Donnel A Briley

Factors Affecting Judgments of Prevalence and Representation: Implications for Public Policy and Marketing

Donnel A. Briley et al. — Sat, 22 Sep 2012 21:27:36 PDT

Public policies are typically established to eliminate important social problems (e.g., minority discrimination, crime, poverty). And the importance of these problems, and urgency people feel about addressing them, is influenced by perceptions of their prevalence. These perceptions, however, can be unwittingly biased by extraneous sources of information that lead some either to overestimate or underestimate the seriousness of the problem at hand. We review empirical work on the construction of perceptions of frequency and representativeness and the processes that underlie them, and show that these perceptions are often biased in ways that differ over segments of the population. The implications of these findings for developing public policy initiatives and de-biasing strategies are discussed.

Cultural influence on consumer motivations: A dynamic view

Donnel A. Briley — Thu, 04 Mar 2010 22:10:03 PST

The Effects of Culture on Decision Making and Judgment

Donnel A. Briley — Sat, 28 Mar 2009 19:09:09 PDT

When Does Culture Matter in Marketing

Donnel A. Briley et al. — Sat, 28 Mar 2009 19:06:37 PDT

Looking Forward, Looking Back: Cultural Differences and Similarities in Time Orientation

Donnel A. Briley — Sat, 28 Mar 2009 18:03:36 PDT

Cultural Change and Marketing

Steve Jenner et al. — Sat, 28 Mar 2009 16:31:11 PDT

The results of this study suggest that marketing strategies need to be adjusted to changing cultures. Culture affects marketing decisions regarding product, price, promotion and place (the 4 Ps). Many marketing studies have been reported based on Hofstede's seminal work on national culture (1980). Marketing managers need to be cautious about assuming the validity of the Anglo cluster equating the cultures of the United States (U.S.) and Canada. We should recognize that national cultures are changing in the U.S., Canada and Mexico, as well as most other countries in the world. Our findings for a very recent sample of people attending executive and MBA programs would seem to apply to the upwardly-mobile business class. Contrary to the ubiquitous Hofstede data found in textbooks, we found no significant differences in Power Distance between the U.S., Mexico and Canada. Our findings regarding differences in Uncertainty Avoidance show that Mexico did not have a significantly higher mean than the U.S., but that the U.S. had a higher mean than Canada. The U.S. and Canada did not differ significantly on Individualism/Collectivism. Our results suggest that caution should be taken in automatically assuming cultural parity between the U.S. and Canada and that established cultural positions between the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) member nations may be changing.

Bridging the Culture Chasm: Ensuring that Consumers are Healthy, Wealthy and Wise

Donnel A. Briley et al. — Sat, 28 Mar 2009 15:24:37 PDT

This article pulls together streams of culture-related research found in information-processing and behavioral decision theory literature, and it complements them with a focus on motivations and goals. The authors propose a framework that suggests that (1) the treatment of culture is useful when it incorporates subcultures, including those defined by nationality, ethnicity, religious affiliation, and neighborhood or local surroundings; (2) goals are determined by both cultural background and situational forces; and (3) through its impact on goals, culture influences the inputs used to make a decision, the types of options preferred, and the timing of decisions. The authors highlight the implications of the framework for two policy domains: health and finances. They suggest that consumers’ goal orientations can provide a useful segmentation dimension, and they carve out specific tendencies that appear to vary across cultural contexts (e.g., satisficing, goal shifting, reactivity). A deeper consideration of consumer goals and the role of culture in individual decision making can inform policies aimed at improving the quality of consumers’ decisions and, ultimately, consumer welfare.

When Does Culture Matter?: Effects of Personal Knowledge on the Correction of Culture-based Judgments

Donnel A. Briley et al. — Sat, 28 Mar 2009 15:17:02 PDT

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.

Cultural Chameleons: Biculturals, Conformity Motives, and Decision Making

Donnel A. Briley et al. — Sat, 28 Mar 2009 15:12:01 PDT

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, behavioural 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 byWesterners. 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.

Subjective Impressions of Minority Group Representation in the Media: A Comparison of Majority and Minority Viewers’ Judgments and Underlying Processes

Donnel A. Briley et al. — Sat, 28 Mar 2009 15:06:34 PDT

Consumers’ judgments of the frequency with which members of an ethnic minority are represented in advertisements can depend on the processing strategies they employ both at the time the ads are first encountered and at the time the judgments are reported. These strategies, in turn, can depend on whether the consumers personally belong to the minority group in question. European American and African American participants received a series of advertisements that varied in terms of the relative numbers of Black and White models that were portrayed. European Americans overestimated the number of Black models that appeared in the ads when the actual incidence of these models was low, but this overestimation decreased (and thus they became more accurate) as the number of ads containing these models increased. In contrast, African Americans were accurate when only a small number of Black models were presented, but became less accurate as the actual incidence of the models became greater. European Americans apparently based their estimates on the ease of recalling individual instances at the time of judgment, whereas African Americans appeared to perform an online tally of the number of Black models shown at the time they encountered them.

The Effects of Group Membership on the Avoidance of Negative Outcomes: Implications for Social and Consumer Decisions

Donnel A. Briley et al. — Sat, 28 Mar 2009 14:58:34 PDT

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.

Transitory Determinants of Values and Decisions: The Utility (or Non-utility) of Individualism-Collectivism in Understanding Cultural Differences

Donnel A. Briley et al. — Sat, 28 Mar 2009 14:53:19 PDT

The determinants and effects of cultural differences in the values described by individualism-collectivism were examined in a series of four experiments. Confirmatory factor analyses of a traditional measure of this construct yielded five independent factors rather than a bipolar structure. Moreover, differences between Hong Kong Chinese and European Americans in the values defined by these factors did not consistently coincide with traditional assumptions about the collectivistic vs. individualistic orientations. Observed differences in values were often increased when situational primes were used to activate (1) concepts associated with a participant’s own culture and (2) thoughts reflecting a self-orientation (i.e., self- vs. group-focus) that is typical in this culture. Although the values we identified were helpful in clarifying the structure of the individualism-collectivism construct, they did not account for cultural differences in participants’ tendency to compromise in a behavioral decision task. We conclude that a conceptualization of individualismvs. collectivismin terms of the tendency to focus on oneself as an individual vs. part of a groupmay be useful.However, global measures of this construct that do not take into account the situational specificity of norms and values which reflect these tendencies may be misleading, and may be of limited utility in predicting cultural differences in decision making and other behaviors.

Reasons as Carriers of Culture: Dynamic vs. Dispositional Models of Cultural Influence on Decision Making

Donnel A. Briley et al. — Sat, 28 Mar 2009 14:46:49 PDT

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.