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Cross-cultural differences in decision-making


Decision-making is a mental activity which is an integral part of planning and action taking in a variety of contexts and at a vast range of levels, including, but not limited to, budget planning, education planning, policy making, and climbing the career ladder. People all over the world engage in these activities. The underlying cross-cultural differences in decision-making can be a great contributing factor to efficiency in cross-cultural communications, negotiations, and conflict resolution.

A considerable amount of literature in cognitive science has been devoted to the investigation of the nature of human decision-making. However, a large portion of it discusses the results obtained from a unicultural subject pool, predominantly from a pool of American undergraduate students. Notwithstanding this limitation, the results are usually implicitly or explicitly generalized, which gives rise to the home-field disadvantage: when a particular cultural group is taken as a starting point, it becomes much harder for the researches to notice, or to 'mark', the peculiarities existing within the group. As a result, what is characteristic only of the group under study is taken for granted and ascribed to the general population. This tendency is further aggravated when the researcher belongs to the cultural group that they study. In this case, the researcher and the subjects are exposed to the same physical, social, and situational contexts on the daily basis. Much of every-day functioning is automatic, in other words it is driven by the current features of the environment we are in, that are processed without any conscious awareness. This leads to the building of implicit attitude, values, and beliefs, which are hard to spot. They become apparent when individuals or decision-making models from different cultural backgrounds are compared.

More scientists have recently been becoming involved in conducting studies on decision-making across cultures. The results show that there are in fact cross-cultural differences in behavior in general and in decision-making strategies in particular and thus impel researches to explain their origin. There are a number of most popular and accepted explanations:

Co-Evolution of Genes with Culture Hypothesis. The planet Earth is rich in a variety of geographical zones, all of them differing from one another in climate and living conditions they allow for. Across generations individuals populating a certain area learn to adopt and pass on to the next generations the cultural traits that promote survival and flourishing within the environment of their locality. As a result, the genes supporting the survival-relevant traits are passed on, while others fade away. In the long run, it becomes the case that it is for the surviving genes to set conditions for the cultural practices to be used and even to create the environment to which the members adapt. The process that changes the frequency of application of cultural traits is influenced by the same forces that determine the remolding of the combination of genetic variants. These forces are natural selection, mutation, drift, and migration. There is however one more force – 'a decision-making force' – in cultural evolution. Since cultural traits are transmitted in the context of interpersonal communication, the cultural variants its participants adopt are influenced by the behavioral choices the 'communicator' and the 'learner' make.


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