Compliance with a request in two cultures: The differential influence of social proof and commitment/consistency on collectivists and individualists

University students in Poland and the United States, two countries that dif fer in individualistic-collectivistic orientation, indicated their willingn ess to comply with a request to participate without pay in a marketing surv ey. Half were asked to do so after considering information regarding their own history of compliance with such requests, whereas the other half were a sked to do so after considering information regarding their peers' history of such compliance. This war designed to assess the impact of two social in fluence principles (commitment/consistency and social proof respectively) o n participants' decisions. As expected, although both principles were influ ential across cultures, the commitment/consistency principle had greater im pact on Americans, whereas the social proof principle had greater impact on Poles. Additional analyses indicated that this effect was due principally, but not entirely, to participants' personal individualistic-collectivistic orientations rather than to the dominant individualistic-collectivistic or ientation of their cultures.