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

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 guid-ance 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. Prin-ciples enjoining compromise are more salient in East Asian cultures than in North American culture, and accordingly, we predict that cultural differences in the ten-dency to choose compromise options will be greater when the decision task re-quires that participants provide reasons. In study 1, a difference between Hong Kong Chinese and North American participants in the tendency to select compro-mise 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