Culture's Influence on Product Perception

Abstract: This thesis sets out to investigate the unexplored cross-disciplinary area of cross-cultural social psychology and product design. Prior research in cross-cultural social psychology has shown that there exists perception differences between people from different cultural backgrounds. For instance, people from countries such as Japan tend to be relatively good at observing changes in the backgrounds of pictures while people in countries such as America tend to be better at observing changes in a pictures foreground. It is hypothesised that these perception differences are rooted in cultural differences. This appears significant to product design, as it stands to reason that if culture influences the perception of seeing and understanding things, then it most likely also influences the perception of seeing and handling products. If designers were aware of these perceptional differences, they would potentially be able to design products catered to different cultural target groups, and creating a better user experiences. Taking the literature on cultural percectional differences as a starting point, this project explored a few of the concepts found there that seemed to have a high potential for informing future product design, with the aim both of testing the underlying theory of East-West perceptional differences, and by designing examples of how testing these could be done in practice. Two experiments were carried out, based on the so-called horizontal-vertical illusion. In the first, participants (n=101) were asked to judge the relative length of two 2D lines with the same lengths, and in the other (n=20) to judge the relative volume of 3D containers with the same volume. Respondents were divided into two groups – “Eastern” and “Western” – depending on their national cultures being classified in previous research as collectivistic or individualistic. Experiment 1 shown that there were – as could be expected from the literature - major differences between Eastern and Western respondents in perceiving lengths on 2D images, but no significant differences in the perception of objects in real life were found in Experiment 2, in which both the Western and Eastern participants tended to perceive taller objects as bigger in volume. The thesis finally discusses the potential merits and pitfalls of applying cross-cultural perception psychology to the field of product design, warning against outdated and essentialistic cultural stereotypes, while also calling for more robust exploration of the area for better empirical grounding of further work.