some have tried to simplify
the scoring scales by using a more subjective scoring
method (Silvia, et al., 2008).
The model of the creative process, though, is not simply
analyzing a problem and then coming up with manyideas, as represented in these divergent thinking tasks.
Zeng, Proctor, and Salvendy (2011) show that it also
involves evaluation, and thus these types of divergent
thinking tests fail to assess the integrated general creative
process. Another issue these authors raise concerningthese types of tests to measure creativity is the constructvalidity of them, since divergent thinking tests neglect
one important criterion in the working definition ofcreativity and that is “appropriateness” (Zeng et. al,2011). Though Kim (2006) provides a detailed review of
the TTCT and concludes that if properly administered it
has benefits for identifying gifted children, but also
encourages everyday creativity, and, most importantly forthis paper, she too recommends that any measure ofcreativity involve multiple measures. Divergent thinking
tests may provide only a small window into a more
complex creative process, but can also provide important
information about ideational fluency, functional
fixedness, and originality seeking, which all are importantat some level to creativity. Zeng et al. (2011) bring up
another key point concerning these divergent thinking
tests and the merits of tailoring them to a specificdomain, in their case a professional domain, but also inother educational areas like science or foreign language
leaning.

Divergent Thinking Tests
Guilford (1968) emphasized the importance of divergent
thinking where “the thinker must do much searchingaround, and often a number of answers will do or are
wanted” (p. 8). The divergent thinking tasks hedeveloped in his SOI (structure of intellect) Model(Guilford, 1967) looked to measure ideational fluency or
the ability to come up with many different ideas to solvea problem, which is an important part of the creative
process. Divergent thinking can be contrasted against themore standard IQ tests or convergent thinking tests,
which require the test taker to provide one right answer
to the question. Due to the pervasiveness of this latterstyle of test in the environmental setting, E. Paul
Torrance (1970, p. 86) stated, “Children are so
accustomed to the one correct or best answer that they
may be reluctant to think of other possibilities.” Torrance(1966) (2008) developed these divergent thinking tasks
into what he called The Torrance Test of Creative
Thinking (TTCT), which became one of the mostwidely used tests to measure creativity (Baer, 1993) (Kim,
2006). Though even Torrance himself was cautious toconflate creativity directly with divergent thinking(Torrance, 1988, p. 46), it became the psychometrictemplate for measuring creativity for many years and still
up to the present day seems to be frequently used as themeasurement of creativity. Recently, though Runco5

graduate students as judges, Kaufman, Lee, Baer, andLee (2007) found consistency among their scores. So
there seems to be a growing amount of data that supports
the use of quasi-experts, those who have certain
knowledge of the specific domain, but are not consideredso-called “experts.” Additionally, this will alleviate someof the burden on the researcher in recruiting a group of
judges for the study. The following section moves awayfrom a tangible product and looks more closely at theindividual or the creative personality and the importanceof the trait labeled “openness to experience.”

Another popular way to look at creativity, which seems
rather natural and directly addresses the criticism of thedivergent thinking tests and their lack of constructvalidity, is to focus more on an actual creative product.
The next section examines possible ways to get theparticipants to actually produce such a product and thensuggests ways to measure the creativity of the productwithin a social context.

Creative Products and Consensual
Assessment Technique
There are numerous tasks that one can use to measure acreative product such as writing a story about a picture(Wolfradt & Pretz, 2001), completing a photo essay(Dollinger & Clancy, 1993) (Dollinger, Urban, & James,
2004), designing an invention, making a collage (Baer,
1993), writing a scientific poem (SciFaiku) (Kaufman,
Baer, Cole, & Sexton, 2008), and so on. Thoughcreativity, as mentioned earlier, is the production of a“perceivable product” that is defined within some social
context as being “novel” and “appropriate” or “useful.”
The question one might further ask is who determines
this social context and decides the novelty andappropriateness of this product? While divergent
thinking tests attempt to be more objective in thescoring, the scoring of a creative product tends to be
more subjective. The Consensual Assessment Technique,first developed by Amabile (1983) (1996), systematicallyset forth a way to assess such a creative product by using
judges. These judges are to be people “who have at least
some formal training and expertise in the target domain”(Amabile, 1996, p. 73). They are not provided any kindof scoring rubrics, but rather are to rely on their own
subjective opinions of creativity to rate these products.
These judges are supposed to mirror, on a small scale, thegroup of experts in the real world world who act as
gatekeepers, deciding what is considered creative andwhat is not. Nonetheless, any researcher attempting tostudy creativity will naturally feel the constraint offinding this group of experts to act as judges for the
research.

The Creative Personality
A commonly used past measurement of the creative
personality is the creativity personality scale (Cps)(Gough, 1979), which is a 30-item adjective checklist of
personality traits. The respondent checks the items thathe/she feels answers the following question, “What kindof person are you?” Eighteen items positively correspondto a creative personality and 12 items negatively
correspond to it. Some of the positive items seem rather
obvious such as intelligent, wide interests, inventive,
original and unconventional while others seem rather
dubious such as; informal, sexy, and snobbish. Similarly,
a few of the negative traits are also a little puzzling suchas; sincere, honest, and suspicious. Many of these positive
creative traits, especially the less puzzling ones, arecomponents of one of the broad Big Five personality
traits identified as openness to experience (McCrae &Costa, 1985). Current research suggests five high-leveltraits: openness to experience (O), conscientiousness (C),extraversion (E), agreeableness (A) and neuroticism (N),(McCrae & Costa 1997) which have been found to beprevalent in over 50 different cultures (McCrae &Terracciano, 2005).
Costa and McCrae (1992) developed a 240-item NEO
Personality Inventory, Revised (NEO-PI-R) that looks
at each of the five personality traits and within each trait
further specifies six facets. The six facets for the openness
to experience trait are imagination, artistic interests,
emotionality, adventurousness, intellect, and liberalism.
Utilizing this Big 5 measurement (Costa & McCrae,
1992) to measure individual personality, the trait,
openness to experience, is highly related to various
measures of creativity such as divergent thinking tests(McCrae, 1987), a life course creativity study spanning
45 years (Soldz & Vaillant, 1999) a creative productbased on a photo essay (Dollinger et al., 1993), as well as,a creative product based on the ratings of written stories
and creative hobbies (Wolfradt et al., 2001). Morerecently a public-domain personality measure called theInternational Personality Item Pool (IPIP) (Goldberg,
1999) (Goldberg, et al., 2006) freely allows researchers toaccess a personality measure without the constraints ofbeing bound to copyrighted material.

One will begin to question this rather ambiguous word,“expert.” What exactly constitutes an expert? According
to Simonton (1997) this would involve over 10 years of
purposeful practice in a certain domain. Finding theseexperts can be a major challenge for the researcher, so
Dollinger and Shafran (2005) looked at the reliability ofusing novice judges and found that novices and experts
scored fairly similar to each other. One thing to note
about their study is that these novices received sometraining before they assessed the creative product, so
technically it is a little different than using theConsensual Assessment Technique, which rejects the useof such training. Kaufman and Baer (2012) mention thepossible use of quasi-experts, an individual that is neither
expert nor novice. In one study using psychology
6and dance, while the other dimension, “Science,” has thedomains of invention, science, and culinary. The domainof architecture does not fall under either of the twodimensions. In this questionnaire each domain has eightitems numbered from “0” to “7” and to score thisquestionnaire each item is weighed by the corresponding
number (the number “0” denotes not having any
recognizable talent in this domain). In the domain of“Music,” for example, number 1 is “I play one or moremusical instruments proficiently” while number 6 is
“Recordings of my composition have been sold publicly.”
From looking at the range of the eight items in eachdomain, one could naturally assume that this type ofmeasure is more designed for eminently creative people
and not very applicable to everyday creativity for use with
university students or more adolescent populations. In
another study, Kaufman, Cole, and Baer (2009)
developed the Creativity Domain Questionnaire (CDQ),
consisting of 56 items, which initially was found to haveseven factors. A shortened version of this questionnaire,
reduced to 21 items revealed four factors namely; 1)
Math/ Science (algebra, literature, computer science,
biology, logic, mathematical); 2) Drama (acting,
literature, blogging, singing, dancing, writing); 3)Interaction (leadership, money, playing with children,
selling, problem solving, teaching); and 4) Arts (Craft,decorating, painting) (Kaufman, Waterstreet, Ailabouni,
Whitcomb, Roe, & Riggs, 2009). The important pointin these questionnaires is to try to capture the broad
dimension of creativity in various possible domains rather
than restricting it to the typical arts. Batey (2007),
specifically investigating everyday creativity, developed
his own compact version called “The BiographicalInventory of Creative Behaviors,” made up of 34 items.
The participants are simply asked to put an “X” in thecorresponding box if they have been involved in such anactivity in the past 12 months. Some examples of these
activities are; “Drawn a cartoon,” “Made someone apresent,” and “Delivered a speech.” Most of theseinventories rely on the thinking of Hocevar (1981) who
stated “Past behavior is generally the best predictor of
future behavior” (p. 459).

Another possible way to look at the creative person is tostraightforwardly ask the participants to answer items
that correspond to certain creative behaviors and pastcreative achievements. This sort of self-reflective
questionnaire acts as a creative biography for theindividual and provides additional insight into one’s
overall creativity.

The Self-rated Creative Person
Creative behaviors span quite a wide range of varying
domains of experience and there has been much debate as
to whether creativity is more specific to these differing
domains or if creativity is a more general ability (Baer,
1998) (Plucker & Beghetto, 2004) like Spearman’s “g orthe measure of general intelligence developed in 1904 by
Spearman see (Spearman, 1904), which could then becalled “c” (Kaufman & Baer, 2004). So, for example, if
one person were creative in math, like Poincaré, would
he also be creative in a completely different discipline likecooking or painting or is his creativity in math specificonly to the domain of mathematics? Amabile (1996), in
her componential theory of creativity, views it as bothgeneral and domain specific, which work together with athird component, task motivation, and it is thisconvergence that affects the overall creative performanceon a specific task. Gardner (2003) divided up intelligence
into multiple intelligences that extend from spatialintelligence to interpersonal intelligence. Could creativity
likewise be divided up into multiple creativities? Similar
perhaps to Greek mythology, where there were ninemuses and each one represented a different form of
divine and creative inspiration from epic poetry(Calliope) and tragedy (Melpomene) to astronomy(Urania). Obviously these would not hold in the modern
context, but many researchers have attempted to put
together a classification of differing domains where one
can be creative, which I will go into more detail next,
reviewing the development of these self-reported creative
inventories.
Hocevar (1980) developed one of the earlier versions ofan inventory of creative behavior, which he called the“Creative Behavior Inventory.” This inventory is made upof 77 items of creative activities and accomplishments
such as “Received an award for acting,” “Gave a recital,”and “Made jewelry” in which participants respond byusing a 6 point scale from “never” to “more than 6 times.”
These activities and accomplishments range from acting,writing, fine arts, craftwork, science, math, cooking,dance, music, and humor. These differing creative
domains, though, are not clearly distinguished, while theCreativity Achievement Questionnaire (CAQ) (Carson,
Peterson, & Higgins, 2005), which is also a self-reported
measure of creative achievement, clearly distinguishes
between 10 differing domains of creativity. These
differing domains then are further subsumed into two
distinct dimensions. The first dimension, “Arts,” has thedomains of drama, writing, humor, music, visual arts,

Another approach to these self-report inventories is not
to reflect on past behavior and accomplishments, but tocompare oneself to others of the same age on a 5 point
scale from “1” “much less creative” to “5” “much morecreative” in various creative behaviors. Kaufman (2012)
recently designed the Kaufman Domains of Creativity
Scale (K-DOCS), which covers a wide range of activities
from interpersonal behavior such as , “Helping otherpeople cope with a difficult situation,” to computerscience, “Figuring out how to fix a frozen or buggy
computer,” to more traditional domains of creativity likethe arts, “Sketching a person or object.” (See Silva,
Wigert, Reiter-Palmon, & Kaufman, 2012 for a moredetailed review of the various self-report scales and theirreliability, validity, and structure). Deciding on what7

assessing creative thinking in order to incorporate a morecomprehensive picture of the overall creative process.
More research needs to look at ways to measure how
individuals are able to form associative elements into new
combinations, much like the early work of Mednick(1962) and his remote association tests (Mednick, 1968).
In these tests participants are given three words (sore,shoulder, sweat) with seemingly no relationship and areasked to find a fourth word that somehow links them all
together (answer: cold). These tests have gone out offashion in the field of creativity, mostly because they
constrain the respondent to come up with only one rightanswer, relying more on convergent thinking thanideational fluency. One area that could prove to bebeneficial is the incorporation of metaphorical thinking
and imagery activities into such an assessment, which has
begun to be used by some researchers (Silvia & Beaty,2012). Metaphor, like creativity, combines two seemingly
disparate and unrelated concepts in new and innovative
ways, providing insight and deeper understanding.
Metaphorical imagery is highly prevalent in the field of
advertising (Forceville, 2002) and creative marketing andcould possibly be incorporated into creative thinking
tasks. Such tasks could ask the respondents to provide
interpretations to metaphorical ads or to provide theirown metaphors for a product. Then, these metaphorscould be consensually assessed for both novelty andaptness. As Albert Einstein mentioned “combinatory
play seems to be the essential feature in productive
thought” (West, 1997, p. 26) and tapping into thiscombinatory play may provide greater insight for the
researcher into this complex and often thorny humanability called creativity.

measurement to use may be rather troubling to theresearcher, for each assessment tool is more specifictowards a certain creativity such as; everyday creativity(Batey, 2007) or eminent creativity (Carson et al., 2005),
while others expand the domains from the typical arts,
math, and sciences to more unconventional creative
domains like social relationships and interaction withothers (Kaufman et al., 2009). Another issue to consider
is the sociocultural environment where thesemeasurements were developed and administered, namely
the USA and the UK. Further research is needed to lookat their translatability into and applicability to otherdiverse cultural and linguistic settings.

Conclusion
Utilizing multiple approaches to assess creativity provides
the researcher a more holistic representation of what
creativity is and the possibility to analyze therelationships between the different components such asprocess, product, and person. Approaching creativity
with a broad array of assessment tools can provide a more
complete picture of how individuals differ in respect tocreativity, how this trait relates to other variables like
intelligence and school achievement, and possible ways toenhance creativity in the classroom or work environment.
Ways to more accurately measure the creative process isthe dimension that appears to need the most refinementand development. Divergent thinking tests may have thelongest history and perhaps are the most widely used
tests, though at the same time they are probably the mostmisunderstood, in terms of what they are actually
measuring (Runco, 2008). This makes it an opportune
time to restructure and expand the measurement for

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11

Meta-analysis of Intelligence Scores of'Street Children' in Developing Countries
Graham Pluck & Daniel Banda-Cruz
Chuo University, Japan & Universidad San Francisco de Quito, Ecuador
In addition to UNICEF, various other charities andNGOs worldwide exist to help the street children ofdeveloping countries. These frequently publish estimatesof the size of the problem, generally quoting figures of
100 million or 150 million children globally. However,
the true extent of children living in the urban centres ofdeveloping counties is largely unknown. No reliable
systematic surveys are available and the estimates of tens
or hundreds of millions are essentially guesses (Thomas
de Benitez 2011).

