Culture and judgment and decision making

The fields of judgment and decision making (JDM) and cultural psychology have not seen much overlap, but recent research at the intersection of culture and JDM has provided new insights for both fields. This chapter reviews recent advances, with a focus on how studying cultural variations in JDM has yielded novel perspectives on basic psychological processes. JDM perspectives can propose novel explanations for differences across national cultures beyond those suggested by the prevailing models of culture. Cross-cultural research reveals that some judgment biases once assumed to be universal are in fact limited to particular sociocultural contexts. The chapter illustrates ways in which cultural and JDM research inform each other, and notes these mutual contributions in a number of subfields of contemporary JDM research arising from both cognitive and social psychological perspectives. This includes risky decision making, intertemporal decision making, evaluation-choice consistency, causal attribution, conflict decision making, confidence judgments, and optimism.