"I tried to make him Look Good": Cultural Differences in Navigating Advice

Advice is a ubiquitous form of social support that allows people to share valuable information with each other. Advice can improve problem-solving and strengthen social bonds. But advice can also backfire, threatening the recipient’s autonomy and perceived competence, making the provider appear overly dominant, and generating interpersonal tension. These negative consequences of advice stem from the fact that it is inherently a face-threatening form of communication. Cultural contexts differ in the preference for advice as an effective support strategy. People from individualistic North American cultural contexts, with their emphasis on individual autonomy, are less likely to express preference for advice compared with people from collectivistic Chinese and Russian cultural contexts, with their emphases on social ties. Despite the similarities, the two collectivistic cultural contexts may also differ when it comes to advice: whereas Russian cultural contexts foster the idea that directness is an important aspect of sociality, Chinese cultural contexts foster the importance of attending to face concerns that arise during social interactions. In a daily diary study, we examined advice exchanges in European American, Asian American and Russian American participants in the US, and also Russians in Russia and Chinese in China. We found that respondents in the Chinese sample reported engaging in and enjoying advice interactions more than other groups. These differences were explained by higher levels of monitoring face concerns in the Chinese sample. In a second study, we examined the ways European American, Asian American and Russian American participants exchanged advice in the lab when discussing a problem. In line with the first study, we observed that Asian American participants were more likely to engage in direct advice without straining the relational quality of the interactions. These data suggest that interpersonal costs of advice differ across cultural contexts, with face concerns mitigating the costs in East Asian cultural contexts.