Culture and Relationships

Why Culture

Social science needs the concept of culture because evidence from geographically separated communities has shown that how these interdependencies are managed varies from place to place. For example, David Matsumoto has orchestrated a team of researchers from 32 cultures around the world to explore how emotions are displayed to others. Emotional expression plays a crucial role in regulating ongoing social interaction, so variations in the dynamics of this regulation will have important consequences for how relationships are managed. These researchers found that in all cultures emotional display is sanctioned more toward outgroup members compared to ingroup members and when the person displaying emotion was in a public setting as opposed to being alone with an interacting partner. Regardless of the social setting, however, persons socialized into individualistic cultural systems, where freedom and equality are more highly valued reported greater freedom in expressing their emotions, particularly positive emotions; persons socialized into collectivist cultural systems, where self-restraint and social order are more highly valued, reported less. In this domain of relationship, then, a respondent's cultural group membership influences his or her level of emotional expressivity.

As another example, Michael Bond and Joseph Forgas explored whether the perception of another as more conscientious led the perceiver to engage in more trusting behaviors toward that target. They confirmed this expectation but found that conscientiousness was more influential on Chinese than upon Australian trust. In this case, a respondent's culture affected the strength of association between another's personality characteristic and an actor's behavior toward that person, shaping a dynamic process. As before, the emphasis on self-restraint characterizing a collectivist culture enhances the importance of the personality characteristics that are more valued in its members and hence directs its member's behavior toward those others. It is these empirical demonstrations of culture's association with relationship-relevant outcomes or processes that drive the scientific search for explanations about why cultural membership affects people's associations with other persons.

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