Abstract
The article examines the effect of bicultural framing strategy on the evaluation of culturally mixed products (CMPs). Across two experiments, we demonstrate a self–other asymmetry effect in the CMP evaluation. Specifically, we examine the “foreign-culture home-culture” strategy in which the foreign culture “modifies” the home culture. This phenomenon leads to less favorable evaluation of CMPs relative to the “home-culture foreign-culture” strategy in which the home culture “modifies” the foreign culture. Furthermore, the findings show that consumers’ perception of cultural intrusion mediates the effect of framing strategy on CMP evaluation. We also identify the boundary condition wherein the self–other asymmetry is attenuated when people focus their judgment on facts (as opposed to motivation).
Keywords
Culturally mixed products (CMPs) are products in which cultural symbols from two or more countries are presented simultaneously. Kung Fu Panda, for example, an American computer-animated martial arts film produced by DreamWorks Animation, has sparked a heated debate in China over CMPs. The audiences who love the movie typically think of it as an American story that features a Chinese panda. However, those people who dislike and even hate the movie view it as a Chinese panda that tells an American story or, more exactly, a Chinese panda that propagates American culture. Why do people exhibit distinct reactions toward the same cultural hybrid? We propose that the framing strategy for the CMP would influence people’s reaction to such a product, and that self–other asymmetry effect, led by biased motivational inference, serves as the process underlying consumers’ evaluations of CMPs.
Literature Review and Hypotheses
Categorization of CMPs
Literature in psychology and marketing has argued that individuals tend to use a single category rather than create new categories for understanding CMPs (e.g., Moreau, Markman, & Lehmann, 2001). Once a CMP has been categorized, consumers use beliefs about the selected product categories to make inferences about the functions and quality of new products (Gregan-Paxton & Moreau, 2003). This means that the way in which individuals categorize CMPs will influence their overall evaluation of the mixed products (Moreau et al., 2001).
Research in psycholinguistics uses the “noun–noun” conceptual combination to define the relationship between the different properties presented in a CMP (e.g., Costello & Keane, 2001). Structurally, a noun–noun combination includes two parts: the head category (the second noun in the phrase) and the modifier category (the first noun in the phrase). Take the example of a “camera phone.” “Phone” is the head category, which means “phone” is selected as the category in which the CMP is placed. In contrast, “camera” is the modifier category, which implies that the properties of the modifier category can be transferred to the head category (Wisniewski, 1997). In this way, a camera phone is a phone that has some properties of a camera. Similarly, a phone camera is a camera that has some features of a phone. Therefore, when the label of the head category and the label of the modifier category interchange with each other in a CMP, thoughts about the product may change accordingly.
Two Types of Framing Strategies for Culture Mixing
Drawing on the research on conceptual combination described above, we defined two types of framing strategies, which can be used in designing the mixed products. The first strategy is the “foreign-culture home-culture” strategy by which the cultural elements from a foreign culture are defined as the modifier category whereas the symbols of the home culture are presented as the head category. The second strategy is the “home-culture foreign-culture” strategy, which describes the home cultural elements as the modifier category and places the elements from a foreign culture into the head category. Imagine a biculturally mixed product of paper-cutting (a symbol of Chinese culture dating back to the Eastern Han Dynasty in the second century) and Mickey Mouse (a symbol of 20th Century American culture). For the “foreign-culture home-culture” strategy, the CMP is described as “Mickey Mouse paper-cut,” which indicates that the mixed product is a Chinese culture being mixed with some properties of American culture. In contrast, the description of “paper-cut Mickey Mouse” embodies the “home-culture foreign-culture” strategy, which means that the CMP is an American cultural element being mixed with some properties of Chinese culture.
