The current between-subjects study investigated how participants from two cultural groups (100 American domestic students and 115 Chinese international students) deal with threats to their collective face elicited from a critic who is either an ingroup member, an outgroup member, or an identity-unspecified member in an intercultural-communication context with a laboratory experimental design. Chinese students reported higher collective face concerns and lower liking towards a person who criticized their collective face compared with Americans. While encountering criticism targeting their countries, Chinese felt higher discomfort feelings compared with Americans. Chinese participants' discomfort feelings in the ingroup-critic condition were more influenced by their collective face concerns compared with Americans in the same condition. The practical and methodological implications of this study were also discussed.
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