This paper investigates how Confucianism affects individual decision making in Taiwan and in China. We found that Chinese subjects in our experiments became less accepting of Confucian values, such that they became significantly more risk loving, less loss averse, and more impatient after being primed with Confucianism, whereas Taiwanese subjects became significantly less present-based and were inclined to be more trustworthy after being primed by Confucianism. Combining the evidence from the incentivized laboratory experiments and subjective survey measures, we found evidence that Chinese subjects and Taiwanese subjects reacted differently to Confucianism.
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http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0167268113002400
In the first study, we found that Chinese immigrants showed a prominent self-vs.-mother differentiation in the medial prefrontal cortex (MPFC) within the first two months of their arrival. Interestingly, previous studies recruiting participants raised in China, a country emphasizing on the interdependence, has generally failed to find such differentiation in the MPFC. By contrast, studies using participants raised in independent cultures have found that the MPFC differentiates self from mother. This finding suggests that these self-motivated Chinese immigrants might be more independent in the self-construal than those who stayed in China.
In the second study, we were interested in examining whether this self-vs.-mother differentiation could be modulated based on immigrants’ self-construal changes during acculturation. Thus, we scanned these immigrants again six months later. We found that the self-vs.-mother differentiation pattern diverged depending on whether immigrants became more or less interdependent in the self-construal. That is to say, for immigrants who became ‘less Chinese’, the self-vs.-mother difference remained, whereas for those who became even ‘more Chinese’, the self-vs.-mother difference in the MPFC and posterior cingulate cortex (PCC) disappeared. This finding supports the notion that self-construal changes during the process of acculturation are reflected in the relative engagement of brain structures implicated in self-referential processing.
In the third study, we examined whether brain reward activity to in-group emotional expressions, presented without explicit awareness, could predict friendship patterns in newly-arrived Chinese immigrants six months later. We found that immigrants with the highest in-group reward reactivity in the ventral striatum showed an increase in the percentage of in-group friends, whereas those with the lowest in-group reactivity showed a reduction in this percentage.
By using neuroimaging methods, we are able to explore how self-construal changes during acculturation influence activity in brain regions involved in self-referential processing. Furthermore, we were also able to use brain activity to predict acculturation outcomes within immigrants, suggesting that neuroimaging methods are a potentially valuable way to add novel information about acculturation processes.