Culturally conferred conceptions of agency: A key to social perception of persons, groups, and other actors

Many tendencies in socialperceivers 'judgments about individuals and groups can be integrated in terms of the premise that perceivers rely on implicit theories ofagency acquiredfrom cultural traditions. Whereas American culture primarily conceptual-izes agency as a property of individual persons, other cultures conceptualize agency primarily in terms ofcollectives such as groups or nonhuman actors such as deities or fate. Cultural conceptions ofagency exist in publicforms (discourses, texts, and insti-tutions) and private forms (perceivers ' knowledge structures), and the more promi-nent the public representations ofa specific conception in a society, the more chroni-cally accessible it will be in perceivers ' minds. We review evidencefor these claims by contrasting North American and Chinese cultures. From this integrative model ofso-cial perception as mediated by agency conceptions, we draw insightsfor research on implicit theories and research on culture. What implicit theory research gains is a better grasp on the content, origins, and variation ofthe knowledge structures central to social perception. What cultural psychology gains is a middle-range model of the mechanism underlying cultural influence on dispositional attribution, which yield