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Counter Cross-Cultural Priming and Relative Deprivation: The Role of Individualism–Collectivism

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Abstract

This paper uses cross-cultural comparisons and comparisons obtained by experimental manipulation to examine how cultural and contextual factors influence responses to personal and group relative deprivation. Two studies were conducted, one in an individualistic country (The Netherlands) and one in a collectivistic country (Singapore). One way to examine the influence of the assumed cultural differences in individualism–collectivism is to assign participants to the conditions that elicit “countercultural” psychological states, that is, conditions that prime collectivistic mindsets in the Netherlands and individualistic mindsets in Singapore. Results show that cross-cultural differences have reliable effects on responses to relative deprivation and gratification. Furthermore, findings in the countercultural (experimental) conditions meaningfully differed from those observed in the control conditions in which participants were exposed to neutral stimulus materials. This suggests that cultural mindsets are not fixed, and that countercultural priming can be used to study cross-cultural and contextual differences with high levels of internal validity.

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Notes

  1. Please note that after the prime manipulation and before reading the scenarios (which included the deprivation and level of treatment manipulations), participants completed the 20 items that, combined, constitute the PANAS (Watson et al., 1988). The PANAS items asked participants to indicate their present affective states. Importantly, after having read the scenarios (and hence having completed all manipulations), participants completed different questions. Specifically, participants then were asked to answer 24 questions about the situation portrayed in the scenarios (see Van Veldhuizen, 2013). We included the PANAS in our studies because earlier research shows that priming manipulations that use open-ended questions to induce mindsets have stronger effects when followed by filler tasks. Thus, as in earlier studies (e.g., Greenberg et al., 1997; Loseman et al., 2009; Van den Bos, 2001; Van den Bos et al., 2012, 2013; Van den Bos & Miedema, 2000; Van Prooijen et al., 2002), the PANAS served as a filler task in our studies and (as mentioned in Footnotes 2 and 4) controlling for positive and negative affective states as assessed by the PANAS did not alter the findings reported. Therefore, the effects of affective states are not reported further. Data and stimulus materials are available on request.

  2. Inspecting Cook’s (1977) distance measure in this analysis (Cohen, Cohen, West, & Aiken, 2003) revealed that 7 of the 239 participants of Study 1 (2.9 % of the sample) showed a distance score of more than 3 SDs above the mean. These participants were excluded from the main analyses of Study 1. Two other participants (0.8 % of the sample) were also excluded because of missing values on the fairness judgments scale, leaving a total of 230 participants, with 27–30 participants in each cell of our design. Although the answers of at least some of the excluded participants may have deviated from what was expected, including them in our analyses yielded a similar three-way interaction effect between countercultural priming, deprivation, and level of treatment on participants’ fairness judgments as is reported in the main text, although in this case the effect was marginally significant only, F(1, 229) = 3.44, p = .065, η 2 = .01. It also should be noted that when controlling for positive and negative affective states as assessed by the PANAS, the predicted three-way interaction was still statistically significant, F(1, 189) = 4.58, p < .04, η 2 = .02. Therefore, the effects of affective states are not reported further in Study 1.

  3. One participant had a missing value on one of the voice items, explaining the degrees of freedom reported.

  4. Inspecting Cook’s distance measure in this analysis revealed that 7 of the 229 participants of Study 2 (3.1 % of the sample) indicated a distance score of more than 3 SDs above the mean. These participants were excluded from the main analyses of Study 2, leaving a total of 222 participants, with 26–29 participants in each cell of the design. Including the outlying participants in our analyses yielded a significant three-way interaction effect between countercultural priming, deprivation, and level of treatment on participants’ intentions to voice their opinions, F(1, 221) = 6.97, p < .01, η 2 = .02, attesting to the robustness of the predicted effect. When controlling for positive and negative affective states, the hypothesized three-way interaction was statistically significant, F(1, 209) = 9.78, p < .01, η 2 = .03, hence the effects of affective states are not reported further in Study 2.

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Author notes

  1. Tanja S. van Veldhuizen

    Present address: Department of Criminal Law and Criminology, Faculty of Law, Maastricht University, Maastricht, The Netherlands

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Psychology, Utrecht University, Heidelberglaan 1, 3584 CS, Utrecht, The Netherlands

    Kees van den Bos & Tanja S. van Veldhuizen

  2. National University of Singapore, Singapore, Singapore

    Al K. C. Au

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  1. Kees van den Bos
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  2. Tanja S. van Veldhuizen
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  3. Al K. C. Au
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Correspondence to Kees van den Bos.

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An earlier version of this article was submitted to Utrecht University as Tanja van Veldhuizen’s MSc thesis.

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van den Bos, K., van Veldhuizen, T.S. & Au, A.K.C. Counter Cross-Cultural Priming and Relative Deprivation: The Role of Individualism–Collectivism. Soc Just Res 28, 52–75 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11211-014-0230-6

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