In many developing countries, unsupervised children
spend much of their time in the urban environment andin the context of extreme poverty. These 'street children'are generally not attending school, psychological traumas
are common and rates of substance abuse are high. The
multiple deprivations suffered and the exposure to factors
mitigating normal neurocognitive development would
suggest that attainment of optimal intellectual function
would be hindered. This would have implications forinterventions aimed at bringing these children back into
mainstream society, which generally favour reintegration
into educational programs. Despite this, there is scantpublished material on intelligence testing of samples ofstreet children. A systematic review and meta-analysis of
the existing academic literature was conducted in English
and Spanish. Only five studies of street children that
included data on intelligence tests or proxy measures ofintellectual functioning could be identified. These
reports, from Colombia, Bolivia, Indonesia, Ethiopia andSouth Africa, described 201 different children. Meanscores from the street children were compared with
control sample means or population norm estimates, inthe latter case adjustments were made for cross-culturalcomparisons and for the Flynn effect. The adjusted
means were used to calculate effect sizes (Cohen’s d). In
all five samples, performance was below that which
would be expected from the normal population, though
there was much variation. The sample from Indonesia
showed the smallest effect size (d=.25) and the sample
from Ethiopia showed the largest effect size (d=2.87).
The mean weighted effect size was 0.99. Although
limited by the dearth of research on the topic, the current
results suggest that the multiple deprivations suffered bystreet children in developing countries tend to impair
normal neurocognitive development, but that the extent
of this varies by culture.

The reasons that children are spending much of the timein the urban environment are complex. Some may behomeless, but others, perhaps the majority, will havefamilies to whom they return at night. Some will be
begging or engaged in criminal activity and many will bechild labourers, e.g. earning money by entertaining
motorists or selling small items in cafes and bars. Poverty
and an imperative to obtain money is a critical feature of
their presence in the cities of developing countries. Street
children are often demonised by the more privilegedclasses, by the media and security forces. In Brazil, street
children are commonplace in the large cities and receive
very little protection from the police. Furthermore, they
may be victim to violence or assassination from local
vigilante groups and even rouge police units (Inciardi &Surratt, 1998). Exposure to violence and trauma isthought to be a very common feature of the lives of street
children worldwide (Thomas de Benitez 2007).
There is further health related research with street
children that has often focused on substance abuse,particularly ‘glue sniffing’. Indeed this form of substanceabuse appears to be a common feature globally ofhomeless and street connected youths (e.g. Vega &Gutierrez 1998). Other research topics have been foodaccess and undernourishment (e.g. Patriasih et al. 2010)
and blood levels of lead and other toxins caused by urban
pollution (e.g. Samaniego & Benítez-Leite 2002).
Furthermore, there is a reasonable body of academic
studies of street children stemming from sociological andanthropological work (e.g. Aptekar 1991). Academics
working with and investigating the NGO sector havefocused on rehabilitation efforts to move children fromreliance on street living and to reengage them witheducational services (e.g. Lusk 1989). Despite all these
efforts, cognitive function and development of street

The concept of ‘street child’ refers to those young people
who spend much of their time unsupervised in the urban
environment in a context of extreme poverty. A formal
definition has been developed by UNICEF: “any girl or
boy who has not reached adulthood, for whom the street (inthe broadest sense of the word, including unoccupied
dwellings, wasteland, etc.) has become her or his habitualabode and/or sources of livelihood, and who is inadequately
protected, supervised or directed by responsible adults” (Black
1993).
12

El Alto, Bolivia (Dahlman et al. 2012). This includes
data on a measure of IQ and also includes data on acomparison group of poor but not homeless children. In
order to help interpret this new data, we have extracted
the important information so that it can be comparedwith the data reported in the previously describedsystematic review. In addition, it is possible to calculate
effect sizes for the five different studies, so that despite
the different data collection methods used in each, directcomparisons of the results can be made. Furthermore, thesubsequent effect sizes from the five different studies canbe used to produce a weighted average to describe theoverall estimated effect size. In essence, to provide asingle statistic that conveys the results from all theavailable data.

children has been a generally neglected topic. This issomething of an omission because many of the featuresdescribed above (e.g. trauma, substance abuse, pollution
or malnutrition) have the potential to impair cognitive
functionsandprevent
normalneurocognitive
development. In turn, this could hinder attempts atreintegrating children back into educational systems.
In contrast, there is considerably more known about theeffects of homelessness on cognitive function indeveloped industrialised countries. Reports from the
USA (e.g. Solliday-McRoy et al. 2004) and England(e.g. Pluck et al. 2012) have demonstrated that, based on
population norms, IQ scores are lower than would be
expected in samples of homeless adults. Indeed, suchhomeless samples appear to score about one standard
deviation below the population norms provided by thetest manufacturers. The evidence suggests that thisreduction in cognitive ability is acquired and is associatedwith many of those features known to be overrepresented
in homeless populations in developed countries. For
example, high rates of childhood traumatic experiences,
psychiatric illness and alcohol and drug abuse areassociated with cognitive impairment in homeless adults(Pluck et al. 2011).

However, to do this there are some methodological issues
that must be considered. It is known that globally there
has been a steady increase in IQ test performance. Indeed
the ‘Flynn effect’, as it is known, describes how IQ scores
have increased by about 3 points each decade (Neisser
1997). In effect, IQ tests will tend to overestimate as they
become older. Therefore, comparisons of effect sizes of
IQ scores, such as attempted in this meta-analysis, mustaccount for the Flynn effect.
In addition, there is also significant global variation in IQ
test score performance. Population means are different indifferent countries. However, as we wished to focus ondeveloping countries, this presents a problem. In manysuch countries standardised and normed IQ assessments
have not been available and researchers have frequently
resorted to using tests from the large developed countries(generally the USA). However, what is normal in the
USA is not necessarily normal in other countries.
Although controversial, estimations for average IQ scoresfor most countries have been published (Lynn &Vanhanen 2002). These can be used to correct for
geographical variation, when for example a USA normed
test has been used outside the USA. Although these IQ
estimates are controversial and imprecise, to correct withthem will probably increase the accuracy of estimates ofgaps between observed IQ score performance and what
would be expected in the normal (local) population.

Similarly, in developed countries, reductions in expected
IQ scores are observed in samples of homeless children
and children in homeless families. For example, a studyof black homeless families in the USA reported that as agroup, the children scored at the 34th percentile on an
IQ test (Masten et al. 1997), equating to an IQ of about
86. On the test used the population mean was set at 100
with a standard deviation of 15. So it can be seen that thechildren scored in the same pattern as homeless adults,
about one standard deviation below the population mean.
We have recently performed a systematic review ofcognitive functions of street children in developing
countries and reported that a wide range of cognitive andneuropsychological impairments have been described,
albeit from a small corpus of research involving only
seven studies reporting on 215 individuals (Pluck 2013).
Furthermore, the studies used a wide range of methods,
limiting cross-cultural comparisons. Nevertheless, there
was a pattern of cognitive developmental problems and insome samples neuropsychological impairments andevidence of acquired brain damage. Only four studies
included data on general intellectual function (e.g. IQ).
Comparison of these scores seemed to suggested
significant global variation. Nevertheless, the conclusion
was that there is a relatively consistent pattern of poor
performance on tests of intellectual function by samples
of street children.

To summarize, we report on a systematic review andmeta-analysis of scores of intellectual function of street
children in developing countries.

Methods
The systematic literature review that recovered thestudies from Colombia, South Africa, Ethiopia andIndonesia has been reported previously (Pluck 2013).
The search was performed in July 2012. The search was
performed in both English and Spanish using the large
global search engines for academic material (e.g. Web ofKnowledge, Google Scholar). The definition used forSince that systematic review was performed, a fifth
publication has become available. This describes a
neuropsychological study of street children in La Paz and13

1992), Ethiopia (Minaye 2003) and Colombia (Aptekar1988).

‘street children’ was: “Street children are recognised to be
young people who experience a combination of multiple
deprivations and ‘street-connectedness’” (Thomas de Benitez
2011 p viii). Studies were included if the children
fulfilled this definition and were aged between 5 and 16.
The search revealed 7 studies reporting on 215 individual
street children. However, data on intellectual function(e.g. IQ) was only reported in four different samples.
These were on samples of street children in Indonesia(Hartini et al. 2001), South Africa (Jansen et al. 1990,

In December 2012, the search was repeated and thislocated a fifth article that had recently been published. It
reported on a sample of 36 homeless street children (allboys) from Bolivia and provides comparison data on 31
domiciled but socioeconomically similar boys (Dahlman2012). A summary of all the available studies with dataamenable for meta-analysis is provided in Table 1.

Table 1: Studies included in the meta-analysis of intellectual function test scores of street children
City andSampleMean age Comparison group Test of intellectual
Reference
Countryfunction
Cali, Colombia
56 street children
11.6
Normative data
Kohs Block Design
Aptekar,(range =1988
7-16)
El Alto and La
36 boys with
14.1 (SD
31 domiciled boys
Leiter Performance
Dahlman etPaz, Bolivia
experience of living = 1.8)
of similar SES
Scale
al (2012)
in the street
Ngagel42 street children
11.5
Normative data
Cattell Culture Fair
Hartini et al,
and Banyu Urip,(range =Test-ii
2001
Indonesia
10-12)
Johannes-burg,
44 street children
14.1 (SD
22 domiciled
Category Test of theJansen et al,South Africa(half were glue
= 1.46)children
Halstead-Reitan
1990, 1992
sniffers)
Battery
Addis Ababa,
23 child beggars
5.6
30 children from a
Custom made tests
Minaye, 2003
Ethiopia
local kindergarten
1992). A summary of the study-by-study effect sizes areshown in Figure 1. Although such effect sizes are notusually represented with polarity, we have maintained theplus/minus information in order to represent thedirection of the difference between the street children
sample and the respective comparison data. A negativevalue indicates that the street children performed worse
than the comparison group. In addition we have used thequalitative categories also provided by Cohen (1992) to
describe effect sizes, these are ‘negligible’ from 0 to .2,‘small’ from .2 to .5, ‘medium’ from .5 to .8 and ‘large’ iflarger than .8.
In Figure 1 we can see that in all cases the effect sizes
were negative, indicating that the street children samples
achieved lower scores than their respective comparison
samples. However, there is considerable variation by
study location, the Indonesian report had only a small
effect size (d=-.25) while the Ethiopian report had a large
effect size (d=-2.87). When the data describing all 201
cases reported in the five studies is combined, theestimated weighted effect size is d=-.099.

The IQ and other measures of intellectual function werecorrected for the Flynn effect and for regional differencesin the use of norms as necessary. In effect this involved
adding 0.3 IQ points to the normative mean for eachyear that had passed between the publication of theresearch and the publication of the IQ test. Where
normative IQ scores had been used from the USA andformed comparisons of data from other countries, thepopulation norm for the local country was adjusted byreference to the expected difference in IQ scores between
that country and the USA based on the tables provided
by Lynn and Vanhanen (2002).

Results
For the data from Bolivia, South Africa and Ethiopia,
comparison data was provided on control groups.
Therefore the calculation of interest was the score
difference between the street children sample and thecontrol sample. For the other reports, control data was
not provided, and it its place normative population
estimates have been used, in each case adjusted for the
Flynn effect and geographical variation. In each case,effect sizes were calculated with Cohen’s d (Cohen

14

Figure 1: Effect sizes for tests of intellectual function scores by the street child samples from the fivecountries when compared with a control or normative sample
noted that as this is a meta-analysis, it is dependent on
the volume of previous reports. As described, only fivestudies were available, reporting on only 201 children.
Although we noted in the introduction that the extent of
the problem of children spending much of their time
unsupervised in urban environments is unknown, it isclear that 201 children studied is a tiny figure in relation
to magnitude of the issue globally.

Discussion
We have reported on a systematic review of cognitive
function of street children in developing countries andperformed a meta-analysis on all of the available data
relevant to general intellectual function. Only five studies
reported in six publications and involving only 201
individual children were identified. Poorer performanceby the street children samples compared to thecomparison data was observed in all five of these studies;
however, there was considerable variation. For example
the effect size reported in the Indonesian study was only
d=-.25, by convention this would be considered a small
effect size, as would the effect size in the South African
sample (d=-.48). The effect size in the Bolivian study
would be considered of medium size (d=-.053) and theothers, both the Colombian (d=-1.48) and Ethiopian(d=-2.87) would be considered large effect sizes.

In addition, this analysis is dependent on the quality ofthe existing reports. These were generally quite small
studies, and some used barely adequate methods tomeasure intellectual functioning. For example the study
in Ethiopia used custom made tests of knowledge andvocabulary (Minaye 2003). This is partly understandable,
as normed and validated tests are often not available indeveloping countries. Nevertheless, the use of nonstandard assessments or inappropriate assessments
weakens the interpretation of this meta-analysis.

When the data from all five studies was combined, theestimated average weighted effect size was d=-0.99. This
indicates that, on average, the street children performed
almost exactly one standard deviation below what might
be expected of children in their culture (in the analysis weused, the effect size is equivalent to the number ofstandard deviations of difference). However, it must be

Despite this, some conclusions can be reached. There
was an obvious pattern to the study-by-study effectresults. In each case the effect sizes indicated that thestreet children studied performed worse than theircomparison groups. There was significant geographical15

brain damage. Indeed, one of the studies included in thisanalysis, from South Africa, also reported that of thosestreet children who were glue sniffers, most had
neurological signs suggestive of brain damage (Jansen etal. 1990).

variation, this should perhaps not be surprising, as the
local contexts in which the children live in each culture
will vary tremendously. The average effect size was very
close to one.
A mean effect size that approximates one is of interest as
the same phenomenon has been observed in homelesspopulations in developed countries. For example Pluck etal. (2012) have shown that homeless adults in the UKscored below population means by effect sizes of 1.0 for
IQ and 0.99 for memory performance. Similar effects ofhomeless adults scoring one effect size below the
population mean have been demonstrated in the USA(e.g. Solliday-McRoy et al. 2004). Furthermore, thesame phenomenon has been observed in homelesschildren in the USA (Masten et al. 1997). It would
appear therefore, that there is a general phenomenon of
distributions of intellectual function test scores displaying
a pattern in which those of particularly low
socioeconomic status in a society score on average one
standard deviation below the estimated average for the
population as a whole.

Another cause of differences in cognitive function
between street children and more privileged children in
the general population is access to formal education. As
most street children and not attending school, it could beargued that this will delay their learning and general
cognitive development. Although in many developing
countries, school attendance is not necessarily the norm
for most children anyway. Furthermore, in many cultures
where there are street children, the children are in factchild labourers, working in the urban environment, forexample selling flowers or candies to motorists. It could
be argued that their real world experience compensates
for their lack of formal education in driving their
cognitive development. In fact, there is some evidence forthis. In Brazil, some of the street children who work as
venders have mathematical abilities comparable to thoseof regularly schooled children. Furthermore, for someforms of calculation, the street children are significantly
better than school attending children (Saxe 1988).

