So when I was in the first year of my PhD in 2005, I was walking down the hallway when I ran into Prof. Carol Dweck from Stanford University, so she asked me ‘Hey, Krishna what are you doing these days?’ So I said ‘I'm thinking about do people always choose what they like? Are choices based on preferences?' And then Carol asked me ‘What? Aren’t they the same? Choices and preferences-what's the difference?’ I think Carol Dweck’s comment revealed the Western assumption that choices should be based on people's preferences. But later that year, once the academic year was over I was scheduled to visit my family back in India. So I thought okay let me actually test whether this is always the case. So I went to a college cafeteria. I got five nice pens similar to what what you just saw in this course a few minutes ago. I had students take each pen test out how it writes and then evaluate the pen. How much they like the pen, how well does it write and how good does it look and so on. Then when they were done, I told the participants, 'okay, so just pick one of the five pens that you like as a gift for participating in the study’. And I did the same thing at the cafeteria at Stanford University after returning. What I found was that in the U.S. consistent with my professor’s assumptions large majority of people, of nearly ninety percent, chose the pen that they said that they liked the most. So people's choices were based on their preferences. But in India only sixty percent of people chose the pen that they rated as liking the most. I didn't have an opportunity to run this study in China at that point; but I'm sure the results would be very similar as people don't always buy and choose what they like particularly in Asian cultures. So, what do Asians or particularly Chinese customers based their choices on if not on their preferences. This is typically the first question that I get when I described my findings to someone. So over the years I found that Asian customers think about two particular things. So one question is to think about what would most other people like me choose or buy. Which pen is most fashionable? What do I see the celebrities doing? What is popular these days? And then the second question that they asked is what would others want me to choose. Which pen suits my personality, or the type of person I am, or the type of student I am. What would my friends say looks good on me or what would my parents say is the type of pen I should be getting. So Asian customers are focused more on other people's views and other people's actions rather than exclusively focused on their own personal preferences. In recent research, I found that the most salient factor is what people believe is the appropriate thing to do in their cultural context. Is it to go with what you like primarily? Or is it to go with - not with your preferences but what is the right thing to do. Again people in all cultures including in the US and Western cultures believe that you pay attention to other people's views and other people's actions. But Asians are particularly attuned to the social norm about what is expected of them. And in research I found that social norms are not kind of blanket. They can be changed. So let me describe a couple experiments that I ran to test this idea. So I got a group of Asian participants and I randomly split them into two conditions. In one group, I give them an article saying that the norm in Asian cultures is to not choose according to your own preferences all the time. I told them that as a recent survey found that a majority of people believe that you shouldn't just do what you want all the time, you should also be considerate about what other people would feel or other people would want to do. But then other group of participants, I told them the norm in Asian cultures is to just act on your preferences. People value individuals who are strong, who don't care too much about what others are doing be true to themselves. And then I asked them to make some choices. I previously measured their preferences so I could test whether the extent to which people chose according to the preferences or not. And what I found was that even Asian people’s behaviors are highly influenced by the social norms when they were told that the norms says don’t do, always act according to the preference. This is a big gap. Maybe people choose things that they didn't really like very much but when we tell them that the norm is to go according to the preferences, now we see a tight relationship between people's choices and preferences. Now even Asians end up choosing what they like the most. So this shows that Asians behavior is not ingrained or due to an unchangeable fixed mindset, but it's very responsive to what they think the social norm is at a given moment. So, one set of explanations could be because of the type of environment that they live in. So, for example, most Asian countries including Japan, Korea, China, Hong Kong, Singapore, Taiwan, India are much more dense, have many more people per square km than, say, large Western countries like the US, Canada, or Australia. And so in dense environment we have to interact with a lot of people all the time, there might be a greater pressure to conform to social norms. Like in the U.S. I can choose whether I want to walk on the left side or walk on the right side; and there're not a lot of many people I’ll run into. But in Hong Kong, I would be careful what side I’ll walk on because if I walk on the wrong side I'd be bumping against a hundred people on my way from home to work. So the environmental pressures could lead people to follow social norms to a greater extent. And a second set of explanations could be because of the cultural ethos about how people view their self. Do people view their self as being very independent and separate from the social context? The right way to behave should come from inside you, not from outside you. Or do people feel that there is no inherently right way to behave? The right way to act comes from our collective understanding of how one should act and comport oneself. So this more independent versus interdependent view of the self and society could also be an explanation for this cultural differences, and whether people always choose what they like or not. So typically most advertising targets people's preferences. Advertise company says ‘Look! Buy. My product is very nice. Prefer my prices, have higher stronger preferences for my products, and buy my products. It's good in so many ways.’ But targeting preferences might not be very effective if people don't always choose according to their preferences. So what my research suggests is that if companies want to sell products to Chinese customers or Asian customers more generally, what they should be targeting is people's choices, they should be telling people choose my product over other products. And this claim would be more effective. If they also provide other reasons that, for example, most of the people are choosing this product. This product is considered more fashionable or more popular than other similar products or this product is the best product objectively best item out there that's being sold. So the focus is not on the advantages or key unique features of one given item but on how this item compared with the competitors’ and why people should choose this item, not just like this item at the same time. So shifting the focus of advertisements from preferences to choices should make advertising more effective in Chinese markets.
