The Practice of Social influence in Multiple Cultures

Wilhelmina Wosinska, Robert B. Cialdini, Daniel W. Barrett, Janusz Reykowski

• Publisher: Psychology Press
• Year: 2000
• Print ISBN: 9780805832792
• eBook ISBN: 9781135705961
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: History & Theory in Psychology
• Index: Psychology

This book provides a diverse collection of studies reporting the effects of social influence processes in multiple cultures at both the universal and culture-specific levels. The book is characterized by three distinct features. First, the social influence process is considered as a ubiquitous and pervasive feature of human interaction. Second, the book represents a multicultural approach which includes both cross-cultural and culture-focused examinations. Third, the book emphasizes practical implications of the research presented. This volume incorporates theory and research stemming from three different approaches to social influence: social influence principles across cultures, social influence and social change across cultures, and culture and moral perspective in the social influence process. Because each of these three parts encompasses a considerable variety of research methodologies, social contexts, and cultures, each is proceeded by an integrative commentary authored by one of the book editors. These essays provide syntheses of the topics and themes within the corresponding sections and within the book as a whole. They also offer critical commentaries on both theoretical and methodological issues, raise suggestions for future research, and focus on practical applications. This book is intended for both scholars interested in cross- and multicultural research into the mechanisms of the social influence process and for the professional whose mission is to make planned changes in a society. Knowledge about the influence process, especially regarding how it works in different cultures and within several cultural groups, facilitates this goal. The practical implications ending each chapter serve as encouraging instructions for such applications.

Part I:
Principles of Social Influence
Across Cultures

Janusz Reykowski
Polish Academy of Science

Overview and Commentary

Most of the research on social influence has been conducted in Western countries and primarily within the United States. Nevertheless, many people regard the basic principles of influence to be universal. In other words, they assume that the principles operate in similar ways in divergent cultures. This seems to be a latent assumption not only among authors who have described these principles, but also among many readers in various countries who accepted, with enthusiasm, translations of Cialdini’s (1993) book Influence: Science and Practice into their respective languages. One question should be asked: To what extent can one generalize the findings concerning the mechanisms of social influence beyond the original milieu in which they were discovered and successfully applied? Relatedly, what is the role of cultural factors in people’s reactions to various influence strategies? The first part of this volume discusses these very questions.

The first three chapters of Part I are focused primarily, but not solely, on one important mechanism of social influence that has been called the principle of commitment. A plethora of research has demonstrated that people who are led to commit themselves to certain behavior are likely to perform it when requested, despite mounting difficulties and decreasing attractiveness of the goal. Is this mechanism equally effective in various cultures?

In the first chapter, Iyengar and Brockner review research concerning this issue. First, they summarize many studies that show that when individuals commit to a certain activity, they develop attitudes consistent with such commitment, which then sustain this activity. Such commitment is stronger if it was public, if the corresponding activity required much effort, if it was irrevocable, and if it was freely chosen. Free choice appears to be an especially potent factor. Researchers found that every time people were convinced that they made the choice, they became much more persistent in their efforts. Do these results apply to people in general?

Iyengar and Brockner (chap. 1) point out that free choice holds a high position in the hierarchy of American values. It is related to the self-conception of the American people, especially to the ideal of the independent self, which is characteristic of this individualistic culture. However, the ideal of the independent self is not universal. As Markus and Kitayama (1991) explained, in collectivistic cultures, such as those in the Far East, people strive for interconnectedness and belonging. This striving is one reason that the interdependent self seems more malleable across contexts and why self-consistency may be less important for them. On the basis of this reasoning, Iyengar and Brockner hypothesize that the provision of personal choice can be more motivating for American individualists than for Asian collectivists. Their research reported in chapter 1 supports this hypothesis. In fact, choice was a much more effective manipulation for American children than for their Asian counterparts. At the same time, they found that Asian children were more motivated when the choice was made by an important ingroup member—the children’s mothers; the Asian children did significantly worse when they made their own choices. The latter result also indicates that there must be important cultural differences in the operation of the social proof principle on behavior. For a collectivist, social proof can be a potent mechanism of influence, provided that it comes from ingroup members.