This analysis cannot directly inform on the reasons forthe one standard deviation effect. To some extent thismay reflect a natural tendency in capitalist andmeritocratic societies in which high IQ allows people toprotect themselves from poverty, leaving those less able
to occupy the lower socioeconomic strata. However,there are also other factors which can be identified which
likely drive poor cognitive development of street children.

In conclusion, the results of this meta-analysis suggestthat there is a large degree of cultural variation in the
cognitive development of street children in developing
countries. However overall, the results suggest that street
children tend to score about one standard deviation
below what would be expected of children in general intheir culture. It is unclear to what extent this reflects anatural phenomenon of capitalist societies, acquired
neurocognitive impairment or delayed cognitive
development. Regardless of this, the magnitude of theeffect on intellectual functioning suggests that it will
likely hinder attempts at bringing street children into
mainstream education.

Substance abuse is an important issue. It has beenreported to exist at very high levels among many groupsof street children. Glue sniffing in particular seems to belinked to the socioeconomic deprivation and urban livingof street children (e.g. Dominguez et al. 2000; Gutierrez& Vega 2003). This is perhaps due to its low cost andaccessibility. Unfortunately, glue sniffing is a particularly
toxic and harmful practice that can cause permanent

References
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Aptekar, L. (1991) Are Colombian street children neglected? The contributions of ethnographic and ethnohistoricalapproaches to the study of children. Anthropology and Education Quarterly, vol. 22, pp 326-349.
Black, M. (1993) Street and Working Children: Seminar Report. Florence: UNICEF.
Cohen, J. (1992) A power primer. Psychological Bulletin, vol. 112, pp. 155-159.
Dahlman S, Bäckström P, Bohlin G & Frans O. (2012) Cognitive abilities of street children: Low-SES Bolivian boys
with and without experience of living in the street. Child Neuropsychology, Advance Online Publication.
Dominguez, M., Romero, M. & Paul, G. (2000) Los “Niños Callejeros” una visión de sí mismos vinculada al uso delas droga, Salud Mental, vol. 23, pp. 20-28.
Gutierrez, R., & Vega, L. (2003) Las investigaciones psicosociales sobre la subsistencia infantil en las calles
desarrolladas en el INP durante los últimos 25 años, Salud Mental, vol. 25, pp. 27-34.
Hartini, N., Subekti, E. M. A., & Nur Ainy, F. (2001) The IQ and EQ profile of street children. Jurnal Penelitian
Dinamika Sosial, vol. 2, pp. 32-40.
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Inciardi, J.A. & Surratt, H.L. (1998) Children in the streets of Brazil: drug use, crime, violence, and HIV risks,
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Jansen, P., Richter, L.M. & Griesel, R.D. (1992) Glue sniffing: a comparison study of sniffers and non-sniffers,
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Jansen, P., Richter, L.M., Griesel, R.D. & Joubert, J. (1990) Glue sniffing: A description of social, psychological andneuropsychological factors in a group of South African 'street children', Suid-Afrikaanse Tydskrif vir Sielkunde, vol.
20, pp. 150-158.
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Lynn, R., & Vanhanen, T. (2002) IQ and the Wealth of Nations. London: Praeger.
Minaye, A. (2003) A special form of child abuse: using children for begging and its psychological effects on the
behavior of children. Unpublished M.A. thesis, Addis Ababa University, Addis Ababa, Ethiopia.
Masten, A.S., Sesma, A., Si-Asar, R., Lawrence, C., Miliotis, D. & Dionne, J.A. (1997). Educational risks forchildren experiencing homelessness, Journal of School Psychology, vol. 35, pp. 27-46.
Neisser, U. (1997) Rising scores on intelligence tests. American Scientist, vol 85, pp. 440-447.
Patriasih, R., Widiaty, I., Dewi, M. & Sukandar, D. (2010) Nutrient intake and nutritional status of street children in
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Pluck, G. (2013) Cognitive abilities of ‘street children’: a systematic review, Chuo Journal of Policy Sciences andCultural Studies, vol. 21, pp. 121-133
Pluck, G., Lee, K.H., David, R., Macleod, D.C., Spence, S.A. & Parks, R.W. (2011) Neurobehavioural and cognitive
function is linked to childhood trauma in homeless adults, British Journal of Clinical Psychology, vol. 50, pp. 33-45.
Pluck, G., Lee, K.H., David, R., Spence, S.A. & Parks, R.W. (2012) Neuropsychological and cognitive performanceof homeless adults, Canadian Journal of Behavioural Science, vol. 44, pp. 9-15.
Samaniego, E. & Benítez-Leite, S. (2002) Niveles de plomo en sangre en niños de áreas urbana y sub-urbana,Pediatría, vol. 29, pp. 10-16.
Saxe, G.B. (1988) The mathematics of street child vendors, Child Development, vol. 59, pp. 1415-1425.
Solliday-McRoy, C., Campbell, T.C., Melchert, T.P., Young, T.J. & Cisler, R.A. (2004) Neuropsychological
functioning of homeless men, Journal of Nervous and Mental Disease, vol. 192, pp. 471-478.
Thomas de Benitez, S. (2007) State of the World's Street Children: Violence. London, UK: Consortium for Street
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Thomas de Benitez, S (2011) State of the World's Street Children: Research. London, UK: Consortium for Street
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Vega, L., & Gutierrez, R. (1998) La inhalación deliberada de hidrocarburos aromáticos durante el embarazo deadolescentes consideradas como de la calle, Salud Mental, vol. 21, pp. 1-9.

17

Can Personality Type be predictedby Social Media Network Structures?
Matthew Escobido, Gillian Stevens
Asian Institute of Management, Philippines
such networking. This means that people now develop
relationships and connections with people for no reason,other than to widen their personal and business on-line
contacts. Cyber-networking has replaced the need forface-to-face networking when searching for a job; when
conducting research and appears to provide more
efficient ways to engage in debates that extend existingknowledge and discourse.

Abstract
Social media platforms have become an integral part of
how we live our lives, in particular for those generations
who have grown up in the digital world and use theseplatforms to connect and communicate with manydifferent groups. Personality profiling now underpins
many facets of our lives for example digital marketing
campaigns target specific audience groups using
information gleaned from how a person engages withsocial media (Seung, 2012).
Specific personal
information that could assist with precise targeting might
be helpful to those who want to interact with people via
digital media. Psychological Type suggests we are
predisposed to certain behaviors and preferences (Jung,
1921). Traditional methods of assessing personality
include observation or psychometric questionnaires.
Both methods have their benefits and drawbacks butwhat are the alternatives? Can the digital world and inparticular, social media platforms, provide an alternative
method? If a person’s digital personality footprint could
be assessed by the way they engage in social media
activity this information could be used to precisely target
informative communications as well as productmarketing campaigns (Maehle & Shneor, 2010).

Income generation from on-line advertising andsponsorship is now big business.
In fact, digitalmarketing has become a discipline in its own right.
Traditional marketing and advertising campaigns are
now being substituted by social media campaigns to
expand their reach towards targeted audiences (Seung,2012).
If marketers and those interested indisseminating information to specific groups of people
could tap into reliable information about a person they
could direct their campaigns more precisely (Maehle,
Shneor; 2010). Currently marketers rely on informationin the digital world that an individual makes known or iswilling to reveal in the public domain, for example what
products and services they use, like and share within andacross their personal social media networks.
If organizations could know more about the personal
characteristics of the people that they were aiming totarget, the more focused their campaigns could be.
However, such information is very personal to anindividual and is unlikely to appear openly in the publicdomain.
If information that characterizes personality
could be translated into a format that appeared in a desensitized and anonymous configuration, it might proveadvantageous to a range of end-users. The intention ofthis research is to find alternative ways of representing
suchpersonal
informationwhilstmaintaining
confidentiality and integrity.

This paper presents a summary of initial work
undertaken to explore the nature of structural patterns
represented by an individual’s Psychological Type, as
defined by their MBTI type and specific aspects of theirsocial network data, as defined within the context of their
Facebook connections and usage. Initial findings suggestthat the virtual world is able to reflect personality
differences that exist in the external world. Ongoing
research is being undertaken to build on these initial
findings.

Introduction
The world is shrinking. The concepts of Globalizationand ‘Six Degrees of Separation’ mean that relationships
between organizations and people are becoming moreinterconnected. It is now possible through the lens ofsocial media to search for and connect to a person
anywhere in the world without any prior physical orsocial contact.
The current, popular social media
platforms of Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter encourage

Understanding and Assessing Personality
There are different models that help to explain andunderstand the concept of personality. Two contrasting
approaches are the trait and preference approach. The
trait approach suggests that individuals possesscharacteristics which are inherent, immutable, ‘hardwired’ and stable over time, whereas the preference
	
  

	
  

18

which relate to how we make decisions, thinking andfeeling and our attitude to the outer world expressed
through the preference of extroversion or introversion.
Jung’s conceptual model suggests a person’s PsychologicalType is predisposed to different behaviors andpreferences according to the development of each mental
function and attitude.

approach suggests that people are predisposed to certain
behaviors and characteristics that have been developed
and are also consistent over time and usage. However, tosome extent a person can modify their behavior, if
motivated to do so, in certain situations and contexts.
The Big Five Personality Model is based on the trait
approach and is said to provide a framework of
personality that subsumes all personality behaviors.
Many psychometric questionnaires used to assess
personality are based on the Big Five Model. In
addition, there are questionnaires that are based on thepreference approach; the Myers Briggs Type Indicator(MBTI) developed by mother and daughter (Briggs
Myers et al, 1998) is one such measure that is widelyused in a variety of settings such as education, counseling,career development and conflict resolution. MBTI isbased on the work of Carl Jung (1921) whose seminal
work on Psychological Type has provided a legacy toresearchers interested in expanding the body ofknowledge on personality differences.
According to Jung, an individual’s personality or
Psychological Type is based upon the development anduse of four mental functions, two of which relate to how
we perceive information, sensing and intuition and two

Whilst the trait and preference approach differ
conceptually, a research study by McCrae and Costa(1989) shows a relationship between the Big Five Factor
model and the MBTI scales. The study showed that thefour MBTI scales measure aspects of four of the five
major dimensions of normal personality and that the
five-factor model provides an alternative basis forinterpreting MBTI findings within a broader, morecommonly shared conceptual framework.
The descriptions of the MBTI scales given below aretaken from the Introduction to Type handbook (Briggs
Myers, 1998). Interpretation of the Big Five personality
traits and correlations to MBTI preferences are shown
below:

Table 1. Correlations between Big Five personality traits and MBTI preferences
Big Five Trait
MBTI Dimension
MBTI scales
Openness to Experience
Preferred way of taking in
Sensing: Take information in that is real andinformation
tangible using the five senses. Trusts experience.
Intuition: Take information in by seeing the big(Positive correlation to
picture. Trusts inspiration.
Intuition)
AgreeablenessPreferred way of making decisions Thinking: Look for logical consequences in a
(Positive correlation tosituation.
Feeling)Feeling: Look to create harmony in a situation
Extroversion
Preferred focus of attention /Extroversion: focus on the outer world.
energyIntroversion: focus on the inner world.
(Inverse correlation to
Introversion)
Conscientiousness
Preferred way of dealing with the Judging: Methodical and ordered approach toexternal worldlife.
(Inverse correlation to
Perceiving: Spontaneity and casual approach toPerceiving)life.
The trait neuroticism which is referred to as emotional instability is not correlated with any of the MBTI scales.
methods could potentially cause the person being
observed or tested to consciously or unconsciously alter
their behavior to suit a given purpose or desired outcome.
However, when a person is engaging in normal social
media interactions, it is unlikely that they are consciously
trying to alter their personality and so their social media
interaction patterns may provide a reflection of their true
self. However, research indicates that for some people
they use the virtual world of on-line interaction as a way

Whichever approach to personality is considered, thenotion of assessing, discussing and identifying aspects ofan individual’s personality, with or without their consent,in the public domain could be considered to be intrusive
and unethical. If it were possible, therefore, to find analternative way of assessing personality in a less intrusive
way, it could open up an array of applications in many
aspects of life.
Personality is typically assessed by observation orcompletion of psychometric questionnaires. Both these

	
  
	
  

19

Kohli, Kosinkski & Stillwell; 2012).
This teamconducted a study that examined personality and patternsof Facebook usage. Their findings have been significant
in relation to assessing personality and correlations ofsocial network use. Their results show that there are
significant relationships between each of the Big Five
personality traits and usage of Facebook features. Theirmethodology was based on frequency measures, forexample, how many friends does a person have in their
network; how many times has a person been tagged inphotos; how many status updates has a person made andother similar measures? The study’s findings show a
prediction of personality traits given a user’s Facebook
profile and usage. These findings are summarized below:of hiding their true self (Amichai-Hamburger, Wainapel& Fox; 2002).

Technology and Personality
With the current technological revolution of social media
and its pervasiveness into daily life, an interestingquestion that is raised is whether social media could
provide a reflection of personality between that which
exists in the real world with that which exists in thevirtual world. Could social media activity output provide
an alternative way to assess personality?
Agroundbreaking research study into such a question has
been conducted by a collaboration between Cambridge
University and Microsoft Research (Bachrach, Graepel,

Prediction Accuracy
Best
Best
MiddleMiddleLowestTable 2. Prediction accuracy on personality traits and Facebook usage
Big Five Factor
MBTI Scale
Correlation
Extroversion
Introversion
Inverse relationship
Neuroticism
NA
NA
Openness
Intuition
Positive relationship
Conscientiousness
Perceiving
Inverse relationship
AgreeablenessFeeling
Positive relationshipResearch Question

Our study intends to build on the work of Bachrach et al
but with two specific differences.
The first difference is that this current study will examine
the structure of an individual’s social media network inorder to identify specific network patterns that might beassociated with different personality preferences.

According to Jung (1921) Introverts are private andcontained individuals, whereas extroverts are social andexpressive. Introverts like to focus on depth whereas
extroverts tend to focus on breadth. In the actual world,
extroverts and introverts behave in different ways. We
wondered how these behavioral differences would be
manifested in the digital world and what would thesedifferences look like structurally? According to Bachrach
et al, extroverts can be identified from their Facebook
social media activity. Our area of interest focuses onwhat the network structure for an extrovert andconversely an introvert would look like? Using network
theory and analysis, we speculate what the type of
connections within and between introverts’ andextroverts’ network groups would look like structurally.
More specifically we wondered whether a person’s
personality footprint is the same in the actual world as it
is in the digital world; and how those differences might
be represented? Could these digital structural patterns
provide an alternative way of identifying different
personality types?

