Thank you for participating in our experiment. This form will provide you with some information about what this experiment was about. However, we request that you not share this information with anyone, as this might lead to invalid results.

The main purpose of this research is to investigate cross-cultural variations in the relationship of metaperceptions and moral judgment from the perspective of face and dignity cultures.
It has been shown that East Asians concern themselves with how they look from the perspective of others and very much want to guard their reputation (face), whereas European Americans are more concerned with their own perspective, in order to secure their positive self-view (dignity) (Kim, Cohen & Au, 2010; Kim & Cohen, 2010). Based on previous research findings, we hypothesized that European Americans’ moral behavior would be relatively more affected by how they perceive themselves than by how they perceive others view them. In contrast, we expected that East Asians’ moral behavior would be more influenced by how they perceive others would view them than by how they perceive themselves.

To examine this, we asked all participants to complete three tasks – a Visualization activity, Visual perception task, and Personality questionnaire- in sequence.

1) Visualization activity:
Firstly, a one-minute visualization activity was provided. In this activity, participants were asked to imagine that they are in the given situations. There were three conditions. One of the three corresponding situations represented an experimental condition and was randomly assigned to each participant: my perception condition, others’ perception condition, and control condition. In the my perception condition, participants were asked to imagine that they are standing in front of the mirror and looking closely at their own image. This condition is to prime participants to think about how they look in their own eyes. In the others’ perception condition, participants were asked to imagine that they are giving a presentation in front of a group of people and the group of people is watching them. In this condition, participants will be led to focus on how they look in others’ eyes. Finally, in the control condition, participants were asked to imagine that they are standing in the field and looking up at the sky. After imagining the given situations, participants were asked to answer three related questions.

2) Visual perception task:
Secondly, participants were asked to complete a visual perception task. The visual perception task consists of 50 questions. Each question provided participants with a visual illusion and three answer choices including a “skip” option. While answering the questions, you would have encountered a pop-up error message saying that a syntax error occurred in Question 15. Then, from Question 15 to 50, you would have been “accidentally” informed about the correct answer of each question. In fact, these pop-up and error messages were not real but parts of our research design. Among the 36 questions with this error (Q15 – Q50), 15 were actually unsolvable questions. Nevertheless, the error message of these questions kept participants informed that one of the choices is the correct answer, so that the participants needed to decide whether they should answer based on what they actually see or what the error messages tell them.
In the process, there were three conditions. One of the three corresponding questionnaires representing each experimental condition was randomly assigned to each participant: an others correct condition, others skip condition, and control condition. In the others correct condition and the others skip condition, participants were provided with a correct answer rate for each question. In the others skip condition, the correct answer rates were 0-2% from Question 15 on. This was to indicate that most of the others are not following the error message. In the others correct condition, on the other hand, the correct answer rates were 96-100% from Question 15 on. This was to indicate that most of the others were following the error message. Finally, in the control condition, correct answer rates were not be provided.

3) Personality questionnaire:
Thirdly, participants were asked to complete a questionnaire assessing how they perceive themselves (metaperception) and demographics.

We are expecting that what people choose to do will be influenced by a combination of what others do, the perspective people take on themselves, and possibly their culture. Right now, we do not know how each of these factors will influence people, so we are running this study to find out.

Though the nature of the study design called for it, we apologize for not previously disclosing these explanations to you. We really appreciate your participation. We hope that this experiment can be a great learning experience for you. Also, be assured that all of the data from the questionnaires are anonymous. All your responses will be analyzed by a participant number and your personal data will be kept confidential. If you would like us to discard your data, we will discard it immediately. If you have any questions about or suggestions for this research, you are free to contact Minjae Seo at minjaes2@illinois.edu or Dr. Dov Cohen at dovcohen@illinois.edu.

Please do not discuss this study with individuals who might participate in this study.
Thank you again for your participation.

Kim, Y-H., Cohen, D., & Au, W-T. (2010). The jury and abjury of my peers: The self in Face and Dignity cultures. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 98, 904-916.
Kim, Y-H., & Cohen, D. (2010). Information, perspective, and judgments about the self in Face and Dignity cultures. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 36, 537-550.