Eighth Annual
Thomas M. Ostrom Scholar-in-Residence

Much of what we know about life-span development, cohort differences in attitudes and behavior, or differences between cultures, is based on research participants' self-reports. Unfortunately, the usual context dependency of self-reports takes on additional complexity in comparisons across cohorts and cultures: age-related and culture-related differences in basic cognitive and communicative processes elicit age-sensitive and culture-sensitive context effects, which provide a challenge for comparative research. First, age-related declines in working memory function attenuate or eliminate question order effects among older respondents, but increase response order effects. These differential effects can reverse the ordinal placement of cohorts, suggesting, for example, that older respondents are either more, or less, conservative than younger respondents, depending on the specifics of the questionnaire. Experimental manipulations that tax younger respondents' memory mirror age-related differences. Second, respondents from independent (e.g., North America) and interdependent (e.g., China) cultures differ in their attention to the common ground established in the research interview, resulting in differential question order effects between cultures. Again, the ordinal placement of cultures can be reversed depending on the specifics of the research instrument. Experimental inductions of independent vs. interdependent orientations mirror the cross-cultural findings. Third, cohorts and cultures differ in the daily behaviors that do or do not receive attention, resulting in differential autobiographical knowledge. This differential knowledge, in turn, gives rise to differential context effects in frequency of behaviors, which can again reverse the ordinal placement of cohorts or countries. Theoretical and methodological implications are discussed.