3. Kulturwerte und Multilingualität (S. 195-196)

Measuring the effect of culture in experimental persuasive effects research Jos Hornikx (Nijmegen)

1. The importance of studying culture

Persuasive effects research is interested in the effects of message factors (e.g., vividness, style), receiver factors (e.g., involvement, motivation), and situational factors (e.g., distraction) on the persuasiveness of a message. One of the receiver factors is cultural background. Receivers may be American, Asian, European, or, more specific, Spanish or Swedish. There is growing interest in the impact of culture in the field of persuasion effects research (see, e.g., Fitch 2003, Le Pair/ Crijns/ Hoeken 2000). Fitch (2003: 100), for instance, remarks that it is „commonly recognized that persuasion is fundamentally shaped by culture".

The importance of culture goes back, argues Fitch (2003: 102), to the foundation of rhetoric with Aristotle’s enthymeme. This means that persuasive attempts should be consistent with the values and beliefs shared by the audience. As cultures may differ in the beliefs and values that they have, messages should be adapted to be consistent with the values and beliefs of a specific culture. This ancient Greek suggestion has received some research attention in the field of advertising research. I will come back to these advertising studies in Section 2. Studying the effect of culture on the persuasiveness of messages is interesting, because it can indicate that what is persuasive in one culture does not necessarily have to be persuasive in another culture. A lot of insights from persuasion studies, such as those inspired by the Elaboration Likelihood Model (Petty/ Cacioppo 1986), have been developed within the American context. An example is consensus information, for instance „[f]rom a sample of 437 Dutch consumers who have used the new Philips coffee machine, 76% were satisfied".

Consensus information, representing the opinion of a large number of people, is said to influence participants’ attitudes only under conditions of low motivation (Petty/ Cacioppo 1986). If participants are highly motivated, consensus information will not influence their attitude. Aaker/ Maheswaran (1997), however, showed that consensus information had an influence on the persuasive outcome for Chinese participants under conditions of both low and high motivation. The claim that consensus information is only important under conditions of low motivation must therefore be qualified. Cross-cultural studies such as Aaker/ Maheswaran (1997) may provide more insight into the persuasion process. From a practical point of view, such studies are also important, since most companies and firms work in an international environment. Companies may have foreign customers, production plants overseas and employees with different cultural backgrounds. In order to communicate effectively with their international stakeholders, knowledge about the effects of culture on persuasiveness is essential.

Studies that investigate the influence of culture on the persuasion process need methods and instruments to measure the effect of culture. As cultural studies have most frequently used values as a starting point for cross-cultural differences and similarities (see Section 2), values have also been used to measure culture. Persuasive effects research involving different cultures inherently encounters a number of methodological problems. In Section 3, I will describe these problems and some solutions, and propose the inclusion of context variables other than values as an alternative way of measuring the effect of culture in experimental persuasive effects research.