Culture and Decision Making: Social Influence in China, Japan, Soviet Russia, and the United States.

Abstract

The interest which animates this study is the interplay between small group decision processes and culture. The data consist of 1000 interpersonal disagreements drawn from contemporary Chinese, Japanese, Russian, and American fiction. These data are used to make two general arguments, one methodological and one substantive. The methodological argument is as follows: Fiction can be a valid source for the exploration of regularities in human social behavior. In support of this argument, I present evidence which shows that although authors of fiction may choose their "outcomes," they tend to be constrained by reality in depicting the processes that produce these outcomes. Relationships between variables in the fiction are compared with 36 propositions drawn from the social science literature on conflict resolution and dispute settlement. The fiction is found to be consistent with "reality" 87 percent of the time. I argue that fiction is a valuable source because it enables the investigator to avoid the problems of social desirability, observer contamination, access, and artificiality usually associated with more conventional approaches to the study of decision making. More substantively, I argue that decision makers not only carry around with them conceptions of what particular people are like, they also carry around with them conceptions of what people in general are like. In particular, I argue that Americans more than Chinese, Japanese, and Russians tend to hold an "individualistic" conception of persons, or, put the other way, that Chinese, Japanese, and Russians more than Americans tend to hold a "collectivistic" conception of persons. To support this argument, I derive from models of "individualist man" and "collectivist man" four hypotheses about influence processes in interpersonal disagreements and test these hypotheses in the fiction. I discuss the implications of the findings for small group decision making and suggest that conceptions of what people are like are particularly likely to affect the decision processes of political elites. This is so because the problems faced by political elites are especially likely to be characterized by complexity, uncertainty, and ambiguity.