CULTURED MINDS
An Investigation of How Culture Affects Decision Making
COMPARISON & COMPROMISE
The contrast between dialectical versus logical-style reasoning explains some variation in people’s behaviour when choosing between multiple options. Dialectical reasoning accepts contradiction whereas logical reasoning seeks to resolve it. (Ames & Knowles, 2000)
A study that supports this claim showed participants everyday scenarios that included a contradiction/argument. The US participants chose one side of the argument whereas Chinese ones more frequently forged a middle way (Peng & Nisbett, 1999). A similar result was obtained in the domain of consumer choice by (Briley, Morris & Simonson, 2000) who recorded that, when choosing between three options, US participants prioritised one dimension and chose the product which was best in that respect whereas Chinese participants opted for all-round quality (a compromise between the different attributes). When asked to justify their choices, Chinese participants would say that “both dimensions were important”.
Sunk Cost
The sunk cost effect/error is the result of a bias that occurs under specific comparison conditions. If you accidentally bought (non-refundable) tickets to two concerts on the same night - would you choose to go to the £200 concert that you think is so-so or the £20 concert which you know you will love?
The example above is exaggerated, but there are in fact many instances when people choose between objects based on the effort/money spent to obtain them rather than their personal preference or expected enjoyment of one versus the other. This is the sunk cost bias.
The prevalence of the sunk cost effect varies across cultures, but these differences have been difficult to explain through any one cultural dimension or thinking style. (Yoder, Mancha & Agrawal, 2014) observed that Americans are more prone to make sunk cost decisions than Indians and linked this to Individualism/Collectivism. But a study from the previous year (Caldwell & Halonen, 2012), across 11 countries, found no marked effect of collectivism/individualism although the people from the different cultures did vary in tendency to commit a sunk cost error.
