Making Mistakes Is Human, No Matter the Culture
A team of international researchers, including scientists from the HSE University, studied how people from 11 different countries make decisions. They found that when faced with situations requiring quick, independent choices, people everywhere are prone to making mistakes, regardless of their nationality. However, in certain cases, people’s behavior differs based on their attitude toward risk: the most risk-taking were Chinese and Japanese participants, while people from India and Chile were the least likely to take risks.
How We Make Decisions: Rational or Not?
Traditionally, decision-making is seen as a rational process: a person weighs potential risks and aims to maximize benefits. But our brains don’t always let us act rationally, especially when a situation demands an immediate response. Sometimes, people mistakenly choose options with less value, depending on how those options are presented in a given context.
For example, if an investor is offered a stock portfolio with a 60% chance of profit, they are likely to agree. But if told there’s a 40% chance of loss, they might refuse—even though the two statements describe the same situation. Similarly, two circles of the same size can appear different depending on the surrounding shapes. Context shapes how we evaluate our options.
Does Culture Affect Our Decisions?
The researchers wanted to know whether context always influences our decisions, or if the degree of rationality varies depending on sociocultural factors like country of origin, social status, religion, or political system.
The international team, including scientists from the HSE University’s Institute of Cognitive Neuroscience, conducted a study with volunteers from 11 countries with diverse social and economic backgrounds. More than 500 people from Russia, France, Argentina, India, China, and other countries completed a special task in two parts.
First, participants chose between two options, each associated with a reward or the risk of losing it. In each round, the options were repeated in different combinations to create a context that made one seem more or less attractive. Participants could maximize their rewards by learning from previous rounds. However, all participants, regardless of nationality, made mistakes and sometimes misjudged the options depending on the context.
Risk Attitudes: A Cultural Difference
To test whether the context-dependent results from the first part of the experiment were consistent, the researchers gave participants a second task: choose between two options presented in the same contexts, but with known variables. For example, volunteers were told they could either get a large reward with a 50% chance or a small reward for sure. By presenting such lotteries, the researchers could determine the “point of no return”—when people stop taking risks and choose the safe option. This threshold is individual and depends on a person’s willingness to take risks, which turned out to be a culture-specific trait. Russians showed an average willingness to take risks, Chinese and Japanese participants were the most risk-taking, and people from India and Chile were the least likely to take risks.
What Really Influences Our Choices?
“It used to be thought that the main factor influencing our decisions was our willingness to take risks. But our research showed that’s not always the case. First and foremost, our decisions depend on how we receive information: whether we experience a situation ourselves or hear about it from someone else. We demonstrated that human consciousness has a certain cognitive limitation, and this is a universal trait that doesn’t depend on our beliefs, convictions, or nationality,” says Oksana Zinchenko, Senior Research Fellow at the HSE University’s Institute of Cognitive Neuroscience.
Practical Applications
The authors note that the results of this study could have practical applications in economics, psychology, marketing, and other fields.