Attitude Transference and Deviant Behavior: A Comparative Study in Japan and the United States

Abstract

Attitude transference is the term that has come to be used to refer to a key process by which one's personal attitudes approving or disapproving of certain behavior reflect those of his or her primary groups and in turn affect his or her conforming or deviant behavior. Cross-cultural comparisons on this and other issues afforded by previous studies, however, have been limited primarily to examining findings that have used different samples and instructions. Drawing on previous literature on cultural variability in individualism, the present study directly tests the hypotheses that although attitude transference operates similarly across cultures, the effects of parental and peer attitudes toward deviance on one's own attitudes should be weaker and stronger, respectively, in Japan compared to the United States. The analysis of identical survey data from college students in the two societies provides mixed support for the hypotheses.

Acknowledgments

Research reported herein was supported by the Grants-in-Aid for Scientific Research from the Japanese Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology and by a grant from the College of Arts and Sciences, University of Oklahoma. We are most grateful to Professor Harold G. Grasmick for his contributions to collecting the U.S. data and his invaluable input into earlier versions of the article. We are also thankful to anonymous reviewers of this journal for their insightful comments and critiques.

Notes

¹To date, the majority of research on cultural differences in Japan and the United States has suggested that Japanese culture is less individualistic than Americans. In the seminal work of IBM employees in seventy-four countries and three regions, Hofstede and Hofstede (2004) found Japan and the United States to score 46 (ranked 22nd) and 91 (ranked 1st), respectively, on the individualism index (43 is the average score). Thus Japanese, more so than Americans, tend to have a lower inclination for independence as a cultural value (see also Gudykunst et al. 1996).

²We must emphasize that the research here is not intended as a test of a full model of differential association/social learning theory or any other theory. Rather, it is concentrated on the relationship between the definitions perceived to be endorsed by one's primary groups (parents and peers) and one's own definitions and behavior, without positing that as the only or the main mechanism of group influence.

³College undergraduate students were chosen as respondents for two reasons. First, we had easier access to them than to younger adolescents. Second, college undergraduate students early in their academic years are in their deviance-prone years (Hirschi 1969). We realize, of course, that people who do not attend college are excluded and might be more (or less) deviant than those who do attend college. But the inclusion of only college students was a constant across the two samples.

⁴The month of April was crucial to obtain students from both countries at approximately the same stages of their academic careers. While an academic year begins in late August or early September in universities in the United States, the Japanese academic year begins in April. Thus, we chose to gather data in April of 2003.

⁵Japanese students must declare a major before their admission to a university. In essence, there is no equivalent to an Introduction to Sociology (or any other subject) course taken by a large number of students outside their major.

⁶Some might question the equivalence of self-reported data in the two countries because self-disclosure in Japan, in relation to the United States, is usually (and often exaggeratedly) considered as an inappropriate behavior (Gudykunst and Nishida 1994). But we made every effort to overcome the problem by informing the Japanese students that the survey was being implemented by the Japanese author who is not affiliated with the university, that the name of the university would never be revealed, and that there is no right or wrong answer to any one of the questions. We also ensured that complete silence was maintained and no peeking was allowed while the students were answering the questions.

⁷We also had to address the wide discrepancy between Japanese national and American state universities in racial and ethnic diversity, a discrepancy so wide that “minority group” status could not be a variable in our analysis. Race/ethnicity is included as a control in tests of deviance theories in the United States. We knew in advance, however, that this would be problematic in our research because of the racial and ethnic homogeneity of Japan. Whereas 75% of the U.S. population is white (U.S. Census 2001b), typical estimates are that 95 to 98% in the Japanese population is racially and ethnically Japanese (Kerbo, 2000:470; see also Sugimoto, 2003). Had we included a variable for race/ethnicity, separating minority group members from others, that variable would have been collinear with the dummy variable for Japan, possibly masking the effect of Japan, independent of its race/ethnic homogeneity. Consequently, our plan was to use only the questionnaires completed by Caucasian students in the United States, excluding those who were self-identified minority group members. Likewise, we would omit from the analysis the few Japanese respondents who identified themselves as “non-Japanese.”

⁸The gender composition of universities in Japan and the United States means that the proportion of males in the Japanese sample will be higher. In the American university only half (51%) of all students were male, and over 50% of that year's freshman class were female. In contrast, Japanese national universities are overwhelmingly male (Statistics Bureau 2003) and in the particular Japanese university from which we gathered data, 71% of all students enrolled were males. Our two samples reflect these distributions.

⁹Similar conclusions were reached with principal components analyses of the dichotomized items within nations (coded 0 for respondents who “never” engaged in the behavior in the past year and 1 for those who did). For both nations, the scree tests (Cattell 1966) indicate a single factor, and no major differences in factor loadings are obvious between nations. Alpha for the sum of dichotomies is .735 in Japan and .759 in the Untied States.