Rajagopal and Burnkrant (2009) posited that when the modifier category has extremely incongruent values, which are difficult to assimilate into the head category, the head category has been perceived as transformed into a subtyped category because of the influence of the modifier category. In this manner, people are more likely to perceive that their home culture is changed by the foreign culture when the “foreign-culture home-culture” strategy is used to frame CMPs. In contrast, they are more likely to perceive that their culture is influencing the foreign culture under the “home-culture foreign-culture” strategy. For example, the combination “Mickey Mouse Paper-cut” makes people think that the Chinese culture has been transposed into a subtyped category on account of accepting an American cultural icon whereas the phrase “Paper-cut Mickey Mouse” renders the feeling that the Western cultural element is modified due to the transference of a property of the Chinese culture.
Self–Other Asymmetry in the Evaluation of Culture Mixing
Literature on the cultural effects of globalization has posited that people will react negatively to culture mixing, particularly when the elements of foreign cultures are perceived to have contaminated the traditional culture (Yang, 2011). In Torelli, Chiu, Tam, Au, and Keh’s (2011) work, simultaneous activation of American culture and Chinese culture led to defensive resistance when the individuals perceived the foreign culture as a threat to their heritage culture. The home culture “confers a sense of symbolic immortality—when the self is seen as a part of an imperishable culture, the self seems immortal” (Torelli et al., 2011, p. 719). People tend to preserve the integrity and purity of their home culture to symbolically achieve the immortality of self. Cheng (2011) found that when the participants realized that the young people’s attitude toward their traditional culture was weakened by foreign cultures, exposure to culture mixing led to an exclusionary reaction. Therefore, people may exhibit negative reactions to culture mixing under the use of the “foreign-culture home-culture” strategy because they may perceive that their home culture is altered by another culture.
In contrast, because the head category in the “home-culture foreign-culture” strategy is a foreign culture rather than their home culture, people should be less likely to evaluate this type of culture mixing from the perspective that their home culture is changed by another foreign culture, and thereby they would be less likely to perceive that the foreign culture offends their home culture. Therefore, we posit that there is a self–other asymmetry effect in the evaluation of the CMP. Specifically,
The Mediating Effect of Perceived Cultural Intrusion
Because CMPs are mixtures of symbolic elements from two or more dissimilar cultures, the incongruity between cultural symbols may trigger an insightful inference about the motive of culture mixing (Cheng, 2011; Chiu, Gries, Torelli, & Cheng, 2011). Previous research has found people may have two distinct mind-sets, that is, cultural protection and cultural learning, when encountering foreign cultures (e.g., Chiu et al., 2011). The mind-set of cultural protection considers foreign cultures as threats to the continuity and vitality of one’s traditional culture (Torelli et al., 2011). The cultural learning mind-set, on the contrary, views foreign cultures as cultural resources contributing to creative performance by complementing the local culture (Leung & Chiu, 2010). The need to preserve cultural purity is an instinct that reflects the existential motivation by which people retain the continuity of their culture to achieve symbolic immortality, driven by a subliminal system of self-defense (Chiu et al., 2011), the process by which the self-defense system works is quick, spontaneous, and reflexive, restraining rational thinking.
In contrast, cultural learning involves the process of introspection by means of which people strive to resist their instinctive disgust toward foreign cultures by rethinking the value of intercultural amalgamation (Chiu et al., 2011). As it differs from the self-defense system, the process of introspection is often slow, deliberate, and laborious.
The mind-set, either cultural protection or cultural learning, we use to interpret the meaning of culture mixing may depend on the accessibility of introspection information during the process of evaluation. We frequently look inside ourselves and think what we should do and should not do. It is therefore relatively easy for us to obtain access to our introspection information, but this is not so for others’ introspection, which is called the phenomenon of introspection illusion (Pronin, Kruger, Savtisky, & Ross, 2001). Introspection illusion empowers differences in motivational inference. When perceiving that one’s home culture is changed by a foreign culture with the “foreign-culture home-culture” strategy, people will be more likely to engage in cultural protection because of a lack of introspection of others’ motives. Therefore, they will tend to experience high levels of cultural intrusion. Yang (2011) found that foreign cultures presented in a sacred local space fueled participants’ negative reactions to culture mixing because the participants viewed the act as a cultural intrusion. Cultural intrusion is more likely to be inferred as a strong motive of culture mixing when cultural continuity concern is activated (Cheng, 2011).
