A Cross-Cultural Study on the Effects of Envy-Evoking Ads

Ads often feature celebrities or others similar to the target viewer and thereby evoke envy. Envy occurs when people make an upward social comparison, and evoked envy can be either benign or malicious. The authors propose that people with different self-construals feel different degrees of benign and malicious envy depending on who is being envied: a celebrity or a similar other. Three studies were conducted comparing Americans to Koreans (Study 1), Americans to the Chinese (Study 2), and Koreans with different self-construals (Study 3). The results showed that people with high independence showed less benign envy toward the celebrity ad than toward the similar others ad, while people with low independence showed the opposite pattern. People with high interdependence showed less malicious envy toward the celebrity ad than toward the similar others ad, while people with low interdependence showed the opposite pattern.

Perception of Greed and Unfairness

In the past decade, interest in greed among empirical business scholars has emerged. It starts with the trailblazing attempt to analyze greed by Wang and Murnighan (2011), followed by the development of the Dispositional Greed Scale by Seuntjens et. al. (2015a, 2015b), which serves as a basis for the research done by Zhu et. al. (2019) and Bao et. al. (2020). However, since Seuntjens’ work, the overwhelming focus has been on greed as a disposition to “always want more and never being satisfied with what one currently has” (Seuntjens et. al., 2015b). Independently, Cheung (2019) proposed a more sophisticated philosophical analysis of greed, which argues that there are three dimensions of greed, and its dimension of unfairness has largely been neglected. This article reports on our investigation of that neglected dimension of greed. Our cross-cultural study (n=395) shows that when the rating of greediness was not very high, the perception of greed went hand in hand with the perception of unfairness, such that there was a positive linear association between the two. The demographics of the participants suggests that the sample is diverse enough to make a broad generalization. The result of this study confirms the conception of greed in Cheung (2019), which claims that the perception of unfairness, i.e., (2) above, is a significant component of perceived greed. Cheung’s account of greed can also explain the data when the rating of greediness is very high, but logically there could be other explanations.

Altruistic or Egocentric, or even Hypocritic? - A Cross-Cultural Study of the Safety Priority Choice of Autonomous Car

How should the autonomous car behave when faced with an unavoidable accident? In particular, in situations where either the driver or the pedestrian will inevitably be killed, whose safety should the autonomous car prioritize? There can be cases in which sacrificing the driver would be the best solution to maximize lives and minimize deaths. And we also need to consider the possibility that the victim could be ourselves. In this cross-cultural study with participants from US, Japan, and China, we investigated the drivers' safety setting preferences and found some interesting cultural differences in such preferences.

Altruistic or Egocentric, or even Hypocritic? - A Cross-Cultural Study of the Safety Priority Choice of Autonomous Car

How should the autonomous car behave when faced with an unavoidable accident? In particular, in situations where either the driver or the pedestrian will inevitably be killed, whose safety should the autonomous car prioritize? There can be cases in which sacrificing the driver would be the best solution to maximize lives and minimize deaths. And we also need to consider the possibility that the victim could be ourselves. In this cross-cultural study with participants from US, Japan, and China, we investigated the drivers' safety setting preferences and found some interesting cultural differences in such preferences.