Abstract

From the cross-cultural researches on individualism-collectivism, it has been founded that various social behaviors, especially evaluation of other persons, of people who live in individualistic culture are enormously different from those of collectivist culture. The author construed these differences as results of the different perspectives on the human being and their relationships. In individualistic culture, they consider the independent and autonomous individual person as the ontological ultimatum of a society. Therefore they stress the uniqueness of an individual and differences among persons, self-assertion and competition, and personal ability and the end results of one's work. In sharp contrast with this, people of collectivist culture regard the relationships among them as the primary unit of a society and thus do not stress the autonomy and independence of an individual person. Therefore they seek harmony in group and similarity among persons, self-control and cooperation, and effort and the process of work in achieving situations. The author suggested that these differences between two cultures can be accounted according to the two working hypotheses of the Dual-Aspect Model of Person Evaluation, saliency hypothesis and elaboration hypothesis, which was proposed by him (Cho, 1982, 1990a). On the basis of this conjecture, the possibility of extension of the Dual-Aspect Model was groped after cautiously to incorporate the interpretation of the phenomena of cultural differences in person evaluation into its scope.