CULTURED MINDS
An Investigation of How Culture Affects Decision Making
QUANTITY OF INFORMATION
Collectivistic (Korean) participants took more information into account than individualistic (American) or Asian-Americans when asked to explain someone’s behaviour. (Choi et.al, 2003; Koo & Choi, 2005). High uncertainty avoidance cultures, such as Peru, may also have a predisposition to ask for more information as a way to reduce uncertainty (Schroeder, 1991) cited in (Littrell & Miller, 2001).
A study by (Wang, Masuda, Ito & Rashid, 2012) looked at how people with an Asian versus European background choose to present and organise information in a poster-making task. Asians preferred to include more information on their posters, in effect trading comprehension-efficiency (ease of reading) for message-comprehensiveness (quantity of information). The opposite trend was observed in the group with a European background. Interestingly, these cultural preferences also extended to aesthetic ratings of web pages: people with a European cultural background rated simple webpages as most aesthetically pleasing and functional, whereas those with an Asian cultural background thought the same of complex pages. The differences appear to translate into tangible skills as well. For example, on information-rich web pages East Asian international students are faster than European Canadian participants at dealing with the information.
Internal Information Search
This Involves retrieving information that the consumer already knows and has stored in his/her memory.
Holistic thinkers (Malaysian) remember situational information more than analytic thinkers (American). This makes sense; people tend to remember the information which they find most important.
(Lin, 2009)