Is Cultural Difference really matters in our decision making?

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There is evidence of culture differences in the tendency toward bias or distortion in probability assessments.
On the one hand, Wright G.N, who wrote the article "Organizational, group and individual decision making in cross-cultural perspective", suggests that in making decisions under uncertainty, Westerners adopt a probabilistic set and make relatively fine discriminations or "calibrations" in assessment of probability of outcomes. However, Asians tend to adopt a non-probabilistic set that leads them to see outcomes as either certain or uncertain.
www.tandfonline.com_doi_pdf_10.1080_002075998400213-1.jpg
On the other hand, A group of scholars used the Melbourne Decision Making Questionnaire to test for similarities and differences between culture samples in self-reported tendencies to use the decision coping patterns and decision self-esteem. The subjects consisted of undergraduate university students in psychology/behavioral science courses in six countries: USA, Australia, New Zealand, Japan, Hong Kong and Taiwan. Student were told that the questionnaires measure the way people usually approach decision making and therefore the answer that is true for them is the correct answer. The result showed in Table 1 represents the means and standard deviations for decision self-esteem, vigilance, hyper-vigilance, buckpassing, and procrastination by country and gender. Take Decision self-esteem as an example, the score for Western countries is generally higher than that of Eastern countries. Also, across culture samples, males expressed greater confidence in their decision-making ability than females. However, after analyzing all the data in the table, you can see the difference are not very high. After more studies, the conclusion from the questionnaire is that despite cross-cultural differences in confidence in decision making and in buskpassing, procrastination, and hyper vigilance, Western and East Asian students are more alike in their self-reported decision styles than different.

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This was quite interesting. The data presented in this post contradicts what I thought happens. I thought that since people in Eastern and Western countries grow up in such different cultures, they think differently, which causes them to also make decisions differently.

The data presented contradicts my past idea of cultural differences. I remember we spent a large amount of time in MGMT 1001 talking about cultural differences through Hoffstede and Trompenaar's cross cultural studies. The studies I mentioned are a little bit older and I wonder if the small difference presented in your data is due to the process of globalization.

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This page contains a single entry by zhuxx604 published on March 24, 2012 10:50 PM.

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