Where does the cultural difference in rejection avoidance come from? The role of relational mobility and reputational expectation

Abstract

Contrary to traditional cultural psychological theories, cross-cultural studies have found that East Asians are not more interdependent than North Americans. Addressing this anomaly, Hashimoto and Yamagishi (2013) proposed that, from an institutional approach, cross-cultural differences should exist in rejection avoidance rather than harmony-seeking tendencies. They argue that this is because, in low relational mobility societies like Japan, where the cost of social exclusion is high, it is adaptive to be attentive to possible negative reputation and behave in a manner that accommodates other people’s expectations through the use of rejection avoidance tendencies. However, it has not been confirmed empirically whether or not cultural differences in relational mobility and the expectation of negative reputation underlie these differences in rejection avoidance. We conducted three online surveys in the US and Japan to test this hypothesis. Results showed that, consistent with our predictions, lower relational mobility among Japanese, compared to Americans, was associated with higher negative reputational expectation, and higher negative reputational expectation was associated with higher rejection avoidance tendencies.