The influential hypothesis by Markus and Kitayama (1991) postulates that individuals from interdependent cultures place others above self in interpersonal contexts. This led to the prediction and finding that individuals from interdependent cultures are less egocentric than those from independent cultures (Wu et al., 2013; Wu & Keysar, 2007). However, variation in egocentrism can only provide indirect evidence for the Markus and Kitayama hypothesis. The current study sought direct evidence by giving British (independent) and Taiwanese (interdependent) participants two perspective-taking tasks on which an other-focused “altercentric” processing bias might be observed. One task assessed the calculation of simple perspectives, the other assessed the use of others’ perspectives in communication. Sixty-two Taiwanese and British adults were tested in their native languages at their home institutions of study. Results revealed similar degrees of both altercentric and egocentric interference between the two cultural groups. This is the first evidence that listeners account for a speaker’s limited perspective at the cost of their own performance. Furthermore, the shared biases point towards similarities rather than differences in perspective-taking across cultures.

Culture dataTrial level data from the director task (s3data.csv) and the visual perspective-taking task (VPT.csv).Culture R codeR code used for data analysis