Study title

This dataset contains multiple measures of psychological processes that have previously been found to vary cross-culturally: individualism, collectivism, closeness to others, attributional style, object categorisation, drawing style and self-enhancement. Respondents are all residents of East London, with most falling into three main groups: first generation British Bangladeshis, second generation British Bangladeshis, and non-migrants with no Bangladeshi or South Asian heritage. The data also contains various demographic and lifestyle measures, such as education level, family contact, mass media use, age, and age of migration (for first generation migrants). Please see attached publication (Mesoudi, Magid & Hussain, 2016, PLOS ONE) for more details.Until recently, psychologists assumed that people from different societies all think in the same way as we do in the West - that there is a universal human psychology shared by everyone on the planet. However, when psychologists started testing non-Western people, rather than the American and British undergraduates who typically do psychology experiments, they found intriguing cultural differences. For example, there are differences in perception: Westerners focus on single objects, whereas non-Westerners focus on the relationships between objects. If you show a British and a Japanese person a scene containing lots of objects, the British person is subsequently better at recognising the objects if they are presented on their own, whereas the Japanese person has better memory if the object is presented in the original scene. Or differences in explaining other people's behaviour: Westerners explain behaviour of others in terms of fixed personality traits, whereas non-Westerners explain actions in terms of social contexts. A British teacher might explain a student's poor exam performance in terms of their laziness or lack of intelligence, whereas a Korean teacher might appeal instead to the overbearing pressure to succeed...