Comparing experience- and description-based economic preferences across 11 countries

Abstract

Recent evidence indicates that reward value encoding in humans is highly context dependent, leading to suboptimal decisions in some cases, but whether this computational constraint on valuation is a shared feature of human cognition remains unknown. Here we studied the behaviour of n = 561 individuals from 11 countries of markedly diferent socioeconomic and cultural makeup. Our fndings show that context sensitivity was present in all 11 countries. Suboptimal decisions generated by context manipulation were not explained by risk aversion, as estimated through a separate description-based choice task (that is, lotteries) consisting of matched decision ofers. Conversely, risk aversion signifcantly difered across countries. Overall, our fndings suggest that context-dependent reward value encoding is a feature of human cognition that remains consistently present across diferent countries, as opposed to description-based decision-making, which is more permeable to cultural factors.