Culture Mixing Advertisements And Products Evaluation And Multicultural Attitudes:the Effects Of The Characteristics Of Cultural Symbols

Globalization provides increasing opportunities for people to interact with artifacts,people and cultures from other countries and areas.In this processes,global advertising plays an important role in not only promoting the commercial goods but also transferring cultural icons and symbols from different countries,providing a stage for culture mixing.The current study explored the effects of such culture-mixing advertisements on local people’s attitudes towards foreign cultural inflows and cultural diversity,trying to figure out how people’s multicultural attitudes were influenced by the characteristics of cultural symbols in the advertisements they were exposed to.Specifically,based on the implications of previous research,the current study looked at the cultural domain that local symbols belonged to and the countries of origin of the foreign symbols.In three experiments where culture mixing was respectively constructed in verbal,visual and thematic form,local Chinese people were presented with advertisements where local and foreign cultural symbols varying in these two characteristics were placed together,and then were measured their endorsement of three aspects of multiculturalism as the indicators of multicultural attititudes.According to the results,when culture mixing was constructed through verbal symbols,the characteristics of symbols exerted no difference on peoples’ multicultural attitudes;However,when culture mixing involved visual symbols,people who had viewed the advertisements with traditional symbols of local cultures showed more recognition of intercultural differences as well as more willingness of cross-cultural contact;advertisements where traditional local symbols and Japanese cultural symbols were simultaneously presented improved their appreciation towards cultural diversity.Further,when culture mixing advertisements engaged people in a more immersive intercultural contact with thematic symbols,people recognized more intercultural differences when the foreign cultural symbols were from Italy,and copresenting foreign symbols with tradition local symbols undermined people’s positive attitudes towards cultural diversity.The findings in the current study confirmed the hypothesized effects of characteristics of cultural symbols in advertisements on local people’s perception of and attitudes towards cultural diversity.Besides,the current study implied the dirrections for future studies with different approaches and methods to further understand the underlying mechanism.