The Role of Culture in the Resolution of Information Incongruity: Additivity versus Attenuation

Past research on dual process models of persuasion has documented that, when faced with information incongruity, individuals tend to form product evaluations by attenuating the less diagnostic information, relying solely on the more diagnostic information. The current research suggests that this way of resolving incongruity may be culture specific. Consistent with recent research in cultural psychology, we show that individuals in a North American culture tend to follow the attenuation strategy described above, while individuals in a Chinese culture tend to follow an additive strategy where both pieces of information are combined to jointly influence evaluations. Two additional experiments provide further support for the proposed psychological mechanism underlying these findings. Results from these experiments suggest that different evaluation strategies such as additivity and attenuation are not culture-specific.