CULTURED MINDS

EMOTION

 

Emotion or internal feeling state is sometimes called ‘affect’ and is widely accepted as a part of the human decision making process (Cohen & Pham, 2008). In fact, studies (Damasio, 1994; 2000) have shown that people unable to feel emotion cannot function properly nor make decisions crucial to their daily functioning. Although it’s nice to think that decisions are completely rational and calculated, we know that the majority of our choices are made using mental shortcuts (heuristics) - of which a prominent one is the affect heuristic a.k.a following your ‘gut’ feeling. 

 

But perhaps the extent to which people use emotion in their decisions also varies across cultures? And studies suggest that people prefer different types of emotion (e.g high-arousal versus low-arousal positive states) - does this impact their choices?

 

 

Using Emotion to make decisions

Those with a dominant interdependent self-construal appear to value emotion differently to people with an independent self-construal when making decisions. In particular, (Falk, Dunn, & Norenzayan, 2010) contend that expected positive emotions have less influence on decision making for interdependents. They show that Euro-Canadians are more likely to choose an enjoyable activity over a useful one and the trend which was reversed for East Asians. They concluded “expected enjoyment plays a significant role in decision making across cultures, but that this role may be attenuated for individuals from East Asian cultures due to their interdependent sense of self.”

 

(Kitayama & Markus, 2000; Uchida et al., 2004) also proposed that people from more collectivistic cultures prefer to seek a balance of both positive and negative emotions rather than maximising positive affect (e.g happiness) as is the goal in many individualistic cultures. This aim follows logically from the Asian ideal of the Yin and Yang where both good and bad are present in the ideal of lasting harmony (Ji, Nisbett & Su, 2001; Lu, Gilmour & Kao, 2001; Lu & Gilmour, 2004). 

 

 

Emotion and purchases

Impulse purchase is a category of consumer behaviour which is thought to be triggered by and subject to strong emotion (Rook, 1987; Silvera, Lavack & Kropp, 2008). Although (Lee & Kacen, 2008) found no significant difference between buying impulsiveness personality traits between caucasians and asians, they did observe a difference in impulsive buying behaviour. They realised that profiles for ‘impulse purchasers’ differ across country cultures - an important finding for advertisement targeting. Their findings support trends in their earlier work (Lee & Kacen, 2002) as well as (Kashima et. al, 1992) which revealed that collectivists less likely to act on their trait buying impulsiveness (by making an impulse purchase). They speculated that impulse purchases are not as socially acceptable for Asians. They also tend to involve high-arousal emotions such as ‘excitement’ (Verplanken et al., 2005) cited in (Silvera, Lavack & Kropp, 2008), which are less sought after in the East where low-arousal positive states such as ‘contentment’ are more socially acceptable (Tsai, 2007; Tsai, Miao, Seppala, Fung & Yeung, 2007).