Culture and individual judgment and decision making

In the last two decades, much has been published on the topic of culture and cross-cultural psychology and much on the topic of judgment and decision making (J/DM). However, only a few researchers have examined the intersection of the two areas. In this article, we review this body of research. Our focus is on four particular J/DM topics that have been studied cross-culturally: probability judgment, risk perception, risk preference, and modes of decision making. Our review reveals an encouraging trend in cross-cultural J/DM research-a shift from merely describing national differences in overt behaviour to exploring underlying processes that explain these differences by recourse to cultural perceptions or values. To reinforce this trend, we recommend that future cross-cultural J/DM research be more model-based (i.e. testing for the causal effect of independent variables shown to differ between cultures rather than simply describing group differences) and adopt a mosaic-building approach in its data collection (i.e. using multiple methodologies and seeking converging evidence to support or reject any model).