The importance of traits and group memberships

Anglo-Americans and Mexican-Americans were asked to list five of their trai ts and five of their group memberships. They were also asked to rank (relat ive to each other) and rate (on an absolute scale) the importance of these traits and groups. Consistent with the distinction between individualist an d collectivist cultures, Mexican-Americans ranked and rated their groups as being more important than did Anglo-Americans. In addition, although parti cipants from both cultural groups gave greatly decreased ratings for less i mportant groups, this decrease was more pronounced for Anglo-Americans than for Mexican-Americans. Finally, the data indicated that the perceived impo rtance of group memberships is only weakly related to their cognitive acces sibility. Copyright (C) 2001 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.