What is the Relation between Culture and Desirable Responding

The literature in cross-cultural psychology suggests that col-lectivists are more likely to engage in deception in order to save faceand maintain harmonious relationships with others. In contrast,individualists are portrayed as candid and sincere because individu-alism encourages people to “be yourself. ” For example, Trilling(1972) argues that people in individualist cultures are more likelyto seek sincerity and authenticity, whereas people in collectivistcultures de-emphasize authenticity. Similarly, Triandis (1995) pro-poses that honesty in interactions with strangers is a characteristicthat is more highly valued by individualists than collectivists.We argue that people with both types of cultural orientationsengage in desirable responding, albeit in distinct ways. Given thatindividualists exhibit considerable biases in the form of possessingoverly positive and unrealistic views of the self, enhancing thepositivity of the self-view, and actively seeking information thatmaintains that inflated self-view (Diener, Diener and Diener, 1996;Heine and Lehman, 1995; Heine, Lehman, Markus and Kitayama,1999; Taylor and Brown, 1988), we argue that individualists arelikely to exhibit self-deceptive enhancement, the tendency to seeoneself in a positive light and to give inflated assessment of one’sskills and abilities.On the other hand, given that collectivists are more likely toengage in deception (e.g., Triandis and Suh 2002; Trilling 1972),which in turn has been linked to impression-management motives(e.g., Jacobson, Berger & Millham, 1970; Kashy & DePaulo, 1996;Sengupta, Dahl & Gorn, 2002), we argue that collectivists are morelikely than individualists to answer dishonestly in order to presentthemselves in a socially desirable manner.Data were collected by administering questionnaires to anethnically diverse sample of adults residing outside the campus ofa major metropolitan area (study 1), and students attending a largeMidwestern University (studies 2 and 3). In general, the resultssupported the above propositions. Findings also indicated that thehorizontal dimension of both individualism and collectivism ac-counts for these relationships. Furthermore, the tendency of collec-tivists to engage in impression management was mediated by scoresmeasuring their tendency to lie.Our findings have important implications for researchersusing surveys as a method of data collection. As is well known,desirable responding is one of the major causes of response bias andis a major threat to the validity of research findings (Johnson & Vande Vijver, 2002). Our findings suggest that researchers need toaccount for response bias in data collected across different cultures.Further, the results of this study likely have important impli-cations for various domains of consumer behavior. For example,our findings suggest that people with collectivistic cultural orienta-tions would be more prone to overstating consumption of goods thathelp them maintain face or enhance their social standing, such asbranded or expensive products. Collectivists may also understatetheir consumption of undesirable products like cigarettes andalcohol. Similarly, our findings suggest that people with an indi-vidualistic orientation and more particularly with a horizontalindividualistic orientation may be more likely to exaggerate theirskills and prowess in various matters (e.g., financial decisionmaking, consumer judgments, and the like).