The second difference is that the researchers have chosen
to use the MBTI (Myers-Briggs Type Indicator)
instrument as the tool for identifying the specificpersonality preferences. This is because existing MBTI
data is available for the targeted sample population and it
might allow for a greater differentiation in personality inthat the combination of preferences result in 16 different
Types. It is not the authors’ intention to argue for oragainst the applicability of the instrument, as evidence
and studies exist to support its strength. The body ofliterature on the validity and reliability of the MBTI
contains many studies that have been carried out using
the MBTI to predict or determine success in specificsettings such as educative courses (Bispong, Patron;2008) or as a way of helping to identify specificcompetencies for particular jobs, such as R & DManagers (Dreyfus, 2007).

Our thinking and speculation about these factors led theresearch team to propose and test the following
hypotheses.

The focus of this research project will examine the best
prediction findings from the Bachrach et al’s study andtherefore concentrate on the MBTI Introversion /Extroversion scale. The research proposition of thisstudy is predicated on the Cambridge Team’s findingsthat an extroverted type’s personality can be predicted

Hypotheses
1. Extroverts will have more connections within theirsocial media network than introverts.
2. The density of an extrovert’s network will be more
intense than that of an introvert’s

	
  
	
  

20

from their social media usage. This current study islooking to establish what specific structural patterns exist
within an extroverted type’s social media network and bydefinition for an introverted type too.

Sample Population
Our sample population was drawn from the current
MBA student community within our teaching institution(AIM) for the following reasons. First, on entry to theMBA program each student completes the MBTI for
learning and development purposes and so an MBTI
database already exists. Second, with average age of 26,
the age range of these MBA students suggests that they
are more likely to be social media savvy and to have adeveloped and active Facebook account.

Methodology
This study takes a quantitative approach to data
gathering and data analysis. We asked for volunteers
from the current cohort of MBA students who are
studying at the Asian Institute of Management toparticipate in this study as they had already undertaken
the MBTI and would, therefore, know their MBTI
Type. We used the participants’ MBTI data as well as
data that were extracted from their personal Facebook
social media networks. Mathematica 9 software was used
to analyze the Facebook data files.

Sample Size
Total n = 49
Sample n = 44

The total number of students who participated was 49.
As we were only interested in the Introversion /Extroversion scales, we show below the division in
numbers between these two scales:

Table 3. Sample Data
Introverts
Extroverts
Total number
Total number
23

21
anonymity they were advised to set up and use an
anonymous email account to send the dataset which
would mean that there would be no traceable connection
between a particular dataset and an individual.
Participants were assured that participation or nonparticipation in this project would in no way affect any of
their grades or student assessments. Participation in the
study was purely voluntary. The researchers also soughtparticipants’ permission to gain access to their MBTI
data and only to use it in the context of the study.
Participants were advised that they would be sent a copyof the journal article resulting from the study if they wereinterested in the final results.

The reason for the discrepancy between the total numberof participants and actual sample size used in the study
was due to a few participants that were undecided about
their best fit type in respect of the extroversion /introversion scales or that their network data wereincomplete so we therefore had to eliminate them fromthe study.

Ethical Considerations
The researchers were sensitive to the issues ofconfidentiality and anonymity. They approached the taskof gathering data from the students’ Facebook accounts
in a way that would minimize concerns about how these
personal datasets would be used and help to avoid
situations where students felt they were not in control ofproducing and sending the requested data to theresearchers. This was accomplished by setting asidesome time at the start of one of the students’ classes andwalking them through the process step-by-step so thatthey could sign up to participate and produce therequired data all at the same time. This meant that allquestions, concerns and issues could be dealt with at asingle point in time and everyone would receive the same
instructions thus avoiding misinterpretation andmisunderstandings.

Data Analysis
Each of the 49 AIM MBA students who volunteered toparticipate in the research was asked to follow a
procedure so that their Facebook friends network could
be extracted using an app called Netvizz (Reider, 2010).
They then sent the output file containing their network
to the research team for processing along with their
MBTI personality type indicator. However, only 44 wereselected as their MBTI type was either indeterminate or
their network data were incomplete.
Their friends’ network data were processed using
Mathematica 9 (Wolfram, 2013) software. A
visualization of a Facebook friends network is shown in
Figure 2.

The researchers assured the participants of confidentiality
and that their data would be only used for research
purposes. If participants wanted to maintain complete

	
  
	
  

21

(b) Introvert(a)Extrovert

Figure 1. Sample friends network of an extrovert and introvert
connections (edges) compared to the total number offriends (nodes).

The dots shown in the figure are the nodes of the
network. The lines connecting the nodes are the edges.
The node at the center is the person whose personality
type we want to infer given the network structure.

We also computed the graph density (Jackson, 2008) to
describe how the structure departs from a completegraph. A complete graph has a graph density of 1 whichmeans all the nodes are connected to all the other nodes
as depicted in Figure 3:

Metrics to describe the structure of their network werecomputed. These metrics included number of friends(nodes) one is connected to and the number ofconnections the friends would have to each other (edges).
We also measured the average degree (Jackson, 2008)
which is the ratio between the total number of

Friends are not connected to eachother (Graph density = 2/nodes)

Some of the friends are connected toeach other (Graph density = 2 edges/
nodes*(nodes-1))

All the friends are connected to eachother (Graph density =1)

Figure 2. Graph density of the friends network
have high modularity and less if from different
communities. Lastly, we also count the number ofconnected components to check the largest network anode is connected to (Freeman, 2004).

After looking at the individual connections, weconsidered how the nodes in the network are grouped.
Instead of relying on Facebook’s Groups (Facebook
Groups, 2013) facility which depends on formal
membership even though they are already connected, welook only at how dense the connections are among thenodes. We then use modularity (Newman, 2006) toalgorithmically identify the communities formed by thenodes. By communities we mean grouping of nodes
where the connections are more dense internally but
sparser between nodes from a different community. For
instance those, belonging to the same community would	
  Findings
First, we acknowledge that the sample population issmall and not representative of the general population
but we wanted to run the project as a pilot study and a
precursor to a follow-up study. Since beginning thisproject, we have been given access to the data that the
Cambridge study has generated and thanks to their	  22

have on average 660 friends while the introverts have
585 friends. Superimposed on the graph is the standard
error to give us an idea of the precision of the data.

generosity we now have additional data resources tohand. We acknowledge that our findings are neither
representative nor statistically significant, but thefindings alert us to potential points of interest for ourfollow-up study. We, therefore, present out findings fordiscussion purposes.

2. The number of edges for extroverts is slightly bigger
compared to introverts. The personal network of an
extrovert has about a thousand more connections than an
introvert (17457 vs. 16680).

We first considered the Extroverted and Introverted
groups. From the different analyses mentioned above,
we focused on 3 measures for these groups.

3. The value of the graph density for the extroverted
group is slightly lower than the introverted group.

1. The number of nodes for extroverts is slightly bigger
compared to introverts. The extroverts in our sample

Figure 3. Graph density of extroverted and introverted types
	
  
	
  

23

will only let people into their network after carefulconsideration and selection. Following the notionthat extroverts go for breadth and introverts like
depth, it could be that each group applies thisconcept to their virtual relationships as well.

Discussion
We first look at the comparisons between the introvertsand extroverts groupings.
1. The comparison of nodes which represents thenumber of friends a person has, in our study,
suggests that extroverts have more friends thanintroverts or put another way, introverts have lessfriends than extroverts. The explanation for this
could be as extroverts need to have social interaction
with people and events in the external world they
may find it easier to connect to people on Facebook
than introverts. They may be replacing the external
world with the cyberworld and may be substituting
cyber connections for real connections. This finding
is in line with that of the Cambridge study(Bachrach, et al; 2012) that found people who have ahigh degree of extroversion had more friends thanthose who had a lower degree of extroversion.

After further analyses, we noticed something interesting,although the numbers are very small, we felt it was worthhighlighting and adding into the discussion. We added
the additional scale of Perceiving to the Extrovert andIntrovert groups and produced two new groups;
Extroverted Perceiving types, EPs and Introverted
Perceiving types, IPs. The comparison of nodes andedges between EPs and IPs produced the same trend as
the pure extrovert and introvert groups but thesedifferences were magnified. In addition, we foundsomething interesting when analyzing the number ofcommunities and connected components.

2. When comparing the number of edges, which
represents the number of connections between
friends, for the extroverts groups to the introverts
group, the number was slightly bigger for extroverts.
This could be explained by the fact that extroverts
have more friends to begin with.

When we looked at the number of communities for theExtroverts and Introverts we expected the trend ofExtroverts having more than Introverts to continue and it
did, even though the difference was small. Similarly, we
saw the same trend for extroverts to have more thanintroverts when we compared the number of connectedcomponents, (Figure 7, below)

3. But even though extroverts have more friends tobegin with, when comparing the graph density,
introverts have more concentrated connections
between friends than extroverts suggesting a tighterknit grouping of people. A speculative explanation
for this might be that extroverts might act like‘Social Butterflies’, they are happy to have ‘openended’ connections and lots of them whereas
introverts are selective about their connections andHowever, when comparing the number of communities
and the number of connected components for EPs andIPs (See Figure 7, below) we found this trend wasreversed in that IPs had a bigger number of communities
than EPs and IPs had a bigger number of connectedcomponents than EPs. It seems that this ‘introverted’
group (IP) is exhibiting more extroverted type behavior.
The limited sample size and high standard deviation
among IPs show a higher standard error.

Figure 4. Comparison for E/I and E/IxxP
In MBTI terms, EPs are known as ‘Adaptable
Extroverts’ and IPs are known as ‘Adaptable Introverts’.

A possible explanation for this unusual anomaly might bethat by adding the additional dimension of Perceiving to
	
  

	
  

24

demonstrated by the additional Perceiving dimension to
extroverts and introverts.
If each of the MBTI
personality types can be found to have typical,
individualized network structures, it would suggest thateach MBTI type could be identified through their own
typical network structure. These datasets could offer analternative way of assessing personality in line with thedigital age in which we live.
In addition, thisinformation would allow further segmentation ofgroupings by personality type and could open up a range
of applications that would enable each type to be
specifically targeted for marketing and communication
purposes.

both extroversion and introversion adds thecharacteristics of spontaneity; flexibility and openendedness. To some extent, these characteristics are
already present in an extrovert and so could be either
cancelled or leveled-out in the EP group, therefore,
having no additional effect; whereas for introverts thesecharacteristics are absorbed and treated as an additional
component of their type.
This combination of
introversion and perceiving may cause introverted types
to express more extroverted behavior. It is as though the
IP group is emulating the extroverted ‘Social Butterfly’
effect.

Hypotheses

Limitations

At the start, the project set out to test two hypotheses:

We acknowledge the limited sample size used in thisstudy. This was in part due to the voluntary nature andresponse rate of participation. Whilst the researchers
used an efficient way to gather the data, the drawback
was that once participants left the classroom environment
it proved difficult for the researchers to maintain thelevels of enthusiasm and motivation to participate thatwas initially evident. We also accept that the sample
population was drawn from our institution’s student
community which is not representative of the general
population. It would be our intention when conducting
further research to expand the size and diversity of thesample population.

1. Extroverts will have more connections within theirsocial media network than introverts.
2. The density of an extrovert’s network will be more
intense than that of an introvert’s
Our initial findings suggest that the first hypothesis is
supported although we cannot claim any statisticalsignificance due to the small sample size. Our datatentatively shows that the second hypothesis is in fact
reversed; the density of an introvert’s network seems to
be more intense than that of an extrovert’s. It is ourintention to follow up and further examine thesetentative findings by increasing our existing sample
population so that all MBTI types are represented. We
will also consider how the Cambridge Team’s database
could provide an additional resource that may help tofurther investigate these initial findings.

Another limitation to the study is the MBTI
questionnaire itself and the opportunity to findparticipants who have both completed the questionnaireand have an active Facebook account. There are also
resource limitations for completing the MBTI, both interms of cost and time.

Conclusions
This pilot study has helped to set the direction for further
research. It appears that extroverts are more likely toengage differently than introverts with social media
platforms, such as Facebook and therefore, each group
appears to produce a different network structure. What
has also been interesting and is worthy of further
investigation is that when adding another dimension to
the extrovert / introvert dimension, a different network
structure is produced yet again. This adds credibility to
the idea that it could be possible that each of the 16
MBTI types could produce different and possibly
discrete network structures. So instead of treating
personality groups as single entities, such as, extroverts or
introverts, the MBTI already allows the categorization of
personality into 16 different types. As we have seen byadding in another dimension to a single entity, a richer
picture of a network structure is produced, as

Further Research
At the start of this project, it was intended to run thisproject as a pilot study to see whether our methodology
was able to replicate some of the results of theCambridge Team’s study but using the MBTI
framework instead of the five-factor model andparticularly to examine what differences might exist
between extroverts and introverts in terms of their
network structures. Whilst our tentative findings doshow that differences in network structures exist for theseone-dimensional groupings, our findings and thinking
have been further stimulated by the idea that adding in
additional dimensions to personality, which the MBTI
allows, more marked differences might be found. Thisline of investigation will be the subject of a follow-up
study.

	
  
	
  

25

References
Amichai-Hamburger, Y., Wainapel, G., & Fox, S (2002) On the Internet no one knows I’m an introvert:
Extroversion, neuroticism and Internet interaction. Cyber Psychology and Behavior, 5, 125-128
Bachrach, Y., Kosinski, M., Grapel, T., Kohli, P., Stillwell, D., (2012) Personality and Patterns of Facebok Usage.
Web Science 12, June 22-24, 2012, Evanston, IL. USA
Bispong, T.O & Patron, H. (2008) Personality Type as a determinant of Student Success in Introductory General
Business Courses. Academy of Educational Leadership Journal. 12.1 30-50
Briggs Myers, I., (1998) Introduction to Type. Consulting Psychologists Press Inc: Palo Alto, CA
Burt, R.S. (1998). “Personality correlates of structural holes” in R.M. Kramer and M.A. Neale (eds.), Power andInfluence in Organizations. Thousand Oaks; London; and New Delhi; Sage Publications
Dreyfus, C.R (2007) Identifying Competencies that predict the effectiveness of R&D Managers. Journal ofManagement Development. Vol 27. No 1: pp76-91
Facebook Groups. http://www.facebook.com/about/groups. Accessed 21/03/2013.
Freeman, L.C. (2004). The Development of Social Network Analysis: A Study in the Sociology of Science. Empirical
Press.
Jackson, M.O. (2008). Social and Economic Networks. Princeton University Press, Princeton.
Jung, C. G. (1921) Psychological Types. English Edition. Collected Works, Volume 6, Princeton, N.J.: Princeton
University Press
Maehle, N. & Shneor, R. (2010) On Congruence between brand and human personalities. Journal of Product &Brand Management. Vol. 19, No. 1 44-53
McCrae, R. R., & Costa, P.T. (1989) Reinterpreting the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator From the Perspective of theFive-Factor Model of Personality. Journal of Personality. Vol. 57 Issue 1 pp17-40
Myers, Isabel Briggs, Mary H. McCaulley, Naomi Quenk, and Allan Hammer. (1998) MBTI Handbook: A Guide to
the development and use of the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator Consulting Psychologists Press: Palo Alto, 3rd edition
Newman, M. E. J. (2006). "Modularity and community structure in networks". Proceedings of the National Academyof Sciences USA 103 (23): 8577–8696.
Reider, B. (2010) Netvizz. http://apps.facebook.com/netvizz/. Accessed 21/03/2013.
Seung-A, A.J. (2012) The potential for social media for luxury brand management. Marketing Intelligence &Planning. 30.7 687-699
Wolfram Research (2013) Mathematica 9. http://www.wolfram.com/mathematica

	
  
	
  

26

Applying Culture Bound Theory to AcuteSocial Withdrawal (Hikikomori)
Maree Sugai, Tohoku University of Community Service and Science, Japan
Secher in Watts (2002) explains “When you get large
numbers of individuals behaving in similar ways, it isgenerally a cultural expression of some kind”.

