Cultural Differences in the Persuasiveness of Evidence Types and Evidence Quality

Abstract

Cultural differences in reasoning and persuasion have mainly been documented for the East*West divide. Nisbett (2003) expects such differences to be absent for Western cultures because of their shared Grecian inheritance. The results of two experiments, however, show that France and The Netherlands, both Western European countries, differ with respect to the persuasiveness of different evidence types. In Study 1 (N0600), cultural differences occurred between the relative persuasiveness of anecdotal, statistical, causal, and expert evidence. In Study 2 (N0600), the quality of statistical and expert evidence was manipulated. For the Dutch, but not for the French, normatively strong evidence was more persuasive than normatively weak evidence for both evidence types. Implications and possible explanations are discussed.Keywords: Argument Quality; Evidence; France; Persuasion; The NetherlandsIn current theories on persuasion, it is believed that under certain conditions the quality of the arguments in a persuasive message determines the outcome of the persuasion process (Chaiken,

Epistemic authority of professors and researchers: differential perceptions by students from two cultural-educational systems

“…This explanation found no support, as the scores on Need for Cognition (NFC) for French (M = 3.28, SD = 0.75) and Dutch (M = 3.13, SD = 0.75) participants did not significantly differ (t (216) = 0.02, p = .99). A cultural difference was found, though, on the preference for expert information: contrary to earlier findings (Hornikx and Hoeken 2007), the Dutch (M = 2.66, SD = 0.76) had a higher preference for expert information than the French (M = 2.40, SD = 0.87; t (216) = 2.69, p < .01). Preference for expert information was therefore not considered an alternative explanation for the cross-cultural difference in expertise judgments.…”

“…When claims are highly improbable (e.g., "smoking reduces the risk of lung cancer"), people disbelieve such claims regardless of the support provided (see Edwards and Smith 1996). Eight claims were borrowed from Hornikx and Hoeken (2007). A pretest had shown these eight claims to be moderately probable.…”

“…The claims were related to different issues such as fear of driving cars, work productivity, and young criminals. For each claim, a relevant and an irrelevant discipline had been determined in a session with Dutch students (Hornikx and Hoeken 2007). Table 1 gives the eight claims in an English translation.…”

“…A second alternative explanation might be that the French participants appreciate information given by experts more than the Dutch participants. Therefore, participants responded on a 5-point Likert scale to four items of the Preference for Expert Information (PEI) scale from Hornikx and Hoeken (2007), which measures the degree to which people appreciate information given by experts (α = .81). The questionnaire ended with questions about participants' age, gender, nationality, and current education.…”

Laypeople’s Evaluation of Arguments: Are Criteria for Argument Quality Scheme-Specific?

“…In experimental studies, we found substantial support for this hypothesis: violation of the criteria trustworthiness (Hoeken et al 2012(Hoeken et al , 2014 and recency (Hoeken et al 2012) for argumentation from authority, relevant similarities and irrelevant dissimilarities for argumentation from analogy (Hoeken and Hustinx 2009;Hoeken et al 2012), number of examples (Hoeken and Hustinx 2009;Hoeken et al 2014;Hornikx and Hoeken 2007) and relevance of example for argumentation from example (Hoeken et al 2014), cause sufficiency and cause relevance for argumentation from cause to effect (Hoeken et al 2014) and desirability of effect (Hoeken et al 2012) for argumentation from consequence resulted in a significantly lower claim acceptability. Only violation of the criteria expertise (for argumentation from authority) and effectivity (for argumentation from consequence) did not always reveal the effect predicted (Hoeken et al 2012(Hoeken et al , 2014, possibly as a result of too subtle manipulations.…”