Decision Making in Individualistic and Collectivistic Cultures

How do cultural values influence individuals' decision making? One would expect answers to this question either from cognitive psychology or from cross-cultural psychology. Cognitive theories on decision making, however, rarely consider the factor of culture, and research in cross-cultural psychology deals only to a small extent with decision making. Therefore the study of culture and decision making is a relatively new and unexplored field. In this paper normative and descriptive approaches to decision making are discussed and three cross-cultural studies on decision making in individualistic and collectivist cultures using different methodologies are described. The results are integrated into a model that can be helpful to derive specific hypotheses for further studies in this field.