CULTURED MINDS
An Investigation of How Culture Affects Decision Making
UNIQUE/CONFORM
Cultures differ in the extent they endorse values of uniqueness versus conformity. Collectivism/individualism and independence/interdependence are most widely used dimensions to describe and predict this distinction. (Kitayama, 1991) uses proverbs to symbolise this cultural difference: In the individualistic culture (U.S) ‘‘the squeaky wheel gets the grease’’ whilst in the collectivistic culture (Japan) ‘‘the nail that sticks up gets pounded down”
Conformity and uniqueness preferences manifest themselves in both social interactions and product choice. In a variety of abstract (e.g choose a coloured dot) and real-life tasks (e.g choose a red/blue coloured pen), East Asian participants overwhelmingly chose the option that represented conformity. So if 8 of the 10 pens were blue, they would choose a blue pen, whereas European Americans preferred to choose the ‘unique’ options (Kim & Markus, 1999).
A similar effect was detected by (Krijnen, 2010) for food choice. Analysis of a restaurants menu orders (and lab experiments) showed that people with collectivistic cultural backgrounds tend to seek uniformity (e.g ordering the same dish as others at the table) while people from more individualist cultures opted for choices that produced a group-level variety.
Brand vs Generic Products
Asian Americans consistently chose brand-name products (rather than generic-name) ones, whereas European Americans did not. The authors posit that conformity/uniqueness motivations are driven by ‘social status concerns’ whereby people with a collectivistic cultural background are more wary of ‘social censure’ that may result from sticking out.
(Kim & Drolet, 2009)