The Contrasting Effects of Culture on Consumer Tolerance: Interpersonal Face and Impersonal Fate

This research highlights two cultural tendencies—concern for face and belief in fate—that are characteristic of Asian (vs. Western) consumers. In three cross-cultural studies on service failures, we show that these cultural tendencies have contrasting effects on consumer tolerance, such that Asian (vs. Western) consum-ers are more dissatisfied with social failures but less dissatisfied with nonsocial failures. We further demonstrate that these contrasting effects of culture are sen-sitive to pertinent contextual factors such as the presence of other consumers or a fate-suggestive brand name. Overall, our research evinces the multidimension-ality of cultural influence and points to the need for a sharper focus in conceptu-alizing cross-cultural consumer behavior. Much of cross-cultural consumer research “focuses, im-plicitly or explicitly, on the contrast between... Eastern-collectivist-interdependent societies and... West-ern-individualist-independent societies ” (Maheswaran and Shavitt 2000, 61). Despite its widespread appeal, this gen-eralized cultural framework may have obscured a range of finer concepts (Triandis 2001). Pioneered by Hofstede (1980) and extended to the indi-vidual level by Triandis et al. (1985), the individualism-collectivism (I-C) framework contrasts an independent ver-sus interdependent construal of the self. Relative to individ-ualists, collectivists tend to have an interdependent view of the self, which fosters a sensitivity to the needs of others *Haksin Chan is an adjunct assistant professor in the Department of