WhatsApp Acceptance: A Comparison Between Individualistic and Collectivistic Cultures

Abstract

Social media applications led by WhatsApp have exhibited a great adoption rate in individualistic and collectivistic societies. To study the factors which influence the adoption of software applications across cultures, the application design was studied by researchers in both individualistic and collectivistic societies. Most of such studies concentrated on the application design from the developer's point of view. Differently, this research study empirically explores the factors that influence the adoption of smartphone apps, such as WhatsApp, from the user's perspective. Therefore, the focus in this paper is on the moderating effect of Hofstede's crosscultures dimension, individualism vs. collectivism (IDV), and the interconnection between the persuasive system design (PSD) and acceptance. A total of 488 responses were collected from societies which span on the spectrum of IDV to include two individualistic societies, Netherlands and Germany, and two collectivistic societies, Malaysia and the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia. The overall results indicate that persuasive design principles are relevant to cultures across the globe. Moreover, individualism has a negative influence on the correlation between the persuasive system design principles and acceptance. Consequently, the findings suggest that in collectivistic societies, PSD principles have a stronger influence on the acceptance of smartphone apps. Thus, smartphone apps that are targeting the global community would highly benefit from the implementation of PSD principles which can lead to a higher adoption.