Abstract
This paper seeks to identify factors that implicate culturebound theory both in the socio demographic orientationof hikikomori and in the physical manifestation of `optingout` by `shutting in` and includes a brief comparison of
those factors from a control culture with the related social
expectation withdrawal of runaway. It uses as a baseline
for analysis, Japan`s position in 3 of the culture value
indices defined by Hofstede, (G.Hofstede: 1980) namely
the dimensions of:•••

Hikikomori is now a well known term. The translation
alternatives (apathy syndrome, shut-ins, voluntaryseclusion or acute social withdrawal) never caught on fora reason; the Japanese word hikikomori is the term that
settled and is most widely used around the world for thephenomenon and this indicates implicitly that it isconsidered to be either Japanese specific or at least foundmainly in Japan.

individualism; IDV,
power distance; PDI,
uncertainty avoidance; UAI,

It is interesting to note the leading specialist on
hikikomori psychologist Dr.Tamaki Saito coined the
buzzword originally as shakaiteki hikikomori in 1998
(Saito:1998) acknowledging the intrinsic social (社会) or
cultural roots.

and seeks to analyse how, in conjunction witheducational norms, peer behavioural patterns andemployment expectations within a society, cultural values
can determine how social withdrawal and `opting out`
will present. Hikikomori is not a social situation that is
disappearing in Japan, even though it is no longer the hot
topic of the previous decade. As interest wanes andmedia inevitably moves its attention on to the next cultlike phenomenon among young people who behave
differently, the growing hikikomori population of overone million ( ) should not be forgotten. Educators are ina prime position to facilitate change and question
teaching styles that may play a critical role inresponsibility for such a huge, national, cultural specific,
social epidemic that is not vanishing like its members,
but is instead rampant and growing.

Originally considered an extension of truancy (不燈侯) it
was first treated as a medical ailment with copious
quantities of drugs (Zielenziger:2006) but is now widely
accepted as a pattern of behaviour of young people whohave jumped off the train of expected educational andsocial norms, as happens in many countries but haveconfined themselves inside their rooms as an escape fromthat pressure.

The IDV component
Individualism
To isolate oneself is a natural escape strategy reaction fora collectivist low IDV society member. In highcollectivist cultures like Japan, context =identity. A
person will feel safe and comfortable belonging to agroup. Indeed, without answers from a stranger toestablish context with questions like; `What is yourname? ` `How old are you? ` and `Where are you from?`
it is difficult to establish a baseline connection withanother person. Even on television interviewing random
strangers in the street, Japanese television will give a
person`s age and job details, where in an individualistic
culture this would be considered rude, an invasion ofprivacy or in some cases a human rights issue.

Introduction
Culture-bound is a term that indicates the native
countries culture is trigger for a certain social behaviour
or trend. By naming a trend culture-bound, it is easier totrace cause and therefore perhaps to find solutions orappropriate ways to respond or not. However, this paper
does not seek to offer solutions to the issue of hikikomorior to propose counsel although it does contain opinion. It
looks at possible contributing background societal factors
and at a juztapositional social withdrawal phenomenonclassified often as `runaway` in an attempt to identify
specific enantiomers that lay claim to the theory hereinthat hikikomori is both Japanese specific and culturebound.

This can be seen in statistics of how trusting people inboth culture types are of complete strangers. In a27and differs from the more violent and verbally abusive
style bullying in self-oriented cultures.

collectivist culture a stranger is not part of a group and so
difficult to place or identify. They are met with uneasebecause there is no context. This unease is incidentallyoften misinterpreted as shyness by those from collectivist
cultures who interpret how this unease would be
identified in their own self oriented culture. Ignoringoutsiders or non-members is acceptable because thegroup must maintain its loyalty above all else andstrangers will be met with unease.

A glimpse at historically rooted traditional
collectivist culture
In traditional village society in the Tokugawa period, thegovernment divided each village into 5 units of mutual
surveillance to create smaller groups within the village inorder to promote mutual dependency and loyalty (⑤人国). The community was divided into these groups and if
one person within the group disobeyed rules or rebelled
the whole group would be punished or chastised. In thisway, it was taught through the generations that
responsibility was for one`s own group (only), and thatthe individual has little power but as a group things canbe achieved well.

In an individualist society, a person relates to a stranger
as a `self`, valuing their individual and independent
status. A whole group however may conversely be met
with distrust.
In an individualist culture like America, Australia andthe UK, a person feels most comfortable when they areable to make an individual expression of self because self=
identity. There will be hints and comments pertaining to
the self which may appear self centered but are culturally
ingrained communicative habits in individualistic
societies where people choose what to share and aretaught that to be assertive with self-needs and opinions isa highly desirable quality.

By relying on this style of group dependency anindividual`s ability to think critically without consulting
others, and the opportunities and incentive to createchange (which happens when one person thinks or does
differently; others see, discuss, adopt and accommodate)
and the practice of doing so have diminished.

Zielenziger (ibid) reports on an experiment withphotography where a group of Japanese students (lowIDV culture) and a group of American students (highIDV culture) were told to photograph a friend. The
Japanese students all photographed their friend in anenvironment of some kind with the background taking
more than 60% of the photograph frame. The American
students all took closer up shots of their friend, theperson took up most of the `canvas` and the background
was blurred or inconsequential. This could denote theimportance of people in context (typical in Japaneseculture) contrasting the importance of people as self
(typical in American culture).

Closed networks known as shigarami within society bindthe groups strongly together so that those at the top,
treated with utmost respect born from recognition of thehuge responsibility they have over the group`s well being,must forfeit as much as their lives if one member of theirgroup steps out of line and shames the network. This
close knit structure can be compared with Amishsocieties `Ordnung` where rules down to exactly whatmembers can wear, and other some religious cult groups
in other countries too, but in Japan (and other highlycollectivist group cultures too) this sense of responsibility
to the group is so intense that any party not within the
network or connected to a group cannot possibly getanywhere in life; where in contrast the option to leave thecult or group is a viable one and often first choice escaperoute in more individual-oriented countries with higher
IDV scores.

Ignoring outsiders or non-members is acceptable in acollectivist culture because the group must maintain its
loyalty to each other first and foremost like a mother cat
guards her kittens. A complete stranger represents a
person that cannot immediately be placed in context orgroup. The Daily Yomiuri (June 13th: 2004) conducted asurvey on trust in strangers and 47% of Americans
responded saying other people can be trusted despite thefar higher crime rate, where only 26% of Japanese
responded that they would trust a complete stranger. The
implication for hikikomori here is that once the person
removes themselves from the group for an extended
period they will be shut out and ignored because they nolonger belong. Likewise, if an individual within thegroup behaves in a way contrary to group unwritten rules
but accepted behavioural patterns for that group, they
will be ignored and shut out to the point where they may
voluntarily leave the group. This passive aggressive styleof bullying is more common in group-oriented cultures

While there is nothing new in this theory, the role that
this imbedded cultural way is intrinsically implicated in
the main isolation feature of social withdrawal/hikikomori
is clear. Only by completely withdrawing from all groups
can the individual salvage their desire to be different or to
behave differently from any group.
By withdrawing from the group they are in turn ignored
and outcast and can never again enter a new group in fearof the social stigma trailing and attached to having left
one. The final irony however, is that the world itself thenclumps these individuals into a group and gives them thename `hikikomori`.
28

As James Lehman, a Canadian behavioural therapist for
teens and young adults writes; “kids run away fromproblems they cannot handle. It`s in our culture. Adolescents
often see running away as a way to achieve a sense of power
and independence.” (Lehman: 2009).

PDI component (Power Distance Indice)
Dependence versus Independence
The fact that hikikomori choose to retreat to their own
rooms is a curious one from a Western high power
distance country perspective. A young person`s room iswhere we are punished and forced to remain when we
have done wrong. It is a punishment `to be grounded`.
Yet, if we look at this choice with Hofstede`s culturaldimension of power indice in mind regarding a high PD
culture with no similar traditional confining punishment
in childhood, it is easily comprehensible.

While both social phenomena are rooted in rebellion orreaction against authority, hikikomori is unique because itchooses to place the family as a safer haven than the peergroup. This in turn, suggests that bullying and schoolpressure play a larger part in retreat than in the
counterpart phenomena of runaway, where perhaps
young people are fleeing the pressure from familypressure.

PDI rating is a country`s score for how it values
dependency. This is connected closely to the other two
components of collectivist and uncertainty avoidance but
the focus is on hierarchy of a society and how extensive
equality is in terms of power. In a low power distancecountry people will respect independence and demand it.
In a high power distance culture (like Japan) people atthe top will have great power and positions and rank will
be controlled carefully with leaders consistently treatedwith great respect and obedience. In low power distancecultures there will be more rebellion for equality andchange from those who feel powerless and less resistanceto that rebellion from those who have the power.

Finally, let us take a look at the uncertainty avoidanceindice and how it relates to hikikomori.

UAI component
Rituals of performance
Japan`s high value of employment stability and lifetime
employment is a mental programming statistic, notnecessarily found within individuals but a composite
factor within the construct described and researched by
Hofstede (Hofstede, 1983: 118-119) under the name of`Uncertainty Avoidance`.

In both cultures, parents teach differing values to theirchildren. In Japan, traditionally although times arechanging, parents have taught children to obey theteacher and all rules. An important mantra is not to cause
problems for other people and to fall in line to save face
for the family. In America and lower PD cultures,children are taught to question the teacher, to question
everything and to answer back with an opinion when
they disagree, to be a `hero` by protecting a stranger andto `think outside the box`. These are basic differences in
the way parents bring up their children and as such,
reflect how a society shapes its power distance.

The longitudinal (25 years) research that supports culturebound hypothesis in connection with employment
avoidance and social withdrawal is documented inapprox. 118 articles published in the `Journal ofInternational Business Studies,` between 1983 to 2008
(Au, K.Y, 1999; 799-812).
UAI is a cultural dimension of toleration concerning
uncertainty about the future. At the high end of the scale
are cultures in which people feel comfortable with rituals
and routines that reduce uncertainty in daily life and in
the workplace. Low-end UAI cultures are those in whichpeople are happier with fewer routines and rituals and areopen to much wider individual variation. In countries
where UAI is high, and Japan ranks 92nd out of 100
countries surveyed (Hofstede, 1980) people will
demonstrate extreme loyalty to the company or theiremployer and feel extreme social obligation to participate
in group activity.

So, it is not surprising that opting out for Japanese young
people should be to stay at home. Here, their own room
is a private sanctuary away from the peer group andworld outside that imposes restrictions on them. Here,they can be semi safe from criticism from superiors` orsociety`s judgement, in a womb like existence with
Mother nearby. The core value of power distance isrejected but the symbiotic relationship with Mother isvery strong and offers a tiny thread of that instinctive
culture born expectancy that is hard to shake- that ofdependency.

A high UAI score relates to hikikomori because 100% of
hikikomori young adults have opted out of both work andgroup social activity. They are therefore reacting in a
culturally adverse mode, mitigating the relevance of theclaim `culture bound`.

In low power distant countries, we have the opposite
culture reactive phenomenon in young people; that of`runaway`. It is directly related to power distance because
it is chooses to run from all dependents and strives forcomplete independence even if that means homelessness.

The pressure on young people within the typicalhikikomori age range of 14 to 30 -to find work and to stayin that work - or to find a club activity and stay in that29

activity and to co-operate correctly within a rigid peergroup hierarchical system (侯輩・先輩) within Japanesesociety are factors that go towards creating pressure toisolate. As unemployment rates rise and the social stigma
attached to any kind of so named drop out continues toprevail, this has created in natural turn a world of internet
cafe hermits, parasites, neats and hikikomori.

Summary
In the diagrams 1 and 2 below, we can see how the 3paradigms discussed in this paper centralize themselvesin real terms. The polar cultural diversions expressed in
the manifestation of opting out in the central circle.

While both social phenomena are rooted in rebellion orreaction against authority, hikikomori is unique because itchooses to place the family as a safer haven than the peergroup. This in turn, suggests that bullying and school orwork pressure play a larger part in retreat than in the
counterpart phenomena of runaway, where perhaps
young people are fleeing the pressure from familypressure. Parents in Western cultures usually encourage
their children to leave home by 18 where in Japan“parents are happy to allow their children to remain at homeand live from their parents` income until their thirties”(Suwa et al. 2003).

Conclusion
In America and England, New Zealand, Australia andother individualistic cultures the trend for opting out sees
`runaways` leaving the home and seeking an alternative
place to be. In this paper I have tried to analyze why
Japanese hikikomori choose to confine themselves in theirrooms within the context of 3 cultural indices as definedby the world famous cultural expert Geert Hofstede. I
have tried to confirm my theory that the exact way`opting out` of society manifests itself in Japan is clearly
culture reactive. It is beyond the scope of this paper todevelop further the enormous implications that thistheory has on education and where change could besought, but it is the foundation for further research intosuch considerations.

30

Influence of Emotional Induction andFree Or Forced Affiliation on In-GroupAnd Out-Group Trust Attitude
Pierluigi Diotaiuti, Angelo Marco Zona, Luigi Rea
Department of Human, Social and Health Sciences, University of Cassino andSouth Latium, Italysame beliefs. In their study the subjects were told that
affiliation was either linked to their preferences in art or
was random. Discrimination occurred in both cases but
was greater when the subjects were affiliated according totheir preferences. Tajfel’s study was partially replicated byAllen and Wilder (1973), who found that the subjects
attributed greater similarity in belief to members of theirin-group rather than to members of the out-group. The
mere affiliation into groups based on an arbitrary task
had encouraged the attribution of a greater similarity of
beliefs to the in-group rather than to the out-group.
Going on to analyse the trust aspect, literature has
underlined that the essentially social nature of trust
makes it an evaluation of the influence that theinteraction between trustor, target and context has on
one’s own results and not an evaluation of individual
factors that contribute to this influence (Rotter, 1980).
McAllister (1995) distinguishes two types of trust: one
based on cognition (which manifests itself usually in task
orientated formal situations) and one based on affection(which manifests itself in personal and informal
situations). An interesting definition, that includes boththe possibility of calculating the results of the effects ofthe situation and the emotional-propensity aspect oftrusting others, has been put forward by Denise Rousseau
et al. (1998), who point out that trust is a psychologicalstate that includes the intention to accept one’s own
vulnerability based on positive expectations towards theintentions or the behaviour of others. Interpersonal trust
derives from a belief in the reliability of the partner/s andfrom the importance they give to the interests of thegroup. In this case trust is different from other relationalvariables such as cohesion, attraction of the group
towards certain members, friendship, pre-existing
relationships between members, familiarity, specificknowledge concerning others (Goodman and Leyden
1991). Considering these distinctions, we canhypothesize that the variables operate on groupperformance through different mechanisms and that eachone has a different predictive value. For example,
believing in the reliability of a partner could influencegroup performance in a way that is different from thedesire to remain part of the group. From a practical point

Abstract
This paper intends to revisit the studies on social
affiliation understood as a determinant of in-groupfavouritism and out-group discrimination (Tajfel, 1982)
arriving at the estimate of effect represented by a priming
emotional stimulus on implicit attitudes of trust toward
in-group and to the out-group. 574 college students
participated in the study. They were all administered two
scales taken from the MPP-Multidimensional Personality
Profile (Caprara, et al., 2006) to assess empathy, prosociality, sociability, interpersonal trust, self-esteem,social desirability, cynicism, management of self image.
The participants were divided into three experimentalgroups and randomly submitted to one out of six
experimental conditions. Results: the type of social
affiliation, voluntary or forced, influences the trust
towards in-group and out-group members; a negative
emotional stimulus is capable of reinforcing the polarized
distributions of leadership (totally internal or totally
external); eliciting subjective preferences neutralizes theeffects of forced affiliation; forced affiliation, when
activated, influences the distribution of leadership infavour of the in-group.

