Compliance with a Request in Two Cultures: The Differential Influence of Social Proof and Commitment/Consistency on Collectivists and Individualists

Abstract

University students in Poland and the United States, two countries that differ in individualistic-collectivistic orientation, indicated their willingness to comply with a request to participate without pay in a marketing survey. Half were asked to do so after considering information regarding their own history of compliance with such requests, whereas the other half were asked to do so after considering information regarding their peers’ history of such compliance. This was designed to assess the impact of two social influence principles (commitment/consistency and social proof, respectively) on participants’ decisions. As expected, although both principles were influential across cultures, the commitment/consistency principle had greater impact on Americans, whereas the social proof principle had greater impact on Poles. Additional analyses indicated that this effect was due principally, but not entirely, to participants’ personal individualistic-collectivistic orientations rather than to the dominant individualistic-collectivistic orientation of their cultures.

Disrupt-Then-Reframe is in the Air: A French Replication and Refinement

“…So the DTR technique has until now been eff ectively operationalised in the countries of North America (United States), Western Europe (the Netherlands, France), and Unauthenticated Download Date | 5/12/18 12:58 PM also in Eastern Europe (Poland). However, the study by Cialdini et al (1999) demonstrated that the probability of obtaining compliance behaviours was higher in the United States than in Poland. Th e authors explain their results in the light of the notions of individualism, which characterises American culture, and of collectivism, which characterises Polish culture (Hofstede, 1980, as cited in Cialdini et al, 1999.…”

“…In the case of the DTR technique, these cultural diff erences do not seem to play a role. Future research would no doubt benefi t from manipulating these notions in the manner of Cialdini et al (1999), within the specifi c framework of the DTR, and from extending the study of the technique to other cultures.…”

“…In other words, an operationalization of the disrupt phase may have the expected eff ects of the technique within a culture, but no longer work in another if the scripts employed are not socially adapted. Although the transculturality of social infl uence processes is a fi eld of Unauthenticated Download Date | 5/12/18 12:58 PM research that has been litt le investigated by social psychologists, several studies (Aaker, 2000;Cialdini, Wosinska, Barrett , Butner, & Gornik-Durose, 1999;Han & Shavitt , 1994) have nevertheless demonstrated that the eff ects of persuasive communications varied in diff erent cultures (Courbet & Marchioli, in press). In a similar vein, persuasion techniques like the touch technique (Kleinke, 1977) and the "but you are free of" technique (Guéguen & Pascual, 2000), or those based on successive requests as with the foot-in-the-door technique (Freedman & Fraser, 1966), are also known for being sensitive to cultural eff ects (Guéguen & Pascual, 2000;Pascual et al, 2012;Petrova, Cialdini, & Sills, 2007).…”

What influences respondents to behave consistently when asked to consent to health record linkage on repeat occasions?

“…People in general are inclined to be consistent with what they said or did in the past. Thus, after committing themselves to a particular action or set of behaviours, they are likely to act in ways that reflect this commitment especially if it is freely made Downloaded by [UCL Library Services] at 07:45 21 November 2017 (Cialdini, Wosinska, Barrett, Butner, & Gornik-Durose, 1999, p. 1244. In this study, the consistency principle implies that respondents who have consented to link their survey and administrative data in the past are likely to consent in subsequent waves of data collection.…”

Talking heads : interviewing suspects from a cultural perspective

“…Another powerful principle is the human tendency to strive for consistency between present and past behaviour and/or attitudes (see also Festinger, 1957). Particularly, once people have committed themselves to a certain act, they will have a natural tendency to behave in a way that is consistent with the act of commitment (e.g., Cialdini, Cacioppo, Bassett, & Miller, 1978;Cialdini & Goldstein, 2004;Cialdini & Trost, 1998;Cialdini, Wosinska, Barrett, Butner, & Gornik-Durose, 1999).…”