¹⁰These items may be seen as measuring not just definitions/attitudes but to some extent differential social reinforcement. That is, the fact that the items asked the respondent to report the perceived likely “reaction” of others to knowledge of one's behavior may suggest that the questions measure some aspect of differential reinforcement. However, the response categories of “strongly disapprove” to “strongly approve” with an intermediate response category of “would not care” one way or the other that are almost exactly the same response categories used in previous research to measure attitudes (see Akers et al. 1979). Nonetheless, we recognize that this measure is something of a mixed indexing of perceived attitudes and reactions.

N = 369 (p for one-tailed test in parentheses).

N = 433 (p for one-tailed test in parentheses).

¹¹Some might argue that the relationship we find between peer attitudes and one's own attitudes is due to the fact that peer attitudes are measured by the individual's report of the attitudes of his or her peers, and therefore one's report of peer attitudes is not accurate and may simply be a reflection of his or her own attitudes. The same argument has been used with regard to respondents' reports of friends' delinquent or non-delinquent behavior being primarily a reflection of one's own behavior (see Haynie and Osgood 2005). However, the research does not support this argument (see Bartusch et al. 1997; Elliott and Menard 1996; Thornberry et al. 1994). Moreover, even if one's perceptions do not match exactly the “actual” attitudes and behavior of others, theoretically it is the person's perception of others' that would be expected to have the stronger effect in attitude transference (Akers and Sellers 2009; see also Akers 1985, 1998).

Partial correlationship between peers' and parents attitudes is .334 (p < .001) among Americans and .534 (p < .001) among Japanese.

¹²Some might argue that there are differences in results based on the use of standardized versus unstandardized scores. But we would note that we also ran the analyses of the relationships presented in Tables 3 and 4 using the scales with the unstandardized variables and found that there was no significant difference in results from the two methods.

*Significance test of difference in unstandardized coefficients based on Paternoster et al. (1998).

*Response options: 1 = never; 2 = rarely; 3 = sometimes; 4 = often; 5 = almost always.

**All eigenvalues principle component analysis: 3.67, 1.32, 1.10, .99, .75, .73, .61, .58, .49, .47, .29.

***All eigenvalues principle component analysis: 3.28, 1.35, 1.15, .91, .84, .80, .66, .64, .54, .48, .34.

*Response options: 1 = strongly disapprove; 2 = disapprove; 3 = would not care/not my concern; 4 = approve; 5 = strongly approve.

**All eigenvalues principle component analysis: 5.10, 1.38, .82, .66, .56, .55, .47, .45, .40, .33, .30.

***All eigenvalues principle component analysis: 5.33, 1.21, .95, .70, .59, .54, .48, .42, .38, .28, .13.

*Response options: 1 = strongly disapprove; 2 = disapprove; 3 = would not care/not their concern; 4 = approve; 5 = strongly approve.

**All eigenvalues principle component analysis: 4.98, 1.41, .85, .69, .63, .54, .49, .44, .41, .29, .27.

***All eigenvalues principle component analysis: 5.04, 1.17, 1.08, .68, .65, .54, .50, .48, .37, .31, .18.

*Response options: 1 = strongly disapprove; 2 = disapprove; 3 = would not care/not their concern; 4 = approve; 5 = strongly approve.

**All eigenvalues principle component analysis: 4.86, 1.28, .88, .77, .60, .56, .50, .48, .45, .40, .23.

***All eigenvalues principle component analysis: 4.98, 1.30, 1.04, .71, .64, .56, .48, .46, .36, .33, .14.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Emiko Kobayashi

EMIKO KOBAYASHI is an Associate Professor at the Foreign Language Institute of Kanazawa University in Japan. She received her Ph.D. in communication from the University of Oklahoma. Her research interests include intercultural communication, cross-cultural psychology, and comparative sociology of deviant behavior, with a particular emphasis on comparisons between Japan and the United States.

Ronald L. Akers

RONALD L. AKERS is a Professor of Criminology and Sociology at the University of Florida. He has conducted extensive research and published widely on criminological theory, alcohol and drug behavior, sociology of law, juvenile delinquency, crime, corrections, and deviant behavior. He is best known for his development and testing of social learning theory, and the social structure-social learning model, as a general theory of crime and deviant behavior. Among his books are Criminological Theories: Introduction, Evaluation, and Application (with Christine Sellers), Deviant Behavior: A Social Learning Approach, and Social Learning and Social Structure: A General Theory of Crime and Deviance. He is recipient of the Edwin H. Sutherland Award and a Fellow of the American Society of Criminology. He has been inducted onto the Roll of Honor of the Southern Sociological Society, and an endowed Professorship in Criminology and Deviance has been established in his name in the Department of Sociology at the University of Kentucky.

Susan F. Sharp

SUSAN F. SHARP is the L. J. Semrod Presidential Professor of Sociology and Women's and Gender Studies at the University of Oklahoma. Her research interests include women and crime/deviance, capital punishment, and comparative criminology. She is the founding editor of the journal Feminist Criminology and is the author of the book Hidden Victims and edited the book The Incarcerated Woman. She was named the Kinney-Sugg outstanding professor in the College of Arts and Sciences for 2009–2010.