Labor Relations Commons^™

Are Social Prediction Errors Universal? Predicting Compliance With A Direct Request Across Cultures, Vanessa K. Bohns, Michael J. J. Handgraaf, Jianmin Sun, Hillie Aaldering, Changguo Mao, Jennifer Logg

Vanessa K. Bohns

Previous research conducted in the United States has demonstrated that help-seekers fail to appreciate the embarrassment and awkwardness (i.e., social costs) targets would experience by saying “no" to a request for help. Underestimation of such social costs leads help-seekers to underestimate the likelihood that others will comply with their requests. We hypothesized that this error would be attenuated in a collectivistic culture. We conducted a naturalistic help-seeking study in the U.S. and China and found that Chinese help-seekers were more accurate than American help-seekers at predicting compliance. A supplementary scenario study in which we measured individual differences in collectivistic and …