Cultural differences between Bosnian-Australians and Anglo-Australians and responses to the self-bias effect and personal ownership

• ¹ Department of Psychological Science, School of Health and Human Sciences, Southern Cross University, Australia

Aim: The tendency to preferentially focus or remember objects associated with the self is known as the self-biased effect (SBE). Culture and its relationship to the self-biased effect have generated considerable interest within the psychology literature. Identifying the extent to which cultural differences modulate self-relevant information and cognition allows us to gain a greater understanding of how the self-biased effect is influenced by culture. This study investigated cultural differences between collectivist Bosnian-Australians and individualistic Anglo-Australians in the self-biased effect using personal ownership. Method: 30 Bosnian-Australian bilingual and 30 Anglo-Australian monolingual participants completed a demographic questionnaire, self-construal scale and perceptual memory association task. The Bosnian bilinguals scored higher on the interdependence subscale than the monolinguals. In the perceptual memory task participants were required to match learned associations (e.g., blue mug-mine, green mug-mother's, red mug-stranger’s) between names of people and coloured mugs. Participants judged whether coloured mug-label pairings matched (e.g., blue mug-mine, green mug-mothers, red mug- strangers) or mismatched (e.g., green mug-mine, red mug-mothers, blue mug-strangers).The participants were instructed to indicate as quickly and accurately as possible whether or not the specific pair displayed matched the learned association or not. Results: The hypothesis that the self-biased effect would be evident in the individualistic Anglo-Australian participants (a difference between response times to self-pairings and mother-pairings) and not in the collectivist Bosnian-Australian participants (no difference in response times between self-pairings and mother-pairings) was not supported. In fact, a robust SBE was found in both languages spoken by the bilinguals and in both cultural groups. Conclusion: It was concluded that the cultural differences did not modulate the SBE in the ownership paradigm adopted in the current study. In addition, the SBE occurred in both of the languages spoken by the Bosnian bilinguals.