The Sense of Commitment in Joint Action: A Cross-Cultural Study Comparing India and the UK

Previous research involving American and Western European participants provides evidence that, in the context of joint action, individuals’ sense of commitment sustains their motivation to persist in performing actions which their joint action partners are expecting and relying on them to perform. In the current study, we extend this research by implementing two web-based experiments comparing participants in two separate cultures: India and the UK, the former being characterized by a higher degree of collectivism and interpersonal interdependence. Participants viewed video clips of two agents making contributions to a joint action, and responded to a battery of questions about how they perceived the scenarios in the video clips, as well as the 30-item self-construal questionnaire. Across the two experiments, we found evidence that the sense of commitment to persisting in a joint action is boosted by the degree of intertemporal coordination and by the perception of a joint action partner’s reliance. We do not find consistent evidence of any difference in how long participants in the two cultures indicate that they would persist. Strikingly, however, participants in India were far more likely to judge there to be an obligation to persist in helping.