Dimensions in social space: A comparative study of China, Korea, and America

Charles Osgood is one of the pioneers who applied semantic differential methods to study affective meanings in different cultures. In their cross-cultural comparative study of 21 language/culture communities in the world, Osgood et al. discovered that evaluation, potency, and activity (EPA) were the three most salient dimensions underlying people's affective feelings toward things in their environment, and they seemed to be universally present in all the 21 cultures studied. (Osgood, May, and Miron 1975) This discovery later found a major application in David Heise's construction of the mathematical model for the affect control theory (ACT) in social psychology and subsequent research conducted under the ACT tradition.;Using newly collected survey data from China, this study strives to offer a closer look at the dimensionalities of affective meanings, especially those regarding social identities. Data collected in Korea and the US are used as comparisons. Analysis of the survey data demonstrates that people's affective feelings toward things "social" could be quite different from those toward things "material," and the dimensions underlying affective meanings about social identities could vary from culture to culture.;If we imagine a social space in which the individual arranges people by the feelings this individual has toward them, then these dimensions could be the dimensions that define such a social space. With data from the three cultures, this study will explore what kind of "social landscape" might exist in such social space, and how it might differ from one culture to another. The results suggest that we need to chart the social space defined by these "social" dimensions carefully because the subjective meanings embedded in the social space could be quite different in different cultures.