The theoretical analysis and the data provided by Iyengar and Brockner clearly show that cultural differences do matter as far as social influence processes are concerned. However, the authors formulate some warnings. In particular, they underscore that cultures are not homogenous and members of a given society are not all alike. In other words, the same dimensions of comparison that distinguish people between cultures may also differentiate people within a given culture. Therefore, to account for differences in people’s reactions to particular forms of social influence, one should not depend solely on knowledge of cultural membership—one also has to take into account the specific position of the given persons on the specific dimension of comparison that is relevant for the given principle of influence. For the principles of commitment and social proofs, the relevant dimension is individualism/collectivism (I/C).

The significance of this postulate is well illustrated in chapter 2 by Cialdini, Wosinska, Barrett, Butner, and Górnik-Durose. It reports their research concerning the effectiveness of two social influence principles—commitment/consistency and social proof—in two different cultural contexts: individualistic and collectivistic. The authors hypothesize that in societies where collectivistic tendencies are relatively strong, social proof may affect compliance to a greater degree than in societies where individualism predominates. The opposite should be true about the commitment/consistency principle. The authors also expect that it would not be sheer national belonging and national I/C orientation that crucially influences compliance, but rather personal I/C orientation. They tested their hypotheses by recruiting subjects in two countries: the United States and Poland. Their data support previous research that indicated that collectivistic tendencies are more prevalent and of greater intensity in Poland than in the United States. Their main findings confirmed the hypotheses formulated by the authors. In particular, the evidence suggests that the strength of personal I/C orientation differentiates susceptibility to the two social influence procedures.

Thus, taking together the analyses and data provided in first two chapters of this part of the volume, one may conclude that the same social influence principles operate in various cultures but with unequal strength: In some cultures, some of the principles appear to be more potent than in others. The specific characteristic of the culture that was found to be responsible for this difference was individualism/collectivism. It was also found that the location of an individual on this dimension tends to determine his or her reactions to the various forms of social influence rather than his or her national culture.

The Cialdini et al. research also produced some unexpected results. One was that collectivists in both countries tended to comply more than individualists, independent of influence principle. The authors conjecture that it may be because collectivists possess a stronger social responsibility norm than do individualists and found empirical support for it in an additional experiment described in the chapter. Nonetheless, one may still wonder whether this is a universal truth. On the basis of I/C theory (Triandis, 1990, 1994), one might expect that, for collectivists, the social responsibility norm has a rather narrow range of application —it is limited to ingroups. Moreover, this norm is also respected by individualists, although its motivational basis may be different than for collectivists. With this in mind, one has to be cautious about emphasizing the role of the social responsibility norm in this instance. Other plausible explanations could probably be generated here that could be explored in future research. However, this commentary is not the place for extensive speculations on why, in this research, collectivists manifested a higher degree of compliance than individualists.

Another unexpected result of the Cialdini et al. research concerned Polish individualists: They were not affected by the manipulations based on the commitment/consistency principle. These authors operationalized commitment/consistency as information about one’s past behavior. It should be taken into consideration, however, that information about one’s own past behavior may have different meaning for different people. Some people would understand it as evidence concerning their internal attributes and thus feel obliged to maintain self-consistency by behaving in the same way, whereas others may regard such information—especially when provided by someone whose strategic intentions are not concealed—as a manipulation impinging on their freedom of choice. In such a case, reactance may be a likely response. Thus, individualists who regard freedom of choice as an important value may, in some circumstances, react paradoxically to the information about their own past activities. As a matter of fact, commonsense knowledge about the Polish character suggests that reactance is a frequent reaction among Poles.

