Management Summary Research Study “Culture-bound heuristics”

This paper argues that culture fundamentally shapes decision processes (heuristics) and how well they work (rationality, biases), and that the importance of culture has been underappreciated because of research norms that remove it from consideration. It first discusses content- and context-impoverished norms in how judgments and decisions have been modeled, along with criticisms of those norms. Second, it uses four case studies to support an argument that decisions in the wild are often inseparable from cultural-domain-specific systems of beliefs, values, practices, task environments, and people. These cases suggest that by removing cultural content and context from experimental stimuli to get at putatively basic cognitive processes, researchers may have systematically overgeneralized and misidentified both heuristics and biases. The paper concludes by recommending expanded methodological and theoretical approaches for identifying and evaluating judgment and decision making that take culture’s importance to cognition seriously. This expansion emphasizes the value of (1) ethnographic methods that richly explore the decision task environment and folk conceptions of decision processes as part of the hypothesis generation stage; and (2) cross-cultural and longitudinal comparative research to test those hypotheses and further explore how decision processes and their effectiveness vary over time and place.

Target groups of stakeholders: Research psychologists, behavioral economists, and management scholars and practitioners concerned with the contribution of culture to cognitive heuristics and biases in judgment and decision making.

Citation: Bennis, W. M. (2025). Culture-bound heuristics. Mind & Society. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11299-025-00353-w

Source: https://rdcu.be/eLzN8