=Paper= {{Paper |id=Vol-1582/16Orji |storemode=property |title=Persuasion and Culture: Individualism–Collectivism and Susceptibility to Influence Strategies |pdfUrl=https://ceur-ws.org/Vol-1582/16Orji.pdf |volume=Vol-1582 |authors=Rita Orji |dblpUrl=https://dblp.org/rec/conf/persuasive/Orji16a }} ==Persuasion and Culture: Individualism–Collectivism and Susceptibility to Influence Strategies== https://ceur-ws.org/Vol-1582/16Orji.pdf

Persuasion and Culture: Individualism–Collectivism and
Susceptibility to Influence Strategies
Rita Orji

Accessible Computing Technology Lab, McGill University, H3A 1X1, Canada
{rita.orji@mail.mcgill.ca}

Abstract. Personalizing persuasive technology increases their efficacy at
influencing the desired behavior change. This paper explores how the
responsiveness to Cialdini’s six persuasive strategies (authority, reciprocity,
scarcity, liking, commitment, and consensus) vary by cultural background. The
results of a large-scale study of 335 participants suggest that individualists and
collectivists differ significantly with respect to their susceptibility to the
strategies – with collectivists being more susceptible to most of the strategies.
Some strategies are more suitable for persuading one cultural group than the
other. Finally, the results show that irrespective of culture, some strategies are
more persuasive overall and therefore more likely to influence participants from
both cultures.

Keywords: Persuasion, personalization, persuasive technology, persuasive
strategies, culture, Cialdini, individualist, collectivist, influence strategy,
susceptibility, tailoring.

1 Introduction
Persuasive Technology (PT) aims to bring about desirable change by shaping and
reinforcing behavior, attitude, and thoughts about an issue, action, or object [8] using
various persuasive strategies. Persuasive strategies are techniques that can be
employed in PTs design to motivate behavior and/or attitude change. Research has
shown that individuals can be motivated to perform desired behaviors using various
persuasive strategies [6, 8, 14, 20, 22, 26]. As a results, over the years, several
persuasive strategies that can be employed in promoting desired behavior change has
been developed, for examples see [6, 8, 20]. Considering the large number of
persuasive strategies in existence, how to employ these strategies to effectively
motive desired behavior change has attracted researchers’ attention. In line with this,
research has shown that personalizing the strategies can increase their efficacy at
motivating behavior change in various domains.
In choosing approaches for group-based personalization, research has shown that
culture is a reliable characteristic [17, 28]. Research has also established gender and
age differences in many areas including the perception of different behavioral
determinants [25, 28], gameplay and health behavior [24]. However, the effect of
culture on the persuasiveness of the six strategies highlighted by Cialdini [6] has not
been explored quantitatively.

Copyright © by the paper’s authors. Copying permitted for private and academic
purposes.
In: R. Orji, M. Reisinger, M. Busch, A. Dijkstra, A. Stibe, M. Tscheligi (eds.):
Proceedings of the Personalization in Persuasive Technology Workshop, Persuasive
Technology 2016, Salzburg, Austria, 05-04-2016, published at http://ceur-ws.org
Persuasion and Culture: Individualism–Collectivism and Susceptibility to Influence 31
Strategies

This paper explores the relationship between culture (individualist and collectivist)
and the six persuasion strategies (authority, reciprocity, scarcity, liking, commitment
and consensus) developed by Cialdini [6]. The results of a large-scale study of 335
participants suggest that individualist and collectivist differ significantly with respect
to their likelihood of being influenced by the strategies – with collectivists being more
susceptible to most of the strategies. Some strategies are more suitable for persuading
one cultural group than the other. Hence, culture is a necessary factor to consider
when selecting the appropriate persuasive strategy to employ in the persuasive
technology design.
The paper contributes to research on ways that persuasive technology can be
tailored to various cultural groups by conducting a cross-cultural evaluation of the six
persuasive strategies developed by Cialdini with respect to their likelihood of
motivating behavior change on people from individualist and collectivist cultural
groups. We examine both the intra-cultural (within the same culture) and inter-
cultural (between cultures) differences. Our findings shed light on the appropriateness
of each strategy for designing persuasive technology tailored for each cultural group.
We highlight the best strategy to employ when designing for each cultural group and
the best strategies overall. The findings indicate that culture is a necessary factor to
consider when selecting the appropriate persuasive strategy to employ in the
persuasive technology design.

2 Background
In this section, we present an overview of the six persuasive strategies developed by
Cialdini [4], this is followed by a brief overview of culture and human behavior.

