I was doing some reading on cultural differences in management styles and, once again, BPS Research has a cool study.  There is a stream of research on negotiation that shows the strategic expression of anger is effective, apparently because it is taken as a sign you are "tough" and thus leads your intimidated opponent to make concessions.  A new study by Hajo Adam and his colleagues suggests that this may be a culturally specific finding, which applies to people of Western descent but not necessarily others.  In a pair of studies that compared people of European descent to people of East Asian descent they found, in both a hypothetical and a more realistic negotiation, that people in the two groups had opposite reactions to negotiating with an angry opponent:

This study is quite fascinating for at least three reasons.  The first is that these are pronounced cultural effects.  The second is they aren't simply pronounced in magnitude -- rather they demonstrate a reversal depending on the cultural background. So although many of us may claim that people are the same no matter where they are from, this apparently isn't so (at least on some dimensions).  The third is more practical: if you are a Westerner and are accustomed to getting your way by browbeating negotiation opponents (and speaking in an angry tone), your usual approach may backfire if you try to use it on East Asians. And if you are from an Asian background, and have to negotiate with Westerners, it might help you to get pissed-off (or at least pretend to be) at times. 

Cool study.  And instructive. It is only one study, but there are other experiments that show such cultural differences on other dimensions -- for example that Westerners are more like to "free-ride" or engage in "social-loafing" then people raised in Asian cultures.  For example, this study found that Chinese school kids performed better when working in pairs than working alone on an "auditory tracking task"; but U.S. school kids performed better when working alone than in pairs.  Again, there is a reverse effect, and evidence that well, we aren't all the same. 

What are your reactions to these cultural differences?  The usual explanation for such findings is that Asians are from "collectivistic" cultures and that Westerners are from "individualistic" cultures.  Is that why? Any other explanations or implications strike you? 

P.S. The citation for the negotiation study is: Adam H, Shirako A, & Maddux WW (2010). Cultural variance in the interpersonal effects of anger in negotiations. Psychological science : a journal of the American Psychological Society / APS, 21 (6)