What are some examples of cultural variance in the results of behavioral economics research?

Plenty of behavioral science studies in recent decades and yet lack of data is a major problem in understanding how cultural differences impact behavior. That should have caused a double take. How could there be both abundance and scarcity of data on the same research topic? Easy. Subjects in most of the published studies are undergraduate university students, usually psychology students, all too often American undergraduate psychology students (see below from 1, emphasis mine).

'...the Western, and more specifically American, undergraduates who form the bulk of the database in the experimental branches of psychology, cognitive science, and economics, as well as allied fields (hereafter collectively labeled the “behavioral sciences”).

Talk about navel-gazing in a self-selecting group that chooses to study among other things navel-gazing!

While there was some kind of underground mumbling and grumbling about this issue for years, the true extent of this problem came into sharp relief with WEIRD. No, not the word, the acronym. This highly cited 2010 paper (1) authored by Joseph Henrich - Wikipedia, Steven Heine - Wikipedia and Ara Norenzayan coined Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, and Democratic (WEIRD) to describe the most commonly studied subject in behavioral science studies (2, 3). The paper reviewed the comparative database across behavioral sciences including in economics and concluded

• Most choose to examine the same thin sliver of humanity, WEIRD.
• However, the few experimental results that do exist across populations, many conducted by Henrich himself, suggest substantial variation in basic attributes such as visual perception, fairness, cooperation, various types of reasoning, etc.
• Authors thus conclude results from behavioral science studies are not representative and therefore, rarely, if ever, generalizable.

See below from 1, emphasis mine.

'Abstract: Behavioral scientists routinely publish broad claims about human psychology and behavior in the world’s top journals based on samples drawn entirely from Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, and Democratic (WEIRD) societies. Researchers – often implicitly – assume that either there is little variation across human populations, or that these “standard subjects” are as representative of the species as any other population. Are these assumptions justified? Here, our review of the comparative database from across the behavioral sciences suggests both that there is substantial variability in experimental results across populations and that WEIRD subjects are particularly unusual compared with the rest of the species – frequent outliers. The domains reviewed include visual perception, fairness, cooperation, spatial reasoning, categorization and inferential induction, moral reasoning, reasoning styles, self-concepts and related motivations, and the heritability of IQ. The findings suggest that members of WEIRD societies, including young children, are among the least representative populations one could find for generalizing about humans. Many of these findings involve domains that are associated with fundamental aspects of psychology, motivation, and behavior – hence, there are no obvious a priori grounds for claiming that a particular behavioral phenomenon is universal based on sampling from a single subpopulation. Overall, these empirical patterns suggests that we need to be less cavalier in addressing questions of human nature on the basis of data drawn from this particularly thin, and rather unusual, slice of humanity. We close by proposing ways to structurally re-organize the behavioral sciences to best tackle these challenges.'

Gizmodo's helpful infographic (see below from 4) digests this article whose gist is,

• Population sampling is blatantly skewed in much behavioral science research.
• Most WEIRDs are undergraduate psychology students.
• Results of economic experiments such as the Ultimatum game - Wikipedia are not generalizable across cultures. Indeed, they aren't generalizable even among Americans.
• Cross-cultural assessment of tests such as Rod and frame test - Wikipedia and Müller-Lyer illusion - Wikipedia show culture shapes perception to a previously unappreciated extent.

It would be careless to move on from this review without referring to one of its other important conclusions (1, emphasis mine),

'There are few research programs that have explicitly sought to contrast Americans with other Westerners on psychological or behavioral measures. However, those phenomena for which sufficient data are available to make cross-population comparisons reveal that American participants are exceptional even within the unusual population of Westerners – outliers among outliers.'

The review (1) found 'highly educated Americans differ from other Americans in many important respects’

• Tend to rationalize their choices more.
• Are more individualistic.
• Less conforming.
• Embedded in less tightly structured social networks.
• Less interdependent and holistic.
• Moralize within the ethic of autonomy compared to the ethic of community and divinity used by the non-college-educated.
• More favorable to diversity.

This much-needed jolt of reality brings to mind the almost century-old words of noted anthropologist, linguist, Edward Sapir - Wikipedia (5),

'The worlds in which different societies live are distinct worlds, not merely the same world with different words attached.'

Obviously Homo weirdus is unlikely to improve upon the by-now increasingly discredited Homo economicus. A rather embarrassing state of affairs considering the Nobels bestowed to date for Behavioral Economics research.

Unfortunately, even seven years on from the coining of WEIRD, apparently nothing much has changed with regard to sampling in behavioral science studies.

Bibliography

1. Henrich, J., S. J. Heine, and A. Norenzayan. "The weirdest people in the world?." The Behavioral and brain sciences 33.2-3 (2010): 61-83. http://hci.ucsd.edu/102b/reading...

2. Henrich, Joseph, Steven J. Heine, and Ara Norenzayan. "Most people are not WEIRD." Nature 466.7302 (2010): 29-29. http://www2.psych.ubc.ca/~heine/...

3. Why Americans Are the Weirdest People in the World

4. Rich, educated westerners could be skewing social science studies

5. Sapir, Edward. "The status of linguistics as a science." Language (1929): 207-214. http://pubman.mpdl.mpg.de/pubman...

https://www.quora.com/What-are-some-examples-of-cultural-variance-in-the-results-of-behavioral-economics-research/answer/Tirumalai-Kamala