Culture and decision making
Cognitive universals?
• Psychology has looked for cognitive universals
• Piagetian vs. Vygotskian modes
– Piaget: Fixed universal stages of thought culminating
in formal logical operations
• Very individual-based
– Vygotsky: Deep influence of culture on cognition
• Much more collective
Individualism vs. Collectivism
• Cultural studies has focused on this dimension
• Western culture is very individual oriented
– Agency of individual people
– Objects are identified individually
• Independent of context
• Determines what an object ‘is’
– Locus of causes is in specific objects
– The ideal of reasoning is logic
• Reasoning should be free from contradiction
Collectivism
• East Asian cultures tend to be collectivist
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Collective culture promotes relational thinking
Agency is part of the collection of individuals
Causality resides in situations
Objects are identified with respect to a field
Contradiction may be embraced
• People may be more prone to see both sides of an issue
• Seeking a third-way to solve conflicts
Dialectical reasoning
• Appreciation for contradiction
– Western culture seeks one solution or another
• Finds certain outcomes to be surprising
• Scientific reasoning seeks a winning theory
– May have hampered the development of physics
– Source of motion was placed within objects
– Eastern culture embraces contradiction
• Proverbs embody contradictions
• Seeks compromise solutions in solving dilemmas
• May have hampered science in Eastern cultures
– Outcomes were not seen as surprising and so new theories
were not required
Object identification and memory
• Western culture
– People tend to dis-embed objects from context
– Memory for objects not strongly influenced by
the context in which the object was seen
• Eastern culture
– People tend to view objects within a field
– Memory for objects is more strongly affected
by the context in which the object was seen
Risk and culture
• Cushion hypthesis (Hsee and Weber)
– Members of Eastern cultures have larger social
networks than do members of Western cultures
– This social network makes members of Eastern
cultures more tolerant of financial risks
– Members of Eastern cultures may be more riskseeking for gains
Promotion, prevention & culture
• Western cultures
– More chronically promotion focused
• Eastern cultures
– More chronically prevention focused
• Some have manipulated this experimentally
• Focusing people on individuals leads to a
promotion focus
• Focusing people on relationship to a
collective leads to a prevention focus
Summary
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Much work to be done on this dimension
Individualism
Collectivism
Not a pure distinction
– Both cultures have some elements of each
– Still, effects of culture are strong.