Shirley Y. Y. Cheng

Cultural threats in culturally mixed encounters hamper creative performance for individuals with lower openness to experience

Past research has examined independently how openness to experience, as a personality trait, and the situational threat triggered by a foreign cultural encounter affect the emergence of creative benefits from a culture-mixing experience. The present research provides the first evidence for the interactive effect of openness to experience and cultural threat following culturally mixed encounters on creative performance. In Study 1, under heightened perceptions of cultural threat, exposing to the mixing of Chinese and American cultures (vs. a non-mixed situation) made close-minded Chinese participants to perform more poorly in a creative generation task. In Study 2, inducing cultural threat by having a foreign cultural icon spatially intrude a sacred space of the local culture caused Chinese participants with lower levels of openness to perform less creatively when the foreign icon was deemed highly symbolic of the foreign culture. These patterns of effects did not emerge among open-minded participants. These findings suggest that trait openness acts as a buffer against foreign cultural threat to sustain the creative benefits of culture mixing.

The Role of Regulatory Fit in Framing Effective Negative Feedback Across Cultures

Giving effective negative feedback is not only important but also challenging. Often people struggle as to how; and perhaps even more so when the feedback receiver comes from a different culture . Building on the regulatory fit theory, the current research examined how negative feedback framing (gain- vs. loss framed) would affect feedback receivers’ motivation as a function of their regulatory focus. We found that European Americans were in general more promotion-focused than Chinese (Study 1) and Indians (Study 2), such that promotion-focused (vs. prevention-focused) participants showed higher motivation after receiving gain-framed (vs. loss-framed) negative feedback. Across two studies, with student and work samples, our findings answered the question of how to give more effective negative feedback and suggested that regulatory fit can be a universal strategy for increasing motivation across the East and West.