In contrast, when realizing that one’s culture is changing a foreign culture under the “home-culture foreign-culture” strategy, people may not experience a level of cultural intrusion as high as in the former case. The reason is that people are more able to engage in introspection when explaining the question, “why do we change others’ culture” and thus are more likely to evoke the motive of cultural learning, decreasing their fear of cultural erosion (Leung & Chiu, 2010).
The Boundary Condition for the Self–Other Asymmetry Effect
Based on the theory of introspection illusion, the biased motivational inference may act as the underlying mechanism in H2. The biased motivational inference explanation focuses on one’s asymmetric introspection on his or her inner world versus others’ inner worlds while assessing one’s own actions versus others’ actions. It predicts a self–other asymmetry effect in the evaluation of CMPs under the different ways of framing. People will be less likely to regard culture mixing as cultural intrusion when they introspect reflectively, focusing on their culture mixing motivation, because they have enough information about their in-group’s introspection for cultural integration (Ames, 2004). However, when thinking about others’ motivation toward culture mixing, it is difficult for them to gain access to others’ introspective experiences. Therefore, culture mixing is more likely to be perceived as cultural intrusion when people infer others’ motivations from the cultural hybrid.
However, the self–other asymmetry effect may only occur when people evaluate CMPs according to their motivational inference. When the culture mixing is judged based on factual observation instead of motivational inference, the self–other asymmetry will be reduced because judgment based on the explicit facts is less involved in the introspection information related to one’s or others’ internal states (Pronin & Kugler, 2007). The bias about the relative diagnostic value of one’s own versus others’ introspections is thus decreased. Therefore, we propose,
Experiment 1
Experiment 1 sought evidence of a self–other asymmetry effect in how people evaluate CMPs under different framing strategies. We predicted that participants would make a more negative evaluation on the CMP when using the “foreign-culture home-culture” strategy than when using the “home-culture foreign-culture” strategy.
Method
A total of 115 undergraduate students from a large university in central China participated in the experiment in exchange for course credits. The study used a 2 (bicultural product framing: “foreign-culture home-culture” vs. “home-culture foreign culture”) + 1 (monocultural product: foreign culture) + 1 (monocultural product: home culture) between-subjects design. The two bicultural product framing conditions were used to manipulate the two different hybrid framing strategies. The two monocultural product conditions were used as proxies for the control condition as there were no incongruities between the elements of the head category and that of the modifier category under each condition. Participants were randomly assigned to one of the four experimental conditions.
Several Chinese cultural elements and Western cultural elements were used to manipulate the products to be evaluated in each experimental condition. A blue-and-white porcelain plate (with a spoon and chopsticks) as the symbol of the home culture and a silver plate (with a knife and a fork) as the symbol of the foreign culture, pretested, were selected as the head categories of the products. A dragon, the symbol of the home culture, and an eagle, the symbol of the foreign culture, were selected as the modifier categories of the products. These elements were also pretested to be significant symbols of either Chinese or Western culture.
Participants in the “foreign-culture home-culture” bicultural framing condition saw a picture of a newly designed CMP (see Appendix A) titled “Eagle Porcelain Plate.” Following Rajagopal and Burnkrant’s (2009) method for conceptual combination priming, the participants were also provided with the following new product description—“an eagle porcelain plate is a Chinese blue-and-white porcelain plate mixed with the feature of a Western eagle.” Participants in the “home-culture foreign-culture” bicultural framing condition were exposed to a picture of a newly designed CMP titled “Dragon Silver Plate” and read the following product description—“a dragon silver plate is a Western silver plate mixed with the feature of a Chinese dragon.” In the monocultural experimental conditions, participants were presented with either an Eagle Silver Plate (Western culture condition) or a Dragon Porcelain Plate (Chinese culture condition) and were asked to read product descriptions accordingly.
Following the presentation of the pictures and the product descriptions, participants were instructed to write down three thoughts they had about the CMPs. Two coders, blind to the experiment’s purpose and the experimental conditions, rated the extent to which the participants expressed that the Chinese culture was changed by the foreign culture (interrater r = .83) and the foreign culture (interrater r = .74) was changed by the Chinese culture, each on a 7-point Likert-type scale.