2.1 Persuasive Strategies
Persuasive strategies are techniques that can be employed in PTs to motivate behavior
and/or attitude change. Over the years, a number of strategies for persuading people to
perform the desired behavior have been developed. For example, Fogg [8] developed
seven persuasive tools, and Oinas-Kukkonen [21] built on Fogg’s strategies to
develop 28 persuasive system design principles.
The six persuasive strategies developed by Cialdini – Reciprocity, Scarcity,
Authority, Commitment and Consistency, Consensus and Liking – are among the
oldest and most widely employed strategies [4]. The six strategies are:
1. Reciprocity: People by their nature feel obliged to return a favor and to pay
back others. Thus when a persuasive request is made by a person the receiver
feels indebted to, the receiver is more inclined to adhere to the request [6].
2. Scarcity: People tend to place more value on things that are in short supply.
This is due to the popular belief that less available options are of higher
quality.
32 Persuasion and Culture: Individualism–Collectivism and Susceptibility to Influence
Strategies

3. Authority: People defer to experts [4]. Therefore, individuals are more likely
to comply with a request when it is made by a person or people they
perceived as possessing high levels of knowledge, wisdom, or power [7].
4. Commitment and Consistency: People by their nature strive to be consistent
with previous or reported behavior to avoid the feeling of dissonance.
5. Liking: People can be easily influenced or persuaded by someone they like.
Factors such as: similarity, praise, and attractiveness can reliably increase the
effectiveness of the liking strategy [4].
6. Consensus: We often observe the behaviors of others to help us make
decisions. This is because “a large majority of individuals are imitators rather
than initiators, and therefore make decisions only after observing the
behaviors and consequences on those around them [7].”
In summary, empirical evidence shows that people differ in their general
susceptibility to persuasive appeals as well as in their response to certain persuasive
strategies [9, 14, 15, 23, 27, 29]. Studies have shown that applying inappropriate
strategies may be counterproductive – resulting not only to refusal to comply to
persuasive attempts, but even leading to adverse changes in behavior [14, 23].
Susceptibility to persuasive strategies can be predicted on the basis of demographic
characteristics and personality traits [9, 17, 28, 29]. Similarly, Cialdini et al. [5]
showed that the commitment and consistency strategy is only effective for individuals
that have a high Preference for Consistency (PFC). Hence, there is a need to
investigate for other factors that may influence the effectiveness of the strategies.

2.2 Culture and Human Behavior
Culture plays an influential role in shaping people’s attitudes and behaviors [18]. Its
effects reflect in almost all areas of human endeavor including the way we interact
with technology and how various persuasive technology artefacts influence our
behaviors. As a result, there is a growing research interest on various ways of
developing persuasive technology to be culturally-appropriate and hence increase
their efficacy at motivating the desired behavior change [17, 28].
Recent attempts by Hofstede to investigate empirically the differences in cultures
based on the value system shared by various groups identified five finite and crucial
cultural dimensions [11], which include: Collectivism versus Individualism,
Femininity versus Masculinity, Long-term versus Short-term orientation, Power-
distance, and Uncertainty avoidance. At present, much of cross-cultural research has
been focused on the individualism and collectivism dimension. Research has shown
that the individualism and collectivism dimension accounts for most of the variance in
global differences [11, 18, 32]. Thus, in this paper, we rely on these two important
and well-researched dimensions: individualism and collectivism to study cultural
differences in healthy eating determinants.
A major distinguishing factor between individualist and collectivist cultural
orientation is the relationship that individuals perceive between one’s self and the
Persuasion and Culture: Individualism–Collectivism and Susceptibility to Influence 33
Strategies

one’s in-groups. In an Individualist culture, there are loose ties between individuals
and people are expected to look after themselves and their immediate families at the
very most. On the other hand, in a collectivist society, from birth, people get
integrated into strong cohesive groups. The collectivist expects other in-group
members to look after them and protect them in exchange for unquestioning loyalty.
Moreso, in a collectivist society, group interest outweighs individual interest, and
individuals behave to maintain good and tight relationships within the group to avoid
loss of face [11, 16, 31].
Hofstede’s cultural model has been criticized (e.g., see [12]) due to some
limitations of the model, such as the broad and binary classification; however, it is
still the most widely referenced cultural model [2, 13]. Recent research has
reproduced and confirmed the validity of Hofstede’s cultural models as related to
individualism-collectivism. For example see [17, 30].

