Are people’s preferences always personal preferences?
Non-Western cultures place greater emphasis on the norms and views of others, which can sometimes supersede personal preferences. Dr. Hila Riemer, lecturer at the Guilford Glazer Faculty of Business and Management Department of Management, and her research partners, Sharon Shavitt and Minkyung Koo from the University of Illinois, and Hazel Markus from Stanford University, offer a normative-contextual model of attitudes which they contend will offer better insight into preferences in non-Western cultures.
In their article entitled “Preferences Don’t Have to Be Personal: Expanding Attitude Theorizing with a Cross-Cultural Perspective” in the journal Psychological Review, the researchers begin with the premise that theorizing about attitudes until now has reflected primarily Western philosophical views and empirical findings, which emphasize the centrality of personal preferences. As such, traditional models of attitude are person-centric. Person-centric attitudes are traditionally viewed as stable and internally consistent; they function psychologically as a means of self-expression, and assist in decision making.
However, Riemer and her colleagues suggest, incorporating research insights from non-Western sociocultural contexts, in which personal preferences are not as central, can significantly enhance attitude theorizing. The researchers introduce a normative-contextual model of attitudes, which explains preferences in non-Western cultural contexts. The normative-contextual model of attitude emphasizes that attitudes incorporate the norms and the views of others. Thus, according to the normative-contextual model, attitudes need not be personal or necessarily stable and internally consistent, and are only functional to the extent that they help one to adjust spontaneously to different contexts.
The new model has implications for attitude theory and measurement, and offer practical implications for a wide variety of areas such as health, well-being, habits and behavioral change, and global marketing.
Dr. Hila Riemer’s research focuses on consumer psychology, particularly on the emotional and cultural factors that influence consumers’ behavior.
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