Next, participants were instructed to evaluate the product on a three-item 9-point semantic differential scale (bad–good, undesirable–desirable, and unfavorable–favorable; Cronbach’s α = .91). They were also asked to provide their perception of cultural intrusion on a two-item 7-point scale (Cronbach’s α = .82). The scale captures the extent to which the participants perceived that their home culture was intruded by the foreign culture. As manipulation checks for the salience of cultural symbols, we asked participants to rate the extent to which each cultural element in the CMPs was perceived to be a cultural symbol of the home culture (Cronbach’s α = .81) or the foreign culture (Cronbach’s α = .84). Appendix C provides detailed results of manipulation checks for Experiment 1. Participants also reported their identification with the Chinese culture (Cronbach’s α = .87), identification with the foreign culture (Cronbach’s α = .85), perception of creativity of the CMP (a single-item scale), and cultural congruity of the elements used in the CMP (Cronbach’s α = .95).
Results
Product evaluation
A one-way ANOVA including both of the two bicultural framing groups and the two monocultural product groups resulted in a significant main effect, F(3, 111) = 7.49, p < .001 (see Figure 1). Planned contrasts revealed that participants in the “foreign-culture home-culture” group evaluated the product (M = 3.70) lower than those in the “home-culture foreign-culture” group, M = 5.53, t(111) = −3.67, p < .001; the “home-monoculture” group, M = 5.83, t(111) = −4.31, p < .001; and the “foreign-monoculture” group, M = 5.45, t(111) = −3.48, p < .001. However, there was no difference in product evaluation between the “home-culture foreign-culture” group and the “foreign-monoculture” group, t(111) = 0.15, p = .88, or between the “home-culture foreign-culture” group and the “home-monoculture” group, t(111) = −0.62, p = .54. These findings support H1.
Mean values and standard errors of product evaluation (Experiment 1).
Mediation of perceived cultural intrusion
To test whether perceived cultural intrusion mediated the effect of bicultural framing strategy on product evaluation, we conducted a bootstrap-based analysis using the PROCESS tool. A significant effect of bicultural framing strategy on perceived cultural intrusion, a = −1.68, SE = 0.39, t(55) = −4.31, p < .001, and a significant effect of perceived cultural intrusion on CMP evaluation, b = −0.73, SE = 0.14, t(54) = −5.16, p < .001, were detected. The 95% confidence interval (CI) for the indirect effect (a × b = 1.22) does not include zero (CI = [0.59, 2.15]). Therefore, the indirect effect was significant. These findings suggest that the effect of bicultural framing strategy on CMP evaluation was fully mediated by perceived cultural intrusion. These results are in line with H2.
Several alternative explanations that may confound the mediation effect were excluded. It is possible that different bicultural framing strategies may result in a different perception of creativity of each CMP. An independent-sample t test eliminated this alternative explanation by indicating no difference in perceived creativity, t(55) = 0.17, p = .87, between the two bicultural framing groups. The possibilities of participants’ identification with Chinese culture, t(55) = 1.25, p = .22; identification with the foreign culture, t(55) = 1.55, p = .13; and perception of cultural congruity, t(55) = 1.60, p = .12, in explaining the variation in CMP evaluation were eliminated, as well, by using independent-sample t tests.
Discussion
The study demonstrates that a CMP using foreign-culture elements as the modifier category and home-culture elements as the head category is evaluated lower than a CMP using home-culture elements as the modifier category and foreign-culture elements as the head category. The results of the thought-listing analysis suggest that the “foreign-culture home-culture” strategy evoked the participants’ perception of the home culture being changed by the foreign culture whereas the “home-culture foreign-culture” strategy led the participants to perceive their home culture changing the foreign culture. This results in a self–other asymmetry effect in the evaluation of the CMPs. This effect can be explained by the extent to which the home culture is perceived to be intruded by the foreign culture.
