Fairness in Culturally Dependent Waiting Behavior: Cultural Influences on Social Communication in Simulated Crowds

Difficulties in living in unfamiliar cultures are caused by differences in the patterns of thinking, points of view, and styles of physical action. In this paper, we present our findings on learners’ cultural understanding during interaction based on culturally influenced communication in simulated crowds. Participants in the experiment are supposed to live in a shared virtual space. They are asked to obtain multiple tickets available at two service counters in the system. A virtual service person provides a ticket upon request from a customer. Additionally, one or more virtual customers move around in the system to acquire tickets. If a counter is occupied by a customer, the others have to wait. Two types of waiting styles–line and group waiting–and two fairness levels of the service person–fair and unfair service–are configured and evaluated. The counter selection results and reasoning results were analyzed using the ANOVA process. We found that culture in Thailand influences ideas of waiting differently in different first- and third-person point of view (POV) settings. The participants in the first-person POV group show a tendency to focus on the concept of fairness more than the participants in the third-person POV setting, whereas the latter pay more attention to cultural reasoning in their waiting behavior.