Reinterpreting cultural priming effects in cross-cultural consumer research
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Reinterpreting cultural priming effects in cross-cultural consumer research Dwight R. Merunka
Received: 19 July 2012 / Accepted: 4 January 2013 # Academy of Marketing Science 2013
Abstract Experimentally priming bicultural individuals in cross-cultural consumer research to access their respective cultures has produced interesting findings. However, close examination of the experimental conditions and of the main findings reveals important inconsistencies and contradictions that cast doubt on their validity. In general, the risk of a cultural attribution fallacy is high in such cross-cultural research, due to the lack of control over three basic conditions that are required for successful cultural priming experiments: (1) the demonstrated biculturalism of study participants, (2) the experimental manipulations used to engender cultural switching, and (3) the procedures used to ensure that culture, rather than other processes such as stereotypical associations, is being stimulated and accessed. This manuscript discusses these conditions, proposes a descriptive model that clearly distinguishes the differential effects of cultural priming on either monocultural bilinguals or on bicultural individuals, and suggests a research agenda for better understanding and improving the implementation of the cultural priming research paradigm. Keywords Bilingualism . Biculturalism . Culture . Cross-cultural . Priming Traditional views of culture recognize a broad group of stable variables, such as values, ideas, rules, practices, and beliefs, that influence individual and collective cognitions
D. R. Merunka (*) IAE Aix en Provence, Cergam, Aix Marseille University and EUROMED Management, Clos Guiot, 13540 Putricard, France e-mail: [email protected] D. R. Merunka e-mail: [email protected]
and behaviors (Geertz 1993; Triandis 1996) and that are transmitted from generation to generation (Matsumoto and Yoo 2006). Cross-cultural research attempts to identify, measure, compare, and interpret these variables across cultural groups (Segall et al. 1998, Steenkamp and Baumgartner 1998), usually by comparing two or more cultural groups that are known or assumed to differ on some culturally marked cognitions or behaviors. Yet a longstanding issue in cross-cultural research pertains to the extent to which study results are comparable across cultural groups. Important requirements for reliable and valid crosscultural research include measurement invariance (Steenkamp and Baumgartner 1998) and control over extraneous or intervening variables. However, because culturally different groups can differ in characteristics such as education, occupation, or income, it is often difficult to disentangle the effects of other variables from those of culture. As an alternative to traditional views of culture, the dynamic constructivist paradigm regards culture as a latent network of knowledge structures, accessed and employed by members of that culture when a particular situation demands it (Briley et al. 2000; Hong et al. 2000
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