However, because different CMPs were used in the two bicultural framing conditions, other variables related to the design of the product may potentially confound our findings. Therefore, we used a more stringent design in Experiment 2 and tested the robustness of the results in Experiment 1.
In addition, although the mediating effect of perceived cultural intrusion was supported, Experiment 1 did not provide adequate evidence to prove the mechanism of biased motivational inference (i.e., people overestimate their virtuous motivations and underestimate those of others when they make an inference of motivation from the culture mixing). It can be argued that the mediating effect of perceived cultural intrusion may be explained by the mechanism of self-protection (i.e., people are usually afraid of being changed by foreign culture without any inference about the motives of the changes). This explanation implies the effect proposed in H1 should exist regardless of whether participants are asked to judge things according to facts or to motivation.
Differing from the self-protection mechanism, the biased motivational inference mechanism focuses on one’s asymmetric introspection on his or her inner world versus others’ inner worlds. The biased motivational inference mechanism predicts that people will have different attitudes to the mixed product under the various ways of framing when they reflect on the motivation of culture mixing. In contrast, when being asked to judge their perceptions based on facts instead of motivation, people remain objective, unaffected by the effect of introspection illusion. Therefore, it can be predicted that there is no difference in people’s attitude toward mixed products, using different ways of framing, when focusing on the factual parts of culture mixing.
Therefore, Experiment 2 attempted to confirm the mechanism of biased motivational inference by examining the moderating effect of “focus in judgment” on the relationship between framing strategy and product evaluation.
Experiment 2
The objectives of Experiment 2 were to provide support for the mechanism of biased motivational inference and exclude the alternative explanation of self-protection by examining the moderating effect of focus in judgment.
Experiment 2 predicted that only in the experimental condition of motivational inference, the home-culture foreign-culture strategy led to a higher evaluation of the CMP than the foreign-culture home-culture strategy. In contrast, when the subjects were asked to think of the importance of facts rather than motivation inference, there would be no significant difference in the effects between the two framing strategies.
Although using different cultural elements across the CMPs in Experiment 1 would, in effect, represent a more realistic marketplace, it could be confounded with consumers’ attitude toward the specific elements. For example, participants’ negative evaluation of a CMP may not be because the presence of framing strategy prompts them to make an inference as to the culture mixing, but because they prefer dragon to eagle. To control for these potential confounded effects, we kept the cultural elements constant across all of the experiment’s conditions and just interchanged the labels of the modifier and the head category in Experiment 2. Using the new stimuli, Experiment 2 replicates the findings in Experiment 1.
Method
Participants and design
One-hundred seventy-nine students from a university in central China were recruited for extra credits and were randomly assigned to six conditions in a 2 (framing strategy: foreign-culture home-culture vs. home-culture foreign-culture) × 3 (focus of judgment: motivation vs. facts vs. control) between-subjects design.
Procedure and stimuli
Participants were informed to participate in two unrelated studies conducted by different researchers. The first, they were told, was a “comprehension and memory study,” with its real purpose of manipulating the focus of judgment. In this task, participants were instructed to read an article and then took a true/false quiz, which consisted of six questions related to the article as manipulation check questions. The main effect of framing strategy was tested by the second study, a “new product survey,” in which participants were asked to assess a new American-designed product entering the Chinese market.
In the comprehension and memory study, we manipulated the focus of judgment by presenting to each participant an article about certain scientific research findings. In the “focus on facts” conditions, the article, referencing social-psychological studies, held the point of view that people make a biased evaluation because they often judge things based on the motivation inferred instead of the facts observed. Therefore, an effective social judgment should be made based on behavioral facts rather than on motivations.
The article presented in the “focus on motivation” conditions introduced a variety of literature to argue that people are biased by focusing on observed facts rather than the inferred motives, and effective social judgment should be made based on inference of motivations rather than on ostentatious facts or outcomes.
Under the two controlled conditions, the article described the relationship between the ways of food processing and obesity, which is irrelevant to the focus of judgment. The three articles, adapted from academic journals, are similar in length (about 1,000 Chinese words).
