Society, Culture, and Performance Forecast: The Role of Occupational Mobility and the Belief in the Fixed World

67 p.Thesis (Ph.D.)--University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, 2007.This research examines the link among society, culture and cognition by studying a specific manifestation of this process: how experiences with occupational mobility in the society influence the perceived malleability of the world versus the individual, which in turn impacts performance forecast and decision making. The author conducted four studies to examine this process. In study 1, the author compared Chinese from Hong Kong and Mainland China with Americans and found that Chinese assigned greater importance to personality-profession fit when making performance forecast. This cross-cultural difference is predicted by Chinese's perception of low occupational mobility and mediated by Chinese's tendency (relative to Americans) to perceive the individuals as more malleable than the world. In Study 2 and 3, the author manipulated participants' belief of occupational mobility and lay belief of the world and personality and replicated the cross-cultural difference in performance forecast with American participants. In study 4, the author simulated different level of occupational mobility in the laboratory and found American participants adjusted their job-application decision according to environmental requirements.U of I OnlyRestricted to the U of I community idenfinitely during batch ingest of legacy ETD