Cultural differences in indecisiveness: The role of naïve dialecticism

• East Asian Canadians (EAC) are more indecisive than European Canadians (EC).
• East Asian Canadians (EAC) are more indecisive than South Asian Canadians (SAC).
• EAC (vs. EC and SAC) exhibit lower need for cognition (NFC).
• EAC (vs. EC and SAC) exhibit higher naïve dialecticism (ND).
• NFC and ND mediate the relationship between culture and indecisiveness.

East Asians exhibit naïve dialecticism, a set of worldviews that tolerates contradictions. As influenced by naïve dialecticism, East Asians are more likely to hold and less likely to change ambivalent attitudes, compared with European North Americans. If East Asians have a heightened tendency to see both positive and negative aspects of an object or issue, but a lesser inclination to resolve these inconsistencies, East Asians (vs. European North Americans) may experience more difficulty in committing to an action, and thus be more indecisive. Consistent with this hypothesis, we found that East Asian Canadians scored higher on a measure of chronic indecisiveness than did European Canadians and South Asian Canadians, and that naïve dialecticism and need for cognition mediated the relationship between culture and indecisiveness. These results add to the extant literature on indecisiveness, demonstrating cultural variations in indecisiveness and an underlying cultural factor that is responsible for these cultural differences.