We used a CMP (see Appendix B) made up from an icon of Chinese culture (paper-cutting) and an icon of Western culture (Mickey Mouse) and manipulated the framing strategy by changing both the title and the description for the new product. In the “foreign-culture home-culture” strategy condition, the CMP is titled “Mickey Mouse Paper-cut” with the description “a Mickey Mouse Paper-cut is a paper-cut mixed with the features of Mickey Mouse.” In the condition of the “home-culture foreign-culture” strategy, the title is “Paper-cut Mickey Mouse” and the description is “a Paper-cut Mickey Mouse is a Mickey Mouse mixed with the feature of paper-cut.”
As in Experiment 1, we measured participants’ product evaluation, perception of cultural intrusion, cultural symbolisms, and cultural congruity. We reported the results of manipulation checks for the experiment in Appendix C.
Results
Product evaluation
A 2 (framing strategy) × 3 (focus of judgment) ANOVA resulted in a main effect of framing strategy, F(1, 173) = 16.03, p < .001. Participants in the “foreign-culture home-culture” conditions indicated lower product evaluation (M = 4.60) than those in the “home-culture foreign culture” conditions (M = 5.75). The ANOVA also revealed a significant interaction, F(2, 173) = 3.26, p < .05 (see Figure 2). Follow-up simple effect analyses revealed that under the control conditions, participants indicated lower product evaluation when the CMP was labeled as a “Mickey Mouse Paper-cut” (i.e., the “foreign-culture home-culture” condition, M = 4.51) than when it was labeled as a “Paper-cut Mickey Mouse” (i.e., the “home-culture foreign-culture” condition) M = 6.09, F(1, 173) = 10.08, p < .01. This result is consistent with the findings from Experiment 1. When participants were manipulated to base their judgment on motivation, the product evaluation in the “foreign-culture home-culture” condition (M = 4.01) was lower than that in the “home-culture foreign-culture” condition as well, M = 5.77, F(1, 173) = 12.46, p < .001. However, the product evaluations did not differ significantly between the two framing strategy conditions (M = 5.37 for the “home-culture foreign-culture” condition, and M = 5.31 for the “foreign-culture home-culture” condition), F(1, 173) = 0.07, p = .79, when participants were manipulated to base their judgment on facts. These results support H3.
Mean values and standard errors of product evaluation (Experiment 2).
Mediation of perceived cultural intrusion
To test whether the effect of framing strategy on CMP evaluation that was moderated by focus of judgment was mediated by participants’ perception of cultural intrusion, we ran a moderated mediation analysis using the same tool as in Experiment 1. When focusing on motivation for making judgments, the 95% CI for the indirect effect (b = −1.04) does not include zero (CI = [−2.09, −0.15]), which indicates the significant mediating role of perceived cultural intrusion. These findings provide further evidence for H2. In addition, a 2 (framing strategy) × 3 (focus of judgment) ANOVA on participants’ perceived incongruity of the cultural elements in the mixed product revealed neither significant main effects of judgment focus, F(2, 173) = 0.132, p = .88, and framing strategy, F(1, 173) = 2.56, p = .11, nor significant interaction effect, F(2, 173) = 0.19, p = .83, and thus the alternative explanation of cultural congruity was excluded.
Discussion
Experiment 2 replicated the findings from Experiment 1 in that participants’ evaluations were more favorable toward the CMP with “home-culture foreign-culture” framing than toward that with “foreign-culture home-culture” framing. This provides consistent evidence for self–other asymmetry in the evaluation of CMP.
In addition, as predicted in H3, focus of judgment moderates the effect of framing strategy on CMP evaluation. The difference in the evaluation of CMP between the framing strategies only existed when focusing participants’ judgment on motivation (vs. on facts), confirming the mechanism of biased motivational inference for the self–other asymmetry effect.
These findings have shown that there was no significant self–other asymmetry effect when people realized the importance of using facts to make judgments. This contradicts the alternative explanation of self-protection, which assumes that people always want to protect their home culture from being changed by other culture with the “foreign-culture home-culture” strategy.
