Cultural Directions and Origins of Everyday Decisions

Decisions are made by individuals in all societies. Reasons for decisions are difficult to locate, yet configure cultural thinking. While taking decisions people can be culture objective and culture subjective at the same time. Methods in research focus on the universal features or etic, and culture specific features or emic, of the construct of decision making. In the methods used to research decision making lie several answers to the question of how people make decisions. Isolating features of the emic of decision making can be useful in tracing pathways to its etic. The unity of cultural individualism and collectivism steer thinking processes of individuals. As a cognitive undertaking decision making experiences the effects of the larger culture, but the domains of decision making determine in what manner and to what extent these effects will be manifest. Decision making is at once subjective and unconscious, culturally guided and idiosyncratically steered, self-oriented and other-related, situationally derived and universally operationalized.