Cultural Differences in Reciprocal and Mutual Social Support
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2016
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Haverford College. Department of Psychology
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Award
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eng
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Tri-College users only
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Abstract
Social support is an invaluable component of our lives, and yet the way we perceive, use and benefit from support depends on one’s cultural background. Through two studies, we explored the differences between reciprocity and mutuality to examine whether different cultures benefit from and evaluate these two types of social support differently. In our first study, we examined the benefits of mutuality and reciprocity for European-American (EA) female friend pairs and Asian American (AA) female friend pairs. Results indicated that EAs experience the least amount of anxiety when in highly reciprocal friendships, particularly when the reciprocal support is emotional in nature, whereas AAs experience more anxiety in highly reciprocal friendships, suggesting that reciprocity is beneficial for EAs’ mental health but not for AAs’ mental health. In our second study, we explored how people perceive support interactions by asking participants from the United States and India to listen to a scripted and audio-recorded mutual or non-mutual interaction between two friends, and then to evaluate each friend and the overall interaction. Results indicated that Indians did not perceive a difference between mutual and non-mutual interactions for each individual friend, whereas the European-Americans felt more negatively in the non-mutual interaction compared to the mutual interaction for each individual friend. The results indicate that our audio interactions likely assessed reciprocity instead of mutuality, suggesting that European-Americans view reciprocal support interactions, and reciprocal relationships, more positively than non-reciprocal interactions, while Indians do not evaluate reciprocal support interactions differently from non-reciprocal interactions.