Comparing Experience- and Description-based Economic Preferences Across 11 Countries

Overview

Journal Nat Hum Behav

Specialties Psychology
Social Sciences

Date 2024 Jun 14

PMID 38877287

Authors

Hernan Anllo

Sophie Bavard

FatimaEzzahra Benmarrakchi

Darla Bonagura

Fabien Cerrotti

Mirona Cicue

Maelle Gueguen

Eugenio Jose Guzman

Dzerassa Kadieva

Maiko Kobayashi

Gafari Lukumon

Marco Sartorio

Jiong Yang

Oksana Zinchenko

Bahador Bahrami

Jaime Silva Concha

Uri Hertz

Anna B Konova

Jian Li

Cathal OMadagain

Joaquin Navajas

Gabriel Reyes

Atiye Sarabi-Jamab

Anna Shestakova

Bhasi Sukumaran

Katsumi Watanabe

Stefano Palminteri

Affiliations

Soon will be listed here.

Abstract

Recent evidence indicates that reward value encoding in humans is highly context dependent, leading to suboptimal decisions in some cases, but whether this computational constraint on valuation is a shared feature of human cognition remains unknown. Here we studied the behaviour of n = 561 individuals from 11 countries of markedly different socioeconomic and cultural makeup. Our findings show that context sensitivity was present in all 11 countries. Suboptimal decisions generated by context manipulation were not explained by risk aversion, as estimated through a separate description-based choice task (that is, lotteries) consisting of matched decision offers. Conversely, risk aversion significantly differed across countries. Overall, our findings suggest that context-dependent reward value encoding is a feature of human cognition that remains consistently present across different countries, as opposed to description-based decision-making, which is more permeable to cultural factors.

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