Cultural values and economic choices: Three meta-reanalyses of experimental evidence

This manuscript revisits three published meta-analyses of experimental evidence with a focus on culture as a source of variation in economic choices. We select the three meta-studies on the basis of contrasting existing hypotheses about the role of individualism, in an attempt to settle these controversies through meta-analytic methods. To pursue this goal, we re-analyze the data by linking country-level individualism and a battery of control variables to experimental measures of risk aversion, tax compliance, and prosocial behavior, respectively. While the original gender-related findings are robust to our re-analyses, in all three cases multilevel mixed-effects models with random slopes reveal that the role of individualism cannot be generalized across the literature, with the data exhibiting between-study heterogeneity. In the first two re-analyses, the studies divide between those that support a positive relationship and those that provide opposite results. In the case of prosocial behavior, instead, our results suggest a negative relationship. We examine this heterogeneity and discuss possible interpretations of our findings.