Speakers
Overview
This session presented three perspectives on cross-cultural decision-making research, covering practical logistics, conceptual challenges, and methodological pitfalls. One speaker shared lessons from a master's thesis comparing framing effects on financial risk-taking in Dutch and American student samples, reflecting on the surprisingly manageable barriers to cross-cultural data collection. A second speaker presented ongoing PhD research comparing time perception and delay discounting between Dutch and Indonesian participants, highlighting how cultural assumptions about task design can compromise measurement validity. A third speaker offered an overarching critical perspective on the field, challenging the causal claims often made from cross-cultural comparisons and proposing more rigorous approaches to manipulation validity.
Key Points
Cross-cultural data collection can be more accessible than many junior researchers expect: online platforms like SONA, shared ethics frameworks, and international networks lower the barriers considerably, especially when samples share a research language.
Language equivalence is not the same as conceptual equivalence: even between Dutch and American samples, individual words in questionnaires can have different connotations, and task stimuli designed in one cultural context may carry unintended meaning in another.
Time is experienced differently across cultures, and not only in social norms, but also in how people spatially represent past and future, which has direct consequences for delay discounting tasks that assume a shared temporal frame.
Most cross-cultural "experiments" are quasi-experiments: they measure average behavioural differences between pre-existing cultural groups without random assignment to treatment, making causal attribution to culture difficult.
Culture explains a surprisingly small proportion of behavioural variance: intraclass correlations between societies are typically around 5%, with far more variation existing within societies than between them.
When priming cultural identity in experimental designs, it is often unclear what is actually being made salient, nationality, language, religion, class, or minority status can all be confounded, making it difficult to identify what is driving observed effects.
Open question: Does culture primarily emerge as an interactional and collective phenomenon, and if so, what does it mean to measure it through individual-level tasks?
Next Steps
Possible collaborations: developing cross-cultural paradigms with explicit manipulation checks and validity controls, and connecting experimental and survey-based approaches to identify specific cultural dimensions that shape financial and temporal decision-making.
If you are interested in cross-cultural decision-making and would like to connect with the speakers or suggest a speaker for another session, contact us at centerfordecisionscience@ru.nl.