Recent metamotivation research revealed that Westerners recognize that promotion versus prevention motivations benefit performance on eager versus vigilant tasks, respectively; that is, they know how to create task-motivation fit with respect to regulatory focus. Westerners also believe that, across tasks, promotion is more beneficial than prevention (i.e., a promotion bias). Adopting a cross-cultural approach, we examined whether beliefs about task-motivation fit generalize across cultures, whether Easterners exhibit a contrasting prevention bias, and the role of independence/interdependence in these beliefs. Results revealed cross-cultural similarities in metamotivational beliefs. Moreover, Easterners and Westerners alike often exhibited a promotion bias, suggesting that this effect may not be shaped by culture. One potential cultural difference did emerge: Easterners appeared to recognize how to create task-motivation fit for both independent and interdependent outcomes, whereas Westerners only recognized how to do so for independent outcomes. We discuss the role of culture in shaping metamotivation.
Metamotivation refers to the beliefs and mechanisms by which people regulate their motivational states to achieve desired ends. Recent metamotivation research demonstrates that Westerners recognize the benefits of engaging in high-level and low-level construal (i.e., motivational orientations toward abstract, essential vs. concrete, idiosyncratic features) for performance on various tasks. We present the first cross-cultural investigation of this knowledge of how to create such construal level task-motivation fit in Eastern and Western cultures. Two studies reveal that American and Japanese participants similarly understand the benefits of high-level versus low-level construal. American and Japanese participants also similarly recognize the various strategies with which to induce high-level versus low-level construal—for example, thinking about why versus how (Study 1) and engaging in global versus local visual processing (Study 2). Study 2 also suggests that this metamotivational knowledge in both cultures may guide people’s preferences for these preparatory strategies when anticipating different performance tasks. Taken together, the current research provides preliminary evidence of cross-cultural consistency in metamotivational knowledge of the benefits of high-level and low-level construal and the functional role of this metamotivational knowledge in goal pursuit.
The layout of visual elements in advertising influences consumers' perception and judgments. The research reported here investigates the influence of the face orientation of a human model on the perception of their attractiveness and its downstream consequences on product evaluation. Across five experiments, we first demonstrate that consumers tend to perceive a model's face showing his or her left cheek as more attractive than when showing the right cheek, even when the images are otherwise identical. More importantly, we demonstrate the downstream influence of face orientation on the evaluation of advertised products whereby the leftward (vs. rightward) model's face increases the evaluation of the advertised product through perceived model attractiveness. We identify the underlying mechanism of the face orientation effect, namely, that consumers perceive those faces showing their left (vs. right) cheek as more prototypical, and that this perception of prototypicality elicits an aesthetic preference for the model's leftward face which in turn carries over to influence product evaluation. The theoretical and practical implications of this research are also discussed.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.