Cross-Cultural Variations in Probability Judgment Accuracy: Beyond General Knowledge Overconfidence?

Previous studies have revealed surprising and persistent cross-cultural variations in overconfidence, whereby respondents in some Asian cultures (e.g., Chinese) exhibit markedly higher degrees of overconfidence than respondents in other cultures (e.g., in the United States and Japan). Most of those demonstrations have entailed general knowledge tasks (e.g., answering questions such as whether Europe is larger than Australia). The present studies sought to determine whether such cross-cultural variations extend to judgments about the kinds of events that bear upon more common practical decisions and to aspects of accuracy other than overconfidence. Subjects in Taiwan, Japan, and the United States made probabilistic differential diagnoses of fictional diseases in a stochastic artificial ecology. Results revealed that previously observed cross-cultural variations do indeed generalize. The data were also informative about several potential accounts for such variations, e.g., arguing against a proposal that they rest on different emphases on discrimination rather than calibration, but consistent with the influences of culture-specific cognitive customs, including responsiveness to explicitly displayed information, regardless of its presumed validity. Copyright 1998 Academic Press.