School of psychological and cognitive sciences and Beijing Key Laboratory of Behavior and Mental Health, Peking University, Beijing, China.
Institute of Cognitive Neuroscience, University College London, London, UK.
Sci Rep. 2018 Sep 14;8(1):13862. doi: 10.1038/s41598-018-30680-7.
Value-based choices are influenced both by powerful counterfactuals, such as regret, and also by risk in potential outcomes. Culture can profoundly affect how humans perceive and act in the world, but it remains unknown how regret in value-based choice and key aspects of risk-taking may differ between cultures. Here our computational approach provides precise and independent metrics, grounded in extensive neurobiological evidence, for the influences of risk and regret on choice. We test for commonalities and differences across three diverse cultures: Iran, China and the UK. Including Iran matters because cross-cultural work on value-based choice is lacking for this key 21 Century culture, and also because patterns across the three cultures arbitrates between explanations for differences. We find commonalities, with regret influencing choice across cultures and no consistent cultural difference seen. However, for risk, unlike in both Chinese and Westerners' choices, Iranians are risk-seeking - findings consistent across two task variants and further explained by Iranians showing less subjective impact of negative, but not positive, outcomes of risky choices. Our computational approach dissects cultural impacts on two key neurobiologically-grounded quantities in value-based choice, showing that neuroscientific accounts cannot a priori isolate such quantities from culture in the cognitive processes underlying choice.
基于价值的选择既受到强大的反事实（例如遗憾）的影响，也受到潜在结果风险的影响。文化可以深刻地影响人类对世界的感知和行为方式，但人们尚不清楚基于价值的选择中的遗憾以及冒险的关键方面在不同文化之间可能会有何不同。在这里，我们的计算方法为风险和遗憾对选择的影响提供了精确且独立的指标，这些指标基于广泛的神经生物学证据。我们在三个不同的文化（伊朗、中国和英国）中进行了测试。包括伊朗很重要，因为针对这一关键的 21 世纪文化，基于价值的选择的跨文化工作还很缺乏，而且这三种文化之间的模式也可以为差异的解释提供依据。我们发现存在一些共同点，遗憾会影响不同文化中的选择，而且没有观察到一致的文化差异。然而，对于风险，与中国人和西方人不同，伊朗人是风险寻求者，这一发现与两种任务变体一致，并且进一步解释为伊朗人对风险选择的负面结果而非正面结果的主观影响较小。我们的计算方法剖析了文化对基于价值的选择中两个关键神经生物学基础数量的影响，表明神经科学解释不能先验地将这些数量与认知过程中的文化隔离开来，而认知过程是选择的基础。
