Cross-Cultural Differences in Choice Behavior and Use of Decision Aids: A Comparison of Japan and the United States.

A controlled laboratory study was conducted to investigate the effect of cultural differences on decision strategy. Participants from two cultures (Japan and the United States) completed multi-attribute preferential choice tasks with and without use of computerized decision aids. The results indicate that Japanese participants were less likely to invoke compensatory decision processes, which involve conflict-confronting assessment of trade-offs among attributes. This behavior is consistent with some cultural differences described in extant literature. The results call into question the generalizability across cultures of descriptive decision theories, which come largely from the West, and suggest the need for descriptive theories that incorporate cultural factors. Copyright 1999 Academic Press.