3 Study Design and Methods
To investigate the extend to which cultural variability between collectivists and
individualists influence the appeal of persuasive strategies, we adopt the well-
established strategies (reciprocity, scarcity, authority, commitment and consistency,
and liking) developed by Cialdini [6]. These strategies have been widely employed in
various persuasion domain ranging from advertising to health [14]. We examined the
effects of cultural differences between Asians and North Americans on their
susceptibility the six strategies. We choose Asia and North America as the
representative of our collectivist and individualist culturesw respectively because
according to many cultural models, they represent two distinct cultural groups. For
example, according to Hofstede [11], Asian countries such as India, China, and Japan
are highly collectivist while North American countries such as Canada and United
State are highly individualists. Again, recent research has confirmed the validity of
the Hofstede’s cultural classifications [17, 30].
To collect data for our study, we adapted the Susceptibility to Persuasive Strategies
Scale (STPS) developed by Kaptein et al. [14]. The items were used to assess
participants’ susceptibility to Cialdini’s six persuasive strategies. The questions were
measured using participant agreement with a 7-point Likert scale ranging from “1 =
Strongly disagree” to “7 = Strongly agree”. The STPS scale has been shown to
adequately predict participant susceptibility to individual strategies and the efficacy of
the strategies for motivating behavior change in real life [1, 14]. We also included
questions for assessing participants’ demographic information (such as age, gender,
country, and geographical territory).
We recruited participants for this study using Amazon’s Mechanical Turk (AMT).
AMT has become an accepted method of gathering users’ responses [19]. It allows
access to a global audience, ensures efficient survey distribution, and high quality
results [3, 19]. We followed the recommendations for performing effective studies on
the AMT by Mason and Suri [19] and before the main study, we conducted pilot
34 Persuasion and Culture: Individualism–Collectivism and Susceptibility to Influence
Strategies

studies to test the validity of our study instruments. Furthermore, we employed
attention questions to ensure that participants were actively considering their answers.
A total of 335 valid responses were included in our analysis. 155 (46%) of our
participants are of collectivist culture (Asians) and 180 (54%) are from individualist
culture (North Americans). Incomplete responses, responses from participants that are
neither from Asia nor North America, and responses from participants who got the
attention questions wrong were excluded from this analysis.

4 Data Analyses
We begin our analysis by validating our study instrument. To determine the validity
of our survey instrument we performed Principal Component Analysis (PCA) using
SPSS. Before conducting PCA, the Kaiser-Meyer-Olkin (KMO) sampling adequacy
was determined and found to be 0.79, well above the recommended 0.6. The Bartlett
Test of Sphericity was significant at (χ2(105) = 1759.059, p < 0.0001). These two
measures indicate that the data was suitable to conduct factor analysis [10].
Indicator reliability can be assumed because Cronbach’s  of the strategies are all
higher than the threshold value of 0.7 except for liking and consensus strategies which
showed a Cronbach’s  of 0.44 and 0.40 respectively. This is acceptable because
according to Peter [25], Cronbach’s α should be ≥ 0.7, but for variables with 2-3
indicator, an α ≥ 0.4 is acceptable. The liking and consensus strategies contains 2
indicators each, therefore, Cronbach’s α is within the acceptable range of ≥0.4.
After establishing the suitability of our data, we computed the average score for
each strategy and then performed Repeated-Measure ANOVA (RM-ANOVA) with
the strategies (reciprocity, scarcity, authority, commitment and consistency,
consensus, and liking) as within-subject factors and culture as between-subject factors
to explore for significant differences between the collectivist and individualist with
respect to their likelihood of being influenced by the six strategies. The analysis was
performed after validating our data for ANOVA assumptions, with no violations.
When the sphericity assumption was violated, we used the Greenhouse-Geisser
method of correcting the degrees of freedom. Following findings of significant
effects, we performed post-hoc pairwise comparisons, using the Bonferonni method
for adjusting the degrees of freedom for multiple comparisons, to determine the
groups that significantly differ from each other.

5 Results
We present the results for the overall persuasiveness of the strategies for the two
cultural groups followed by the result showing the effects of culture on the
persuasiveness of the strategies.
Persuasion and Culture: Individualism–Collectivism and Susceptibility to Influence 35
Strategies

5.1 Overall Persuasiveness of the Strategies

Our results show significant main effects of strategy type (F4.06,1350.96=57.968, p.000,
2=.148) on the likelihood of influencing respondents from both cultures (i.e.,
persuasiveness). This means that there are significant differences between the
strategies with respect to their perceived persuasiveness overall. Regardless of
culture, commitment, reciprocity, and liking emerged as the most persuasive strategy
that have the highest likelihood of persuading people from both cultures –
(significantly different from all other strategies as shown by the Bonferonni-corrected
pairwise comparisons), see Figure 1.
In general, participants from both collectivist and individualist culture perceive all
the strategies as persuasive, well above the neutral rating of 3.5, see Figure 1.

Fig. 1: A bar graph of the mean of individual strategies, showing their overall persuasiveness.
Error bars represent a 95% confidence interval.

