We argue that a way culture influences decisions is through the reasons that individuals recruit when required to explain their choices. Specifically, we propose that cultures endow individuals with different rules or principles that provide guidance for making decisions, and a need to provide reasons activates such cultural knowledge. This proposition, representing a dynamic rather than dispositional view of cultural influence, is investigated in studies of consumer decisions that involve a trade-off between diverging attributes, such as low price and high quality. Principles enjoining compromise are more salient in East Asian cultures than in North American culture, and accordingly, we predict that cultural differences in the tendency to choose compromise options will be greater when the decision task requires that participants provide reasons. In study 1, a difference between Hong Kong Chinese and North American participants in the tendency to select compromise products emerged only when they were asked to explain their decisions, with Hong Kong decision makers more likely and Americans less likely to compromise. Content analysis of participants' reasons confirmed that cultural differences in the frequency of generating particular types of reasons mediated the difference in choices. Studies 2 and 3 replicate the interactive effect of culture and the need to provide reasons in a comparison of North American versus Japanese participants and in a comparison of European-American and Asian-American participants, respectively. Studies 4 and 5 found that Hong Kong Chinese participants, compared with Americans, evaluate proverbs and the reasons of others more positively when these favor compromise. We discuss the value of conceptualizing cultural influences in terms of dynamic strategies rather than as dispositional tendencies.

Calling consumers' attention to their cultural identity can make them aware of their membership in a group and, therefore, can induce a group mind-set. This mindset, in turn, leads them to make decisions that minimize the risk of negative outcomes to both themselves and others. The effects of this mind-set generalize over both group and individual choice situations. These possibilities were confirmed in a series of six experiments. Results showed that making people feel part of an ad hoc group increased not only their use of equality as a basis for allocating resources to themselves and others, but also their tendency to compromise in individual consumer choice situations. Moreover, calling Asian and Western participants' attention to their cultural identity also induced feelings of being part of a group and, as a result, had analogous effects on decisions in both group and consumer choice situations.R esearch and theory on consumer behavior must take into account the way in which individuals' cultural backgrounds influence their judgments and decisions. An understanding of this influence, however, is complicated by a number of factors. For one thing, cultural differences in behavior may only be apparent when the culture-related norms and values that bear on a decision to engage in this behavior are accessible in memory at the time the decision is made (Aaker and Lee 2001; Briley, Morris, and Simonson 2000; see also Briley and Wyer 2001;Hong et al. 2000). This culture-related knowledge is most likely to have an influence when people are not clearly aware of the factors that have led it to come to mind. In fact, calling people's cultural identity to their attention could have effects that override the influence of culture-related norms and values. Moreover, these effects may be similar across individuals regardless of the specific culture that they represent.The present research examined this possibility. Specifically, we hypothesized that calling individuals' attention to their national or cultural identity (like making them

Political ideology plays a pivotal role in shaping individuals’ attitudes, opinions, and behaviors. However, apart from a handful of studies, little is known about how consumers’ political ideology affects their marketplace behavior. The authors used three large consumer complaint databases from the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, and Federal Communications Commission in conjunction with a county-level indicator of political ideology (the 2012 US presidential election results) to demonstrate that conservative consumers are not only less likely than liberal consumers to report complaints but also less likely to dispute complaint resolutions. A survey also sheds light on the relationship between political ideology and complaint/dispute behavior. Due to stronger motivations to engage in “system justification,” conservative (as opposed to liberal) consumers are less likely to complain or dispute. The present research offers a useful means of identifying those consumers most and least likely to complain and dispute, given that political ideology is more observable than most psychological factors and more stable than most situational factors. Furthermore, this research and its theoretical framework open opportunities for future research examining the influence of political ideology on other marketplace behaviors.

Four experiments demonstrate that culture-based differences in persuasion arise when a person processes information in a cursory, spontaneous manner, but these differences dissipate when a person's intuitions are supplemented by more deliberative processing. North Americans are persuaded more by promotion-focused information, and Chinese people are persuaded more by prevention-focused information, but only when initial, automatic reactions to messages are given. Corrections to these default judgments occur when processing is thoughtful. These results underscore the idea that culture does not exert a constant, unwavering effect on consumer judgments. A key factor in determining whether culture-based effects loom large or fade is the extent to which a person draws on cultural versus more personal knowledge when he or she is forming judgments.

Prior research suggests that bicultural individuals (i.e., individuals with 2 distinct sets of cultural values) shift the values they espouse depending on cues such as language. The authors examined whether the effects of language extend to a potentially less malleable domain, behavioral decisions, exploring the extent to which bilingual individuals shift the underlying strategies used to resolve choice problems. Although past research has explained language‐induced shifts in terms of knowledge accessibility principles, the motivation to conform to observers’ norms can also drive these shifts. This article focuses on shifts in the general strategy of avoiding losses rather than pursuing gains, which is more often exhibited by Chinese than by Westerners. Five studies of Hong Kong bicultural individuals found that language manipulation (Cantonese vs. English) increases tendencies to choose compromise options in a product decision task, endorse associated decision guidelines that advocate moderation as opposed to extreme paths, defer decision making in problems where it can be postponed, and endorse decision guidelines that advocate caution rather than decisive action. A motivational explanation of these effects was confirmed.