TY - JOUR
T1 - A cross-cultural study of strong ties and weak ties rationalities
T2 - toward an ontological turn in psychology
AU - Yeh, Kuang-Hui
AU - Sundararajan, Louise
AU - Ting, Rachel Sing-Kiat
AU - Liu, Charles
AU - Liu, Tao
AU - Zhang, Kejia
N1 - Publisher Copyright:
© 2022 American Psychological Association
PY - 2022/9
Y1 - 2022/9
N2 - We developed the Strong Ties Weak Ties Rationality Scale (STWTRS) to demonstrate the heuristic value of the ontological turn which attempts to do justice to the cultural insider’s picture of what is real. To test empirically the hypothesis of the existence of two distinct ontological universes that fall along the divide between strong ties and weak ties ontological framings, we used STWTRS to conduct a cross-cultural study (n = 961) using four samples (i.e., Taiwanese, Yi Chinese, Asian American, and non-Asian American). The results support our claim that the ontological universe of the cultural insider is not a list of fragmentary, ever expanding list of attributes that proliferate in cross-cultural psychology, so much as a coherent wholeness. We argue that this concept is best articulated by Maturana and Varela’s (1980) theory of autopoietic living systems. Potential contributions to the literature and future research directions are discussed.
AB - We developed the Strong Ties Weak Ties Rationality Scale (STWTRS) to demonstrate the heuristic value of the ontological turn which attempts to do justice to the cultural insider’s picture of what is real. To test empirically the hypothesis of the existence of two distinct ontological universes that fall along the divide between strong ties and weak ties ontological framings, we used STWTRS to conduct a cross-cultural study (n = 961) using four samples (i.e., Taiwanese, Yi Chinese, Asian American, and non-Asian American). The results support our claim that the ontological universe of the cultural insider is not a list of fragmentary, ever expanding list of attributes that proliferate in cross-cultural psychology, so much as a coherent wholeness. We argue that this concept is best articulated by Maturana and Varela’s (1980) theory of autopoietic living systems. Potential contributions to the literature and future research directions are discussed.
KW - Autopoiesis
KW - Individualism versus collectivism
KW - Moral cognition
KW - Ontological turn
KW - Strong ties versus weak ties
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=85130800349&partnerID=8YFLogxK
U2 - 10.1037/hum0000284
DO - 10.1037/hum0000284
M3 - Article
AN - SCOPUS:85130800349
SN - 0887-3267
VL - 51
SP - 235
EP - 259
JO - The Humanistic Psychologist
JF - The Humanistic Psychologist
IS - 3
ER -