General Discussion
This article examined the effect of framing strategy that may influence the interpretation of the relationship between the cultures embodied in a CMP and, thus, the CMP evaluation. In two experiments, we consistently showed that the use of framing strategies led to a self–other asymmetry effect in the CMP evaluation, that is, compared with the “home culture-foreign culture” strategy, the “foreign culture-home culture” strategy resulted in a more negative evaluation of the cultural hybrid. The meditation analysis showed that it was the perception of cultural intrusion that drove this effect (Experiments 1-2). Furthermore, we identified the boundary condition of the self–other asymmetry effect: The effect of framing strategies disappears when people focus their judgment primarily on facts (as opposed to motivation; Experiment 2).
Evaluations of CMPs
Our research adds to an existing body of work on CMP evaluation. Previous research examined the effect of the interpretations of multiple category information on product evaluation and verified that simultaneously processing the typical attributes of the head category and the discrepant attributes of the modifier category results in great subtyping due to the belief that the modifier category significantly determines the overall evaluation of the CMP (Rajagopal & Burnkrant, 2009). Consistent with the previous literature on conceptual combination (Costello & Keane, 2001), we found that under high incongruity, the information about the modifier category decreases the perception of the typicality of the head category.
Moreover, we extend this stream of research by focusing on the symbolic property of the multiple category information in the CMPs. Cultural elements are different from other product attributes in that they are closely related to the self (Perunovic, Heller, & Rafaeli, 2007). People usually identify with their own culture and distinguish foreign cultures from themselves (e.g., Chiu & Hong, 2006). The underlying foundation of social cognition helps to explain why there occurs a self–other asymmetry effect when the order of the modifier and the head category are interchanged.
The Consequences of Bicultural Exposure
Our research contributes to the emerging literature in psychology and marketing that addresses the issue of negative reactions to bicultural exposure (e.g., Chiu et al., 2011). Our findings that CMP evaluations are affected by the type of framing strategy are a departure from the existing literature, which argues that bicultural exposure increases the perception of cultural difference or cultural incompatibility, leading to exclusionary reactions (Torelli et al., 2011). Exclusionary reactions are an important problem for marketers because they imply bicultural exposure is not an optimal choice for the companies who hope to combine ideas from foreign cultures with the home culture to achieve a better solution. Our research demonstrates that the “home-culture foreign culture” strategy helps to form a positive evaluation of the east–west crossover and could be an effective way for companies to frame CMPs.
Our research also attempts to coordinate two different views on the cultural impacts of globalization, that is, viewing foreign cultures as either threats or resources, through examining the mediating role of perceived cultural intrusion. Our findings indicate that the opinions related to whether foreign symbols in a bicultural exposure are perceived as threats or as resources may be based on the particular perspective that the participants take to interpret biculturally mixed products. The “home-culture foreign-culture” strategy activates the type of introspection in which people are motivated to overestimate the role of their culture in culture mixing by identifying the motivation of cultural learning, lowering their perception of cultural intrusion. In contrast, the “foreign-culture home-culture” strategy drives people to rethink the role of the foreign culture and increase their perception of cultural intrusion.
Introspection Illusion and Biased Motivational Inference
Our research extends the scope of introspection illusion research in the context of cross-cultural communication. Introspection illusion has been widely used as a source of the self–other asymmetry effect (Pronin & Kugler, 2007). However, the role has not been examined in the context of culture mixing, an important issue in the psychology of globalization (e.g., Chiu et al., 2011). The results of the research fill the gap by suggesting that the introspection illusion explains the self–other differences in product evaluation under different framing strategies.
The research also develops a method to weaken the biased effect of introspection illusion in the evaluation of CMPs. The shift from the focus on motivation to the focus on facts decreases the biased motivational inference under the “foreign culture home-culture” strategy.
Footnotes
Appendix A
Appendix B
Appendix C
Declaration of Conflicting Interests
The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Funding
The author(s) disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article: The authors acknowledge the financial support of research grants from National Natural Science Foundation of China (Project#: 71172208, 71272225, 71532011).