Introduction
In a study conducted by Tajfel et al. in 1971 it was foundthat the mere affiliation of subjects into groups based on
an arbitrary task was enough to cause discrimination infavour of their own group and against the members of
the other group (out-group). When commenting theresults of the research, Tajfel claimed that the mereaffiliation of subjects into groups activated a social normof discrimination, i.e, a norm specifying that “you must
act in favour of your in-group”. An alternativeinterpretation is given in terms of the theory of similarityof beliefs (Rokeach, Smith & Evans, 1960), which statesthat it is the difference between presumed similarities inbeliefs among the members of the in-group and the outgroup rather than the social norm of favouritism towards
the in-group that mediates the discriminatory behaviour
observed by Tajfel. Billig and Tajfel (1973), did,
however, consider the possibility that the subjects had
assumed that the members of their in-group held the31left of the central square) varied in accordance with thebalancing function. Every little man was randomly
assigned a number from 1 to 26.

of view, different interventions will be needed tostimulate or influence these variables. For example,
forcing people to work together for a long time andcreating familiarity in this way will not necessarily
produce friendship, pleasure, trust or cohesion(Golembiewski and McConkie, 1988).

For Test 2 we used a second chart on which was written:“Very good. Your line has reached the top firstestablishing a new climbing record” for the condition of
success and “Unfortunately your expedition has failed andyou have lost a lot of your men” for the condition of
failure. For both conditions the subjects were asked:“Now we would like you to indicate which of your teammembers were the most reliable during the expedition.
Write a number from 1 to 5 inside each little manaccording to the following criteria: 1 for total
unreliability; 2 for minimum reliability; 3 for an averagereliability; 4 for high reliability; 5 for maximum
reliability”. In the centre of the chart there were 2 oval
shapes, one for the Sweet group and one for the Savourygroup each containing the respective graphic element(spaghetti and cake), the textual reference of thecorresponding group (Sweet and Savoury) and three little
mans inside which the subject had to insert the value of
his reliability rating. The following charts were
distributed for affiliation: chart A, which said: “Pleaseindicate your food preferences choosing between Sweet
and Savoury dishes. Write only your first name under
your chosen preference (all the information will bestatistically elaborated in complete anonymity)”. In thecentre of the sheet there were two oval shapes containing
the graphic element (cake and spaghetti) and a textualreference of the group (the Sweet group and the Savourygroup). Chart B carried the following text: “Even though
you have expressed your preference you have been
arbitrarily included in the group of people with the
opposite preference to your own. So you must write yourname in the circle belonging to the group you have been
assigned to inverting the preference you previously
indicated”. In the centre of the sheet there were two oval
shapes containing the graphic element (cake andspaghetti) and the textual reference to the group (Sweet
and Savoury). Chart C read: “For this test you must bepart of the Sweet group (C1) Savoury group (C2). So
please write your name in the circle representing thegroup that has been assigned to you”. Chart C was
divided into Chart C1 per forced affiliation to the Sweet
group and Chart C2 for the forced affiliation to the
Savoury group. In the centre of the sheet there was only
one oval with the cake and the words ‘The Sweet’ forChart C1 and spaghetti and the words ‘The Savoury’ forChart C2. Chart D read: “Could you please indicate yourculinary preferences, choosing between sweet and savoury
dishes. Write your name under the chosen preference”.
In the centre of the sheet there were two oval shapes
containing the graphic element (cake and spaghetti) andthe textual reference to the group (sweet and savoury).

Objectives of the study
This contribution intends to revisit studies on social
affiliation seen as a determinant in favouritism towards
in-groups and discrimination towards out-groups (Diehl,
1988; Tajfel, 1978; Billig and Tajfel, 1973; Allen and
Wilder, 1975), evaluating mainly the aspects linked totrust and reliability ratings. It also intends to consider theeffects of positive/negative emotional induction and theinfluence of personality traits on the processes of
attribution and social affiliation.

Tools
The Multidimensional Personality Profile (MPP)(Caprara et al., 2006) was used to analyze personality
traits, and more specifically the social-emotional scale(which includes the sub-dimensions of empathy, prosociality, sociability and interpersonal trust) and the selfpresentation scale (which includes the sub-dimensions ofself-esteem, social desirability, Machiavellianism /cynicism and self-image management). A translated
version of the textual sceneries for sadness and happinessused in the protocol of Mayer, Allen, Beauregard (1995)
was used for positive and negative emotional induction.
For the evaluation of the elicited emotional state we used
the Self-Assessment Manikin scale (Bradley & Lang,
1980). For Test 1 we used a chart containing thefollowing text: “Now imagine you are about to leave for ahigh altitude climbing expedition. You can choose themembers of your team from the two groups, namely the
Sweet group and the Savoury group. Make up your lineof climbers choosing three climbers from each group andputting the number of your chosen climbers in the little
mans in the centre of the chart under the respective roles.
The roles are ordered in degree of importance”. In thecentre of the chart there was a square containing thedescriptions of the various roles with their relative
prerogatives: (line leader: the most important person andthe expert who leads the group; equipment manager: theperson who is responsible for the equipment and food;the person who sets up base camp: he is the person
responsible for setting up camp; the tent carrier: he is the
person who transports the tents; food carrier: the person
who transports the food; support worker: a marginal roleof support for anyone needing it). At the sides of thecentral square there were two oval shapes that enclosed
respectively stylized little men representing the Savoury
Climbers and the Sweet Climbers, with a picture
representing the food for the different categories(spaghetti for the Savoury group and cake for the Sweet
group). The position of the two groups (on the right or32

of the emotional stimulus on the degree of trust (Test 1)
we find no significance inside the chosen group. Goingon to analyse the results of Test 2, which was aimed at
establishing an evaluation of reliability of the members of
the climbing team in both the cases of success and failureof the mission, we can see that in both cases the degreeof trust accorded was significantly higher for themembers of the in-group than for the out-group(Sig.:,02). Comparing the evaluations of reliability madein the cases of success and failure, we could observe thatwhile the trust accorded to the members of the in-groupremained stable, trust accorded to the members of theout-group dropped significantly in the case of failure(mission success, average rating 9,63; mission failure,average rating 8,49; Sig.:,006).

Methodology
In the first phase of the research all the 574 students
performed an evaluation, using the MPP instrument, of
their personality traits related to the areas of socialemotional intelligence (empathy, pro-sociality, sociability
and interpersonal trust) and of self-presentation (selfesteem, social desirability, Machiavellianism / cynicism
and self-image management). Next, students wererandomly assigned to one of the three experimentalgroups (Group 1: free affiliation; group 2: affiliation after
being forced to express a preference; group 3: forced
affiliation prior to the manifestation of preference) and
one of the six experimental conditions (1: positive
emotional induction and mission success; 2: positive
emotional induction and mission failure; 3: negative
emotional induction and mission success; 4: negative
emotional induction and mission failure; 5: no emotional
induction and mission success; 6: no emotional induction
and mission failure). The experimenter gave instructions
for compilation at the moment of handing out thematerial to each individual. The student was theninvited, where required by the assigned experimental
conditions, to read and empathize with the situations
textually described and aimed at emotional induction,and to then express a rating of their emotional state(Self-Assessment Manikin) elicited by the stimuli
presented therein.

However, if we differentiate by gender, we can see thatfor females trust remained stable also for the members of
the out-group. In the case of mission failure a significant
difference emerged between the averages of the trust
ratings towards the in-group for subjects who had
undergone emotional induction. The negative emotional
stimulus appeared when failure was significantly
associated to a lowering of trust accorded to the in-group(Sig.:,05). In the case of success the emotional induction
was not associated with any variation of the trust rating.
We then proceeded to verify the correlations between the
MPP personal scales and the trust rating (Test 2) of
those subjected to the negative emotional induction andmission failure. The following correlations emerged:
growing empathy produced growing trust towards theout-group (,35**); Machiavellianism was negatively
correlated to trust towards the in-group (-,30*). In thecondition of mission success and when the emotional
stimulus was positive, a negative correlation emerged
between social desirability and trust accorded to the ingroup (-,42** ,005) and a positive correlation between
trust accorded to the out-group and pro-sociality (,32*).
In the condition of success and negative emotional
stimulus, a significant positive correlation emerged
between interpersonal trust and trust accorded to theout-group (,44**). Finally, in the condition of failure andpositive emotional induction, no significant correlations
emerged. As regards the forced affiliation subsequent to
the manifestation of the subject’s preference (group 2),
we found that in Test 1 trust accorded to the in-group(average 8,72) was lower than trust accorded to the outgroup (average 12,17). While when the affiliation wasforced before manifestation of the subject’s preference(group 3), trust accorded to the in-group (average 12,09)
was significantly (Sig. ,001) higher than trust accorded
to the out-group (average 8,92), the same as the results
for the free affiliation group. Going on to analyse theresults of Test 2 both for conditions of success andfailure, the ratings for trust attributed to the in-group
registered a significant difference (Sig.:,001) between
group 2 (average 8,74 towards the in-group) and group 3(average 10,50 towards the in-group); a further

Subsequently, those assigned to Group 1 were asked tochoose their food preference (sweet / savoury), writing
their name inside the circle containing the graphic
element relevant to the chosen food category (cake forsweet and spaghetti for savoury)(Chart A). Those
assigned to group 2, however, after expressing their foodpreference (chart A), were forced to write their names in
the opposite group (chart B). Those belonging to group 3
were arbitrarily assigned to one of the two groups (sweet/ savoury; chart C1/2) and only afterwards were asked
about their food preferences (chart D). All three groups
then went on to do the first test, which consisted informing a team of climbers choosing six participants(three sweet ones and three savoury ones) andsubsequently, for the second test, to give a mark from 1
to 5 for the reliability of the six participants based on the
results obtained (success / failure of the ascent carried out
by the chosen team of climbers.

Statistic analysis and results
Taking into the consideration the subjects who freely
chose their group affiliation in accordance with their foodpreferences (group 1) we started by verifying if the trust
accorded to the members of the in-group was higher
than that of the out-group. The results showed that thetrust accorded to the members of the in-group was
significantly higher (Sig.,001; with an average of 11,89
for the members of the in-group and 9,00 for those of
the out-group). If we then go on to evaluate the influence33

For group 2 we observed that 18.2% attributed both rolesof high responsibility to in-group members; 9.1%
assigned the role of line leader to an in-group member
and equipment management to an out-group member;
30.3% assigned the position of line leader to an outgroup member and equipment management to an ingroup member; 42.2% assigned both primary roles toout-group members. In total 27.3% assigned the more
important roles to in-group members. Comparing thegroups in function of the attribution of positions ofresponsibility, no significant differences emerged on the
MPP scale. Finally, for group 3 we observed that 56.6%of the subjects gave both primary roles to in-groupmembers; 19.7% assigned the primary role to an in-groupmember and the secondary role to an out-group member;
13.2% assigned both roles to out-group members; 10.5%
assigned the more important role to an out-groupmember and the secondary role to an in-group member.
In total 76.3% assigned the more important role to an ingroup member. Comparing the groups a significant
difference emerged on the MPP scale for pro-sociality
among those who assigned both positions ofresponsibility to in-group members (average 20.49) ascompared to the opposite case (those who assigned
everything to out-group members, average 22.90) (T-test
Sig. .032). A significant difference on the MPP scale forsocial-emotional intelligence emerged between the group
who took on all the leadership roles and the group who
assigned all the highest position of responsibility to an
out-group member and the secondary position to an ingroup member. In the first case we registered an averageof 78.09 while in the second case 66.38 (T-test Sig.
042). Finally, a significant difference emerged on the
pro-sociality scale between the group who assigned therole of line leader to an out-group member, reserving therole of equipment management for an in-group member(average 20.13) and the group who delegated all the
positions of leadership to out-group members (average22.9) (T-test Sig. .03) we then went on to evaluate theinfluence of the emotional stimulus on the distribution of
the positions. In situations of negative emotional
stimulus we registered a tendency towards polarization of
the positions (a reinforcement of internal leadership or areinforcement of external leadership). Both averages
increased with a propensity for leadership sharing.

significant difference emerged in the trust ratings
towards the out-group: group 3 (average 9,49), group 2(average 10,56). The emotional stimulus had no effect.
The analysis of the personal traits of group 1 and 3
showed a significant difference (Sig.:,04) on the scale ofself-confidence in the case of success among those who
considered the members of the in-group to be morereliable, registering higher trust levels in the presence oflower self-confidence (more trust towards the in-groupmembers, average 23,35; more trust towards out-groupmembers, average 25.21).
In the case of failure, a significant difference wasregistered (Sig.:.05) on the scale of self-image
management and on the scale of pro-sociality among
those who considered the in-group members to be morereliable. More trust was associated to higher marks in the
management of self-image: average 26.13 for more trust
accorded to in-group members; average 24.20 for moretrust accorded to out-group members. As regards prosociality values an average of 21.67 was registered forhigher trust accorded to in-group members and an
average of 20.01 for higher trust accorded to out-groupmembers (Sig.: .05). we then went on to analyse how
the subjects distributed the roles of leadership in theteam. More specifically, we evaluated the attribution of
the position of head of the line and the person
responsible for the equipment. As regards group 1 wefound that 40.0% attributed both these highresponsibility roles to in-group members; 24.4% assigned
the position of head of the line to the in-group and theequipment management to and out-group member;
20.0% gave the line leadership to an out-group member
and equipment management to an in-group member;
15.6% gave both roles to out-group members. In total
64.4% assigned the most important roles to in-groupmembers. Comparing the groups, a significant difference
emerged on the MPP scale for empathy between those
who assigned the responsible positions to in-groupmembers (average 20.44) compared to the opposite case(those who assigned everything to out-group members,
average 18.14) (T-test Sig. .021). Finally, a significant
difference emerged on the Machiavellianism / cynicism
scale between the group who assigned the role of line
leader to an out-group member, reserving the role ofequipment management for an in-group member(average 25.0) and the group who delegated both
positions of leadership to out-group members (average
20.71) (T-test Sig. .05). We then went on to evaluate
the influence of the positive emotional stimulus on the
distribution of the positions. In situations of positive
emotional stimulus we could note that the more
important roles were assigned to in-group members,
while in conditions of negative emotional stimulus, thetendency was to attribute the role of line leader to an ingroup member and that of equipment management to an
out-group member.

