GLOMO^sys: Specifications of a Global Model on Processing Styles

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Notes

¹Some commentaries wonder whether the paradigms used really prevent confounding procedural from semantic priming. We admit that this is a tricky issue; however, it is not the case that people in the Navon letter priming experiments are explicitly asked to attend to the global or the local level. Typically, under diverse cover stories (e.g., of concentration or attention task), they are merely instructed to decide whether certain letters appear on the screen, and the task is manipulated in a way that in the global condition the targets just happen to be the large letters and in the other, local condition just happen to be the small ones. This unobtrusive manipulation prevents systematic activation of certain semantics that could haven driven effects. It is possible, yet unlikely, that participants who have the goal to concentrate activate at the same time goals such as “look at the Gestalt” or “look at the details,” and it is even more unlikely that such goals are conscious.

²In the studies, the authors distinguished between high self-affirmation and low self-affirmation. In contrast to Darwent et al’s. (this issue) description, we could not find a study in which participants’ self-affirmation was triggered by a self/other distinction. But in any event, if the value listed is rather abstract, then it probably triggers global processing as shown in this research, as the feature of the stimulus simply triggers the way it is usually processed. Alternatively, taking an NCT account, values as measured in self affirmation studies may reflect actual–ideal discrepancies. Such concepts may involve abstract, promotion focus concerns, and they may be ill defined. Therefore they subjectively may elicit a feeling of novelty.

³This is also true for the figure that Smith and Ledgerwood (this issue) present. Of course the world is more complex than the classic Navon task that consists of only two levels of global versus local features, and of course some dependent measures make it harder or even impossible to decide what the global or the local level might be. But people still look either globally or locally at events. The tipping point when people switch from one to the other level (or when glo-sys or lo-sys is activated) may be simply the point at which an individual can no longer see what he or she wants or needs to see: If I cannot see enough detail with the zoom lens of glo-sys activated, I will switch to lo-sys with the finer lens. Similarly, if I do not understand enough on one level of conceptual processing, I may switch to the other.

⁴A historical example of the danger to shape a psychological theory according to new neurophysiological evidence is Stanley Schacter. What would have remained if he would have just ignored all the brain studies that in the end proved to be wrong?

⁵Thus, from our perspective, the Festinger and Carlsmith analogy could as well be used to describe the reviewers own way of argumentation.

⁶Note that CLT is a cognitive theory (see Darwent et al’s, this issue, description) in which high level construals are said to be “more likely than low level construals to remain unchanged as closer one get to an object or farther away from it” (Trope & Liberman, 2010, p. 441), This might imply a need for stability that is, however, different from NCT’s motives to know and self-protection.

⁷We need to mention that some less systematic effects increase complexity to the variable of culture. For example, Davidoff, Fontenau, and Fagot (2008) explained a chronic local processing style in the Himbas of Nothern Africa, by their main activity of distinguishing features among animals—at a level of differentiation that was opaque to Westerners. Similarly, Colzato, van Hooidonk, van den Wildenberg, Harinck, and Hommel (2010) argued that homosexuals (being part of a “subculture”), because they are constantly searching for other ingroup members in the environment, may be trained to look at local features, a processing style that can become chronic as revealed in a study where gays showed a less pronounced global precedence effect. Such effects do not make the inter/independent distinction less valuable with respect to processing styles. Soft factors could, as previously mentioned, always change processing styles on the individual and on the (sub)cultural level.