There is still another aspect of the commitment/consistency principle that should be considered here. Cialdini et al. maintain that the motivating power of the practices based on this principle comes from information about one’s own past behavior. However, they would probably not argue against the proposition that the concept of commitment could be extended to include other behavior. This is in fact what Spangenberg and Greenwald (chap. 3) do in their chapter on self-prophecy. On the basis of previous research and their own studies, they suggest that predictions concerning one’s own future action increase the probability of executing the given action. The authors mention two conditions that have to be met for the self-prophecy effect to occur consistently: The given action is socially desirable, and subjects are unable to make confident self-predictions based on their past behavior.

As to the first condition, it may require a fairly liberal interpretation. In one of the experiments, the self-prophecy effect was found for a rather odd kind of behavior —namely, singing on the phone. It is difficult to assume that singing on the phone is socially desirable behavior unless one agrees that social desirability can be defined in a concrete situation by specific persons or a group. The second condition indicates that there might be a competition between self-prophecy and well-established patterns of behavior. In such a competition, the well-established patterns are bound to win, indicating that consistency with past behavior has priority over consistency with situationally evoked predictions.

Spangenberg and Greenwald argue that the self-prophecy effect is robust in both the magnitude of the effect size and the variety of contexts in which it has been observed. Therefore, it can be used as an effective tool of social influence. Although they explain this phenomenon by referring to value-action discrepancy, it can also be seen as another instance of the commitment/consistency principle. Still there are questions about its applicability in various cultural contexts. The authors consider that cultural differences in normative systems may play an important mediating role. That is, the strength of the norm associated with the given behavior may influence the self-prophecy effect concerning that behavior. Another cultural difference that is taken into consideration is the method of evoking the predictions. The authors believe that the standard American approach—using telephones or paper-and-pencil technique—would not be feasible in many countries.

However, the problem runs deeper than that. As discussed earlier and in the first two chapters, there are good reasons to doubt whether consistency appeals engender equally strong motivation in different cultural contexts. On the basis of this reasoning, one can expect that consistency effects should be much stronger in cultures where an independent construal of the self predominates than in cultures where the interdependent construal does—or, in other words, in individualistic rather than collectivistic contexts.

The role of the individualistic versus collectivistic cultural contexts in determining the effectiveness of social influence is not limited to the commitment/consistency and social proof principles. Data and analyses presented in chapter 4 by Miller, Kozu and Davis, show that several other factors of social influence can be modified by cultural context. These authors focus on how empathy and sympathy are affected by three different factors of social influence: beliefs about similarity to a target person, observational set (focusing attention on psychological states—feelings and thoughts of a target person vs. focusing it on the objective situation), and beliefs about responsibility for the predicament of a target person (the target person’s responsibility for his or her condition vs. external, uncontrollable causes). One may notice that only the first factor is somewhat related to the principles of social influence described by Cialdini (1993)—the similarity manipulation tends to evoke liking that facilitates social impact. The two others are more specific: They regard instances where the influence consists of evoking affective responses toward exigencies of a particular person.

The authors’ present a meta-analysis of studies conducted in the United States and several countries in Europe and Asia. The results of this analysis indicate, first of all, that the three factors of social influence operate cross-culturally (i.e., it may be reasonable to contend that evoking beliefs about similarity to a given person, focusing attention on his or her psychological states, or providing information that a target person is not responsible for his or her negative situation tend to facilitate empathetic and sympathetic responding across cultures). In discussing their results, the authors point out that similarity appeared to have the least influence in eliciting the prosocial effect, but this observation is rather ambiguous. To make a direct comparison of various social influence factors, one should have a common measure of the strength of these factors. Unfort...

Table of contents

• COVER PAGE
• TITLE PAGE
• COPYRIGHT PAGE
• PREFACE
• ABOUT THE EDITORS
• PART I: PRINCIPLES OF SOCIAL INFLUENCE ACROSS CULTURES
• PART II: SOCIAL INFLUENCE AND SOCIAL CHANGE ACROSS CULTURES
• PART III: CULTURE AND MORAL PERSPECTIVE IN THE SOCIAL INFLUENCE PROCESS