5.2 Culture Effect
The results also showed a significant main effect of culture on the persuasiveness of
the strategies (F1,333=6.46, p.011, 2=.019). Overall, collectivists are more likely to
be influenced by the strategies than individualists, see Figure 2 and Table 1.

5.3 Interaction Between Culture and Strategies
The results of the RM-ANOVA showed a significant interaction between culture and
strategy (F4.057,1350.96=12.53, p.000, 2=.036). Pairwise comparisons showed that
collectivist and individualist differ significantly in four out of the six strategies.
Specifically, collectivists found four out of the six strategies significantly more
persuasive than individualists: authority (F1,333=21.166, p.000, 2=.060); reciprocity
36 Persuasion and Culture: Individualism–Collectivism and Susceptibility to Influence
Strategies

(F1,333=6.334, p.012, 2=.019); liking (F1,333=12.087, p .001, 2=.035); and
consensus (F1,333 =25.188, p.000, 2=.070). Scarcity is the only strategy that
individualists found more persuasive than the collectivists, see Figure 2 and Table 1.

7
Collectivists Individualists
6

Fig. 2: Paired mean of individual strategies by cultural group. Error bars represent a 95%
confidence interval.

Table 1: Mean and Standard Deviations (SD) for the strategies by cultural groups. Bolded
means are significantly different across the cultural group; p<.05.
N = 335
Strategies Authority Reciprocity Scarcity Commitment Consensus Liking

mean(SD) mean(SD) mean(SD) mean(SD) mean(SD) mean(SD)
Collectivists 5.06(1.14) 5.70(1.11) 4.67(1.40) 5.70(1.13) 5.15(1.08) 5.20(0.97)
Individualists 4.42(1.38) 5.38(1.26) 4.69(1.39) 5.66(1.17) 4.54(1.13) 4.81(1.09)

5.4 Within Culture Comparison of the Strategies
Table 2 summarizes the results of the within cultural comparison of the
persuasiveness of the strategies. For collectivist, commitment and reciprocity,
emerged as the most persuasive of the strategies. They are followed by liking,
consensus, authority, and scarcity listed in decreasing order of persuasiveness.
Similarly, for individualist, commitment emerged as the most persuasive of the
strategies. It is followed by reciprocity, liking, scarcity, consensus, and authority
listed in decreasing order of persuasiveness.
Persuasion and Culture: Individualism–Collectivism and Susceptibility to Influence 37
Strategies

Table 2: Summary of persuasiveness of the strategies. The strategies presented in descending
order of persuasive strength (underlined is the highest)
Group Strategy
Collectivists Commitment, Reciprocity, Liking, Consensus, Authority, Scarcity

Individualists Commitment, Reciprocity, Liking, Scarcity, Consensus, Authority

Overall Commitment, Reciprocity, Liking, Consensus, Authority, Scarcity

6 Discussion and Conclusion
This study investigated the relationship between culture and susceptibility to
persuasion strategies. To that effect, we showed that collectivists and individualists
vary with respect to their responsiveness to the six persuasive strategies (reciprocity,
scarcity, authority, commitment and consistency, and liking) developed by Cialdin.
Specifically, individualist and collectivist differ significantly with respect to their
likelihood of being influenced by four out of the six persuasive strategies.
Interestingly, collectivist perceive four out of the six strategies: authority, reciprocity,
consensus, and liking as being significantly more persuasive than individualists. This
implies that collectivist can be more easily persuaded using these strategies than the
individualist. The explanation for these results can be found within the characteristics
of the cultural groups. For example, people from the collectivist culture are more
likely to recognize and respect authority figures, hence, they comply with persuasive
appeals employing the authority strategy than the individualist. Similarly, although
reciprocity is a universal norm, collectivist who are more attuned to in-group identity
feel more obliged to give back, hence, they are more likely to be influenced by
reciprocity strategy than the individualist culture. Also, the fact that collectivist
emphasizes the value of in-group more than individualist, also explains why
consensus and liking are more effective for them.
Overall, collectivist are more responsive to all the strategies except the scarcity
than individualist. This implies that collectivist are more persuadable than
individualist with respect to their susceptibility to the strategies overall.
Scarcity emerged as the only strategy that the individualist perceived as more
persuasive than the collectivist because individualist value things that differentiate
them and make them unique than collectivist.
In general, regardless of culture, commitment, reciprocity, and liking emerged as
the most persuasive strategies that have the highest likelihood of influencing
participants from both cultures (significantly different from all other strategies). This
is followed by the remaining strategies, consensus, authority, and scarcity (listed in
decreasing order of influence). The findings indicate that culture is a necessary factor
38 Persuasion and Culture: Individualism–Collectivism and Susceptibility to Influence
Strategies

to consider when selecting the appropriate persuasive strategy to employ in the
persuasive technology design.

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