title: Selective exposure: the impact of collectivism and individualism.
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.
authors.affiliation: Liverpool John Moores University, UK. a.m.kastenmueller@ljmu.ac.uk
authors.forename: Andreas
authors.initials: A
authors.lastname: Kastenmüller
authors.forename: Tobias
authors.initials: T
authors.lastname: Greitemeyer
authors.forename: Eva
authors.initials: E
authors.lastname: Jonas
authors.forename: Peter
authors.initials: P
authors.lastname: Fischer
authors.forename: Dieter
authors.initials: D
authors.lastname: Frey
mesh_terms: D000293:Adolescent; D000328:Adult; D000368:Aged; D000533:Altruism; D001208:Asia / Q000208:ethnology; D002755:Choice Behavior; D003220:Conflict, Psychological; D003431:Cross-Cultural Comparison; D005060:Europe / Q000208:ethnology; D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D007206:Individuality; D057226:Information Seeking Behavior; D008297:Male; D008875:Middle Aged; D009042:Motivation; D012945:Social Values; D014481:United States / Q000208:ethnology