Cross-Cultural Study of Procedural Fairness and Disputing Behavior (Collectivism, Justice)

156 p.Thesis (Ph.D.)--University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, 1985.Research in cross-cultural psychology and anthropology has suggested that cultural collectivism is a useful dimension for categorizing cultures and that different levels of collectivism may be related to different styles of dispute processing. With subjects from Hong Kong and the U.S., three studies were undertaken to explore the relation between collectivism and dispute processing behaviors. In addition, several factors affecting people's preference for different conflict resolution procedures were examined. The first study showed that the collectivistic Chinese subjects preferred bargaining and mediation over adversary and inquisitorial adjudication, whereas the individualistic American subjects preferred adversary adjudication and mediation to the same extent and preferred both over bargaining and inquisitorial adjudication. Results further suggest that the reason for Chinese subjects' strong preference for mediation and bargaining was that they perceived these two procedures as more capable of reducing the animosity between the disputants. Procedural preference was found to be influenced by the extent to which the procedures were perceived as: (1) granting the disputants process control, (2) capable of animosity reduction, (3) fair, and (4) favorable. The second study evaluated the impact of the relationship between disputants and the "stakes" involved in a dispute on conflict-coping strategies. It was found that a conflict was more likely to be pursued if the stakes involved were large and if the would-be disputant was an outgroup person. Furthermore, Chinese subjects were less likely to pursue a conflict with an ingroup disputant, and more likely to pursue a conflict with an outgroup disputant, than were American subjects. Study 3 was a replication of the second study with completely different procedures. The ingroup-outgroup variable was manipulated by varying the degree of perceived similarity between disputants and the possibility of future interaction. The stakes involved in the dispute were manipulated by varying the amount of underpayment experienced upon the completion of a task. Results of Study 3 are basically similar to those obtained in the second study. Implications of these findings for a pan-cultural model of dispute processing behaviors are discussed.U of I OnlyRestricted to the U of I community idenfinitely during batch ingest of legacy ETD