Discussion

34

The data shows that when the subjects choose theiraffiliation group freely (group 1), they tend to manifest
more trust towards in-group members. Therefore, thedata shows that the simple manifestation of a foodpreference can determine a propensity for trust towards
people with the same characteristic. This does not
happen when the subjects were arbitrarily forced into agroup affiliation and only successively were they allowed
to indicate their food preferences for sweet or savoury(group 3). In this case they accorded more trust to ingroup members (imposed) independently of their foodsocial desirability seem to be more willing to downplay
the merits of their own group in order not the irritate theout-group and thus avoid the creation of negative images
and opinions towards his person. An increase in prosociality produced a higher trust rating towards the outgroup, almost as if to share the merits of success. In theconditions of negative emotional stimulus and success inthe test, a positive correlation between interpersonal trust
and trust accorded to the out-group emerged. As if in
conditions of negative emotional predisposition this kindof personal characteristic is more active whensubsequently associated with success, which modifies(reversing it) the state of the mood. In the passage from anegative state of mood to a positive state of mood thetrust rating accorded to the out-group increases. In
conditions of success the subject with low self-esteem
tends to reinforce his self-esteem through an increase in
the trust rating towards members of his own group,
distributing internally, from a compensatory viewpoint,
the merits of the success.

preferences. Here the variable, which determined thepropensity to trust, was the forced affiliation into thatgroup rather than another. In group 2 the subjects wereasked to express their food preferences beforehand andthey were then categorized in the opposite group. In thisexperimental condition the propensity to accord moretrust to subjects with similar food preferences was
highlighted, rather than the propensity to trust themembers of the assigned group (in-group). This atypicaltendency shown by group 2 could be caused by acognitive dissonance between an individual preference
and the forced affiliation into a group with opposite
preferences. More specifically, it seems to be thepreliminary request of the preference that annuls theeffect of the minimum group. When the subject in fullawareness recalls a personal trait (even if this trait is not a
central element of identity), and the affiliation occurs
after the recall, the effects of the minimum group are
annulled. The reminder of certain aspects of Himself
prior to the forced affiliation produces effects that go in
the opposite direction to the theory of the minimumgroup, also in regard to the rating of trust attributed thein-group and out-group members, both in the case of
success and failure of the test. When people are allowed
to freely choose their group and experience failure, theytend to lower even further the trust rating accorded to theout-group, showing in this was that they significantly
attribute the cause of failure to the out-group. In thiscondition we can presume that a subjective attribution of
cause has been activated.

In the case of failure, those who tend to keep the trust
ratings high towards their own group also present highvalues on the scale of self-image management, as if theywish to preserve its value in the eyes of the others in thismoment of difficulty for the group and when their selfimage might become involved in processes of denigrationand discredit. Also in the conditions of failure, more prosocial subjects are orientated to an increase in trust
ratings towards the in-group, as if they want to protect
their own group in a moment when it is naturally more
exposed to tensions and internal conflicts. In reference tothe distribution of the positions of leadership andresponsibility on the team, we could note that for group 1
and group 3 there was a prevalent tendency to assign thefirst and second roles to in-group members while forgroup 2 there was a more prevalent tendency to assign
positions of leadership and responsibility to out-groupmembers (72.7% in total as compared with 64.4%
accorded to the in-group for group 1 that operated in
conditions of free affiliation). As regards personal traits,
in group 1 empathy appeared to tend towards an ingroup orientation and the subjects characterized for thistrait tended to attribute the important roles to the ingroup members. The subjects with high Machiavellian /cynicism traits tended to attribute the secondary position
to in-group members and the high leadership role to outgroup members. Probably, this attitude would allow
them to limit the risks of full responsibility whileallowing them to exploit a position of power sufficiently
enough to maximize its obtainable advantages. In group
3 the subjects with a higher social-emotional intelligencetended to assign the two positions of responsibility to ingroup members while the lower levels of social-emotional
intelligence showed a tendency to behave in a similar way
as the Machiavellians (the highest position to an outgroup member and the other position to an in-groupmember). However, the mistrust and suspicion typical of

The negative emotional stimulus together with thecondition of failure determines a significant lowering of
the trust rating accorded to the in-group suggesting thata negative emotion combined with failure determines agreater internal attribution of cause. Frustration due tofailure alone did not register this kind of tendency.
Neither did the positive emotional predisposition or
success in the test determine significant variations in theratings. The personal characteristics played different rolesof mediation dependant on the different conditions. For
subjects who experienced both negative conditions(failure and negative emotional stimulus), an increase inempathy caused an increase in trust accorded to the outgroup, blaming the others less. This would lead us tobelieve that an empathetic person, more incline toidentify himself with others, tends to protect others morethan himself or his own group. An increase in
Machiavellianism / cynicism produces a decrease in trust
ratings towards in-group members; the Machiavellian
subject cynically tends to accuse his own group, holding
it responsible for the failure. Rather than protect his owngroup, in a situation of no advantage, he will despise it,
because his bond / participation is only instrumental. For
subjects who experienced both the positive conditions(positive stimulus and success), an increase in social
desirability produces a decrease in trust ratings towards
the in-group. In the case of success, those who aspire to35feeling of inter-group and intra-group trust and to theevaluation of reliability.

these subjects could have determined this type of choice,being orientated more to the minimization of risk than toa strategy finalized to achieving subjective advantages.
Still inside group 3, the pro-social subjects tended to
distribute externally both positions of responsibility. As
regards the role of the emotional stimulus, we found that
only the negative stimulus was capable of reinforcing thepolarized distribution of leadership (totally internal andtotally external), with a decrease in the intermediate
positions characterized by a mixed distribution. All thismeant that the group was less flexible and more willingto share the extreme positions of power. For group 2
there were no differences in this sense on the personality
scale. This could be due to the particular experimental
conditions of the test which required the subject to be
forcibly affiliated to a group made up of subjects withfood preferences opposite to his. The denial of his
manifest preference and the forced integration in an
opposing group could probably have generated a conflict
and a greater perception of a state of coercion. This did
not happen in group 3 where the preference wasexpressed only after the forced affiliation. The resulting
cognitive dissonance and the immediate desire to react tothis dissonance could have neutralized the personal traits
and their relative subjective inclinations.

When social affiliation occurs subsequent to theelicitation of the subject’s preferences the effects of theminimum group are annulled, and in fact the opposite isnoted. Forced affiliation is to all effects impeded by thevoluntary recall of the preferences and the person does
not see himself in the group he has been arbitrarily
assigned to but rather in the group that is similar to his
own preferences. From a comparison between groups 2
and 3 we could find that the experimental conditions ofgroup 2 inhibit the effects of the forced affiliation.
From the comparison between groups 1 and 3 a common
tendency emerged to give more trust to in-groupmembers (assigning them the more responsible roles).
However, in group 3 this tendency was more evident(76.3% as opposed to 64.4% in group 1).
In relation to the role of the emotional stimulus, wefound that only the negative stimulus was capable ofreinforcing the polarized distribution of leadership(totally internal or totally external), with a decrease in theintermediate positions characterised by a mixed
distribution.

Conclusions

When people freely choose their affiliation group andexperience failure, they tend to lower their rating of
reliability towards the out-group, showing in this waythat they significantly blame the out-group for the
failure. The negative emotional stimulus, whenassociated with a condition of failure, determines asignificant decrease in reliability ratings of the in-group.
This suggests that a negative emotional predisposition,
together with a failure, determines a greater attribution
to internal causes.

In coherence with the minimum group theory (theconditions of which have been replicated by us in thethird experimental condition), our variables object ofinvestigation, that is, the distribution of a feeling of trust
and the rating of the level of inter-group and intra-groupreliability, undergo the effects of social affiliation exactly
in the same way as for the distribution ofadvantages/disadvantages. Therefore, both the trust
accorded and the reliability attributed, both in the case of
success and failure of the tests, is greater towards themembers of one’s own group rather than to the membersof an out-group. We can state that the experimental
results extend the laws of the theory of the minimumgroup and the effects of social affiliation also to the

The personal characteristics considered have shown anirrelevant weight on the laws of the minimum group.
The only dimension that has shown any influence andcan be considered capable of mediating the effects of theminimum group was the pro-social characteristic.

36

37

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38

Cognitive Change among
Foreign Managers in Japan's IT Sector
WILLIAM BABER, KYOTO UNIVERSITY, JAPANusing the CSI on managers in North American and othercountries, however not in Japan. Other writers havecriticized this one dimensional (analytical-intuitive) as
oversimplifying because these extremes may be mutually
reinforcing and in place in managers (Hodgkinson andSadler-Smith, 2003). This research paper however does
not investigate the deep nature of cognitive style. Rather
the goal is identify and compare changes in the style ofindividuals before and after their exposure to the businessenvironment of Japan. Therefore the unitary intuitiveanalytical dimension proposed by Allinson and Hayes istaken as a starting point for this work.

Introduction
This study report provides evidence about how North
American IT professionals change in the process ofworking in the environment of Japan. The changes
studied here include cognitive, metacognitive, andbehavior changes, however mainly the cognitive changes
will be examined in this research report. This research
project began with intuitions about the subject, namelythat North Americans coming to Japan would experiencea situation different enough to change their behaviors
and thinking that were in place prior to arrival in Japan.
These intuitions were formulated as research questions.
The research questions were developed into in depth,
open form interviews.

The hallmarks of intuitive cognitive style are grasping an
overview of a project and understanding its elements interms of their interrelationships.

Literature review
The literature on foreign managers and acculturation in
Japan has languished in the time since the collapse of the
Bubble Economy in the early 90s. As economic
excitement has shifted to China and other countries,
academic interest has also shifted away from Japan.
Highlighting this shift of attention, only a handful ofacademic papers on cognition in Japanese business haveappeared in 2000-2014; journal searches on "Japan
management cognitive" and similar keywords found only
a few each of articles, books, and dissertations.

The characteristics of analytical cognitive style include
grasping components of a project and understanding its
elements in terms of categories.

What is cognitive style?

Allinson and Hayes (1996, 2000) have not included
Japan in their empirical work on cognitive style, nor haveother studies employing the CSI. They do however referto older works that found inconclusive and apparently
contradictory results in seeking to identify differences at
the macro (nations or regions) in East versus Westcognitive style. Abramson, Lane, Nagai, and Takagi(1993) found Japanese to be more intuitive in style albeit
using the Meyers Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI).
Abramson et al. found Japanese to be slower decision
makers, possibly due to "a more feeling-based cognitive
style" (pg. 581) reflected in preferences for group
harmony, relationships, and sensing the environment as awhole. Canadians, in their study, preferred "a thinkingbased cognitive style" (pg. 581). Further, "the Canadians
displayed a cognitive style that reduced the importance ofthe human element in favor of analytical, impersonal,
rational factors." (Abramson et al., Pg 585).

Cognitive style refers to the way a person gathers andevaluates information about their environment (Allinson& Hayes, 1996, 2011). These authors broadly describe
two extremes, analytical and intuitive, and gradations
between them based on the earlier work of Hammond etal., 1987). Allinson and Hayes however developed the
Cognitive Style Index (CSI) specifically for business
managers. Numerous studies have been undertaken

Cognitive differences exist between a notional East andWest according to Nisbett, Peng, Choi, and Norenzayan(2001).
In their work West refers loosely to thosecultures that inherited their thinking from Ancient
Greece. East, meanwhile, refers to those cultures that
trace their roots to Ancient China, specifically in East
Asia. The differences are based in tacit epistemologies,

Nonetheless Japan retains its reputation as a challenging
country for acculturation and adjustment in the popularpress (Pilling, 2008). As such, Japan and the experiencesof foreign workers in it can be a source of insight into
cognitive change and acculturation.
This paper is based on original research and investigateschanges in cognitive style occur in North American
managers working in Japan.

39

things drastically.” (Pg 327)

long held understandings subsumed by the people ofthose cultures. They explain that East Asians conduct
less categorizing, lean toward grasping an overall view,
employ less formal logic, and prefer a dialectic
understanding of issues. These are broadly described as
holistic. The West, exemplified in their work and in
Nisbett (2003) categorizes more, employs formal logic,
and is more reductionist. These are described broadly as
analytic.

The holistic approach remains widespread and Japanesebusiness organizations are often described as holistic bywriters such as M. Abe (2010).
It is a reasonable step to conclude that these cognitive
style differences, if they are indeed confirmed, exist
among business managers. The studies cited above used
students as proxies for whole populations, albeit
Abramson et al. took MBA students as a study
population. This research paper accordingly accepts thenotion that a broad difference exists as described on a
general population level. This paper also seeks to identify
evidence of those proposed cognitive style differences in
the management styles of Japanese and North Americanbusiness managers. Further, this research paper seeks to
identify changes in cognition as North Americanbusiness managers adjust to work in the host country ofJapan.

While the work of Nisbett and collaborators usedcomplex imagery with Japanese and Canadians,
Kitayama, Duffy, Kawamura, and Larsen (2003) foundsimilar differences among Japanese and Americans using
a simplified visual task.
Thus three different models, those used by Abramson, etal. (1993), Nisbett et al. (2003), and Kitayama et al.
(2003) find similar cognitive style differences among East
Asians and North Americans. Psychology studies haveidentified cognitive style differences between East andWest in other fields of research such as and sociology(Yang, 1986). In the fields of business and management
science, Hay and Usunier (1993) quote an interviewee
pointing out the difficulty of quick change within an
organization and inadvertently describing a holistic
cognitive style:

The Japanese management styles presented below matchthe cognitive style ascribed to East Asia. Rather thanassigning credit or guilt to individuals, these common
techniques (according to cited literature and direct
observations of this author) emphasize group identity andefficacy. As in the examples of frame and components inthe cognitive styles literature, the emphasis in Japan islargely on the frame and relationships. Among theNorth American techniques noted below, the emphasis
is, in reverse, placed on the components which is
generally to say on staff members, not the group.

