Cultural differences in the response to feedback in friendships: exploring the mechanisms of connectedness, agreement/ awareness, and improvability

Date
2017
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Abstract
Individuals use cultural blueprints to guide their interactions and experiences within cultural contexts; therefore, cultural contexts may foster the development of different practices involving friendship interactions. In this dissertation, I investigated cultural differences in the exchange of negative and positive feedback in everyday friendship interactions, and tested the mechanisms for the effect. Replicating the past preliminary studies, I found that across the three dissertation studies, Koreans and Chinese were more tolerant toward negative feedback compared to European-Americans. Study 4 found that priming one of the proposed mechanisms of this cultural difference, improvability mindset, did not affect participants’ responses to feedback. Study 5 found that, while imagining being part of a low relational mobility campus organization did not lead to a different pattern of responses to negative and positive feedback than being part of a high relational mobility organization, people in the low relational mobility group reported feeling closer and greater positive emotions to receiving feedback in general. Finally Study 6 looked at pairs of real friends exchanging positive and negative feedback. A test of statistical mediation suggested that even after controlling for baseline levels of connectedness and awareness, the level of connectedness experienced after the feedback was the probable mediator of the cultural differences in the response to feedback.
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Keywords
Psychology, Connectedness, Culture, Feedback, Friendship practices
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