Selective exposure: The impact of collectivism and individualism

2010/01/26 by Andreas Kastenmüller, Tobias Greitemeyer, Eva Jonas +2 · 44 citations
Psychology · Social Sciences · #Cultural Differences and Values #Social and Intergroup Psychology #Behavioral Health and Interventions #Collectivism #Individualism #Social psychology #Psychology #Political science

paper · doi:10.1348/014466609x478988

published in British Journal of Social Psychology 49(4), 745-763 (Wiley)

openalex publication_date 2010/01/26 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/29

Abstract

Previous research has found that people prefer information that supports rather than conflicts with their decisions (selective exposure). In the present three studies, we investigated the impact of collectivism and individualism on this bias. First, based on previous findings showing that collectivists compared to individualists are inclined to seek the 'middle way' and tend towards self-criticism, we predicted and found that the confirmation bias was more negative among collectivists compared to individualists. Second, we assumed that the difference between selected supporting versus conflicting information would move more in favour of conflicting information among both collectivists and individualists when the domain was important to them. As predicted (chronic and primed), collectivists and individualists, respectively, sought more conflicting (compared to supporting) information depending on whether collectivistic (e.g., the family) or individualistic (e.g., one's own uniqueness) attributes were important.

Citations

• Culture, dialectics, and reasoning about contradiction.
• In Search of East Asian Self-Enhancement
• Selective exposure and decision framing: The impact of gain and loss framing on confirmatory information search after decisions
• Culture and the self: Implications for cognition, emotion, and motivation.
• Motivated skepticism: Use of differential decision criteria for preferred and nonpreferred conclusions.
• The case for motivated reasoning.
• Recent Research on Selective Exposure to Information
• Confirmation bias in sequential information search after preliminary decisions: An expansion of dissonance theoretical research on selective exposure to information.

Cited by

• Selective exposure theory [wikipedia]