“We [Japanese bank managers] always consider thesequence between the past and the future. Dramaticchange is only possible from the outside. But
continuity is very important. It is difficult to change

Table 1: Cognitive style in management style preferences
Japanese management style Analogous or opposite North
American management style
Chourei shiki – regular No
analogous
management
ritualistic
morning techniquegathering
Kachou at head of island ofdesks of team

Evening(frequent, late)drinking

Feigned drunkenness

Seniority based promotion

Comment

Focus on group, not individual;
Increases the feeling of group unity; joint presence
and joint suffering contribute to group identity(Maricourt, 1994; Nishiyama, 1999).
Opposite: Cubicles and offices; Focus on group, not individual;
geographically distributed teams;
Front line boss knows the team, their abilities,
strengths, weaknesses, and activities in depth(Nishiyama, 1999).
Infrequent brief evening drinks; Focus on group, not individual;
may be open to outsiders.
Group limited to the organization's members,
develops group identity (DeMente, 1994;
Nishiyama, 1999).
No analogous behavior.
Usual strictures of relationships are suspended.
Opens a channel for feedback and complaints withno reprisals on the complainer (DeMente, pg 86,
1994).
Opposite: merit based promotion
Focus on group, not individual efficacy;
Ensures staff loyalty (Coleman, 1999) andpromotion of individuals who embody the goals
and culture of the organization (Haghirian, 2010).

40

Preference for generalists

Preference for specialists

Ideas don't get acted on
immediately

Ideas not credited to the author
are considered stolen.

No individual credit for
idea generation

Ideas not credited to the author
are considered stolen.

Nemawashi

Meetings outside the group could
be considered underhanded.

Total Quality Management(TQM)

Six sigma (fixing the product orprocess).

Wa – maintaining group
harmony

Constructive conflict; performancebased hiring and firing.

Slow decision making

Slow is considered a cause of
failureThe above Japanese management styles, all in wide use inJapan, indicate preference for holistic approaches. North
American managers that have moved from analytic
approaches to holistic approaches have either undergonea change in cognition, or have accepted a different
cognitive style on the surface level. The data collected
for this research report will help to identify whether
managers have undergone either or both of those steps.

Methodology
This research paper collected qualitative data in the formof in-depth interviews with North American (US andCanadian Anglophone) managers working in Japan's IT
sector. The individuals were identified through Linked
In as well as the American Chamber of Commerce inJapan (ACCJ) directory. Some individuals came fromthe first or second degree contacts of the author. In all
128 potential contacts were identified and 76 were
contacted. Outreach was accomplished through Linked
In (63 contacts), verbal requests (3), email (9), andwebsite interfaces (4).

Research Questions
Thus the research questions for this report include:--

Restricts the value of any one individual;
Training includes broad range of skills including
moral training (Sakai, 2009).
Focus on group, not individual;
Ideas become part of the group understanding andare not bound to an individual before considered
for action (Bhagat, Kedia, Harveston, and Triandis,
2002, p. 214).
Focus on group, not individual;
Develops pre-eminence of group over individuals(DeMente, 1994)
Focus on avoiding class;Manager seeks solutions one to one with team, notin group discussion (Nishiyama, 1999; Kameda,
1996).
Focus on the whole delivered product, not thecomponents of the product; Employees becomeaware of how they contribute to final overall results(Haghirian, 2010).
Focus on group, not individual;
Avoid upsetting the group at the expense of theindividual or team (Haghirian, 2010).
Focus is on group participation;
Time is necessary for consensus building(Nishiyama, 1999; Abe, 2010).

Can North American business managers moveout of Nisbett's analytic category of cognitive
style into holistic?
Are there identifiably positive or negative
outcomes to cognitive change evinced bycognitive style?

Of these, 19 responded with a willingness to join the
study and ten completed the study. One of the ten wasremoved from the study as his experience in Japan's IT
industry had ended about eight years prior.
The interviews included the same questions in largely thesame phrasing and order. All but one were recorded with
typed notes been taken simultaneously. Most included
follow up sessions to clarify or expand on issues. Some oftherecordings
have
been
transcribed.

Because this research seeks to be relevant to the businessworld as well as to the research community, it also seeks
implications for North American managers working inJapan or other East Asian locations.
A table of cases is shown below.
Table 2: Overview of cases
Case
Nationality
12C
USA
12D
USA

Job Title
VP Business Development
Team Leader
41

Years in Japan
15
20

12E
12F
12G
12H
12J
12L
12M

USA
CanadaUSA
USA
CanadaUSA
USA

Supervisor
Engineer
Team Leader
Owner
Engineer
Logistics Manager
Owner

8
3
13
32
7
22
23

Age of interviewees ranged from 30-60.

Discussion with Analysis and Findings
Change occurred in ways that indicate cognitive change, that is, shift from analytical to holistic.
Table 3: Change in cognitive style
Case
Before
12C
12C

12D
12E

12F

12G
12H

12J

12L
12M

After

Top down non-consensus Bottom up consensus building including use ofdictator leadershipnemawashi
Reactive not proactive
We are “very Japanese” in approach to quality ofservice (proactive re customer experience) – TQM
approach
One of the broader teamGhettoized within the org …later overcame thisin diff org where he is part of the harmony
Generalfeelingof Rejected change to his own thinking andsatisfaction
management style.
Well defined dissatisfaction;
Attempted to mentor Japanese staff
Tried to make change, get Appreciation of some benefits of slow speed andidea across (do code patience with long talking through of an issue;
reviews, eat your own dogfood);
Direct approach
Indirect approach to protect group harmony
Lower level individuals Don't rock the boat; look for ways not to rock theshould seek to stand out
boat that you had not imagined before – thinkfrom point of view of the management or othercounterparty
Individual can impact the Individual cannot cause quick change in the org;
group;The large ship can be redirected only in
Individual will be charged increments;
by management to pursue a Merit not rewarded;task they propose at short Contributions not recognizednotice;Individual merit;
Employees live or die based Appreciates relationship philosophy of Japan andon their merits
uses it to bridge with HQ.
Just work and show your Picks and applies Japanese and North American
merit; be treated w respect
styles as suitable; Synergy: Able to embarrass a
potential client yet gain their custom; USappreciation of time to minimize transaction cost
– Japan appreciation of seniority so he moves to
get to a senior Japan person instead of politely
working with lower staff.

42

Change to Holistic
Thinking
Y
Y

Y
N

Y

Y
Y

UnclearYYImpact on the manager
After detecting a change in cognitive style by identifying
adoption or abandonment of a management technique,the next question is to determine the impact of thechange. One way to directly detect such impact is to
identify positive or negative outcomes for the manager.
Data gathered for this study shows that the shift incognitive style from a typically Western one, analytic, to atypically East Asian one, holistic, results in some cases inclearly different end states.
Figure 1

After the change in cognitive style
This research report employs Berry's (1980) framework
for acculturation which proposes four states ofacculturation: integration, separation, assimilation, andmarginalization. These are arrived at based on therelative importance of relationships and cultural identity
as modeled in the figure below.

Figure 2
culture accepting some institutions of the non-dominantgroup while the non-dominant group accepts the basic
values of the dominant group (Berry, 1997).

The four possible outcomes described by Berry (1980,1997) and the synergy outcome from Adler and
Gundersen (2007) are mapped in the figure below topositive or negative outcomes.

Adler and Gundersen (2007) describe synergies as
involving "…a process in which managers form
organizational strategies, structures, and practices basedon, but not limited to the cultural patterns of individualorganization members and clients." (pg 109). Thus
synergy does not insist on acceptance of any one set ofnorms or standards. Synergy and integration are further
differentiated in that synergy requires the rise of new
solutions which go beyond the available range ofsolutions offered by the cultural groups represented.

Separation, marginalization, and assimilation are
considered negative in this research report because theindividual cannot contribute their ideas and styles to thehost culture. In a practical worst case scenario, separationand marginalization situations could result in the
demotion, sidelining, or loss of job of individuals whoarrive and stay in these end states. Assimilation too,though it may seem safer, could result in the removal ofan expatriated business leader who has "gone native" andcannot effectively represent the wishes of an overseas
headquarters.

Integration is seen as positive in this report because theforeign manager can contribute management ideas andtechniques to the host culture environment. Similarly,

Berry’s integration concept is described as the dominant
43

synergy is seen as positive because the foreign manager
contributes management ideas albeit in changed forms
that particularly suit the immediate environment increative combination with the local thinking andpractices. Figure three shows the end states.

Figure 3
Table 4: Positive or Negative Outcome
Case
Outcome
12C
Positive
12D
Negative
12E
Negative
12F
Positive
12G
Positive
12H
Positive
12J
Unclear
12L
12M

End status
Integration
Separation
Marginalization
Integration
Integration
Integration
Assimilation
Integration
Integration
Synergy

Positive
Positive

The shift in cognitive style from analytic to holistic
indicates a change in cognitive style. What remains
unclear however in this study is the degree of change.
Most of the managers interviewed indicated that they

had preferences for both typically North American andJapanese management approaches. Therefore it seems
unlikely that one style overrides or erases another in thisstudy population.

Assimilation

point that he considers himself part of a group that must
survive in order to achieve success. It is not clear
however that 12J will continue in this assimilated state.
His own overarching goal is to become an entrepreneur, aradically different role in which he may integrate orsynergize based on his North American background.

This individual has been in Japan only three years prior
to the interviews. The passage of time appears to havebeen too brief for this person to identify their role in thecompany and the greater context of Tokyo. The
individual in case 12J has been able to change his own
thinking from “a junior employee should strive to make amark on the organization” to a more Japanese way, “myideas are contributed to the group and the group will gain
credit and benefit from them”. He further describes his
image of the Japanese corporation as one in which theorganization seems like a great ship, so big that its
direction can only be changed by small increments
through the indirect efforts of individuals.

The end state, however, need not be a permanent state.
The manager may move to another state as evinced bysome cases in this study. Like 12E, discussed next, case
12J has not yet clearly settled into one position in themodel.

Marginalization
12E had been unable to find satisfaction working within
a Japanese company but in the months before theseinterviews, was able to find a new understanding of therole as an individual in the context of groups. His new

12J has therefore surrendered his analytic approach inwhich personal identity and merit form the cornerstonesof success and satisfaction. He has assimilated to the44

understanding may have started 12E on the path tointegration, though too little data exists to know andfollow up interviews in coming years will be necessary toconfirm the outcome. Moreover, 12E’s time in Japan,
only three years as of summer 2013, may yet be too brief
for the sensitive process of determining his state.

with some negative experiences. An early employer
accommodated his North American style and thinking in
the early 2000s, in a rural region of Japan, Shikoku.
Moving to Tokyo he found himself in a Japanese owned
multinational where the division head hazed the foreign
team through schedule changes and countermanded
orders. The result of this experience was that theindividual, and his team of foreign workers, wasseparated from the work process. But they were notmarginalized because they developed a coping
mechanism of going further up the chain of command to
get the necessary support for their work. This situation
continued during this entire period of employment withthe foreign staff in a sort limbo, not integrated into
operations fully, but also not entirely out of the picture.
Having changed employers between the first and second
interviews in this study, 12D finds himself in a new job,
comfortably integrated with the staff of a smaller
Japanese organization contributing to projects andproducts. He has not assimilated fully to the Japaneseenvironment, nor has he developed new synergies withhis coworkers. His current status seems to one ofintegration.

The experience of this person was ranged from
intimidating to disappointing. On one side, the foreign
staff was separated from Japanese staff, “we were in ourown small space, we were in the “cave” it was an
intimidating space.” Physically separated from themainstream work environment, this individual foundhimself ultimately marginalized. Attempting to workwith and train Japanese staffers, he found “Japaneseengineers were happy to follow what you teach, but do
not take it further.” His professional and personal
network among Japanese was minimal and in the end he“realized that Japanese management and workers want nochange”. Blocked from integration and with his efforts
to reach out rebuffed, this person found himself
marginalized and unable to contribute to or learn fromthe host culture. Did his experience with the Japaneseemployer change his work style or way of thinking? “No,”he responds.

Integration

Separation

There are numerous examples of integration among thecases in this study report.

One case in the study, 12D, worked for several employees
Table 4: Integration examples
Case
Example12C
Changed to bottom up consensus building including use of nemawashi
Introduced limit working after hours
Accepted as fundamental a Japanese view of top quality customer service
Rejected Japanese after hours drinking in favor of in-office communication
Accepted Lean integration with suppliers
12F
Integrated benefits of slow speed of decision making and long talking through of issues while maintaining task
orientation
12G
Able to integrate North American and Japan based skills by being a bridge between Tokyo and foreign based
HQ
12H
Integrated showing of value (North American style) as relationship ceased to be the supreme as in the Bubble
Economy era
12L
Integrated relationship philosophy of Japan and uses it while keeping focus on completing tasks, bridging
understanding between foreign HQ and local operations, etc.
The above individuals have shown a shift in cognitive
style by integrating North American and Japanesemanagement styles, using both holistic and analytic
approaches.

entirely Japanese nor North American. These new
approaches are synergies in Adler and Gundersen’s(2007) understanding as described previously in thisreport.

Synergy

Go straight for the leader

Case 12M indicates the strongest synergy creation
among the cases presented. While synergy may bepresent in Cases 12H, 12J, 12L, and others, 12M hascertainly been able to create multiple new approaches
that are neither completely holistic nor analytic, neither

The individual in case 12M studiously avoids working
through the hierarchy of a potential client company innormal fashion. Usual behavior in the Japanese business
context might be to develop a contact slowly with orwithout access to the ultimate decision makers. Where a45cultures.

higher level person is part of a meeting, conversation iscommonly managed by a junior staffer with little direct
input from the higher level manager. 12M however
pushes directly to the higher level person and presents a
proposal. Synergy here is based on a North American
preference for minimizing transaction cost and theJapanese appreciation of senior staff. Once 12M hasaccessed the senior decision maker, return to the juniorstaff by the Japanese organization is unlikely. Put neatly
into a trap of responding, and thereby increasing theirown face as senior staff, or repositioning the junior staffer
as the contact point and losing face, many feel compelled
to directly deal with 12M.

Implications
North American IT managers can change their cognitive
style and gain benefits through achieving integration orsynergy. The population can integrate, at least most of
those in the sample. In some cases they seem to have theresilience to move from negative end states to positive
ones.

Limitations
This study report is limited chiefly by the small sample
size. However the in depth interviews provided a
glimpse into a potentially important theme, cognitivechange, for future study.

Embarrass potential client
Strategically he allows potential clients to think he speaks
Japanese poorly. Thus he surprises them with his highly
fluent and technical Japanese. They feel embarrassed
when it turns out that the person they were speaking
about has in fact strong language skills and has been
following the conversation. As a result, when he does
speak, they listen more closely. This is a face damaging
exercise with respect to the potential client whereas it isface-building for 12M. Normal expectations would be
for a new relationship to be severely damaged, if not
destroyed by such a maneuver. However, this tactic is
successful for 12M because it develops respect in theclient for his abilities. This tactic is neither in the canonof North American nor Japanese behaviors but has beendeveloped by 12M, synergizing from both business

Another limitation is that these managers are notreviewed by their Japanese co-workers whose
contribution could balance the perception of theirstrengths and weaknesses.

Conclusion
The study reveals that a fundamental shift in thinking
can occur for North American managers working inJapan. The shift from analytic to holistic cognitive style
can lead these managers into positive or negative
outcomes. Those that navigate the process to arrive at
positive results may be a source of further learning aboutacculturation, thinking, and the Japan-North Americanbusiness-scape.

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