Culture-bound heuristics

Drawing on theoretical insights regarding the interdependence of culture and cognition, this paper argues that culture fundamentally shapes both decision processes (heuristics) and how well they work (e.g., biases). It further argues that the importance of culturally interdependent heuristics (“culture-bound heuristics”) has been underappreciated because of theoretical and methodological norms that tend to remove culture from consideration. The paper first considers theoretical background: content- and context-impoverished norms in how judgments and decisions under uncertainty have been modeled and empirically studied, followed by critical responses to those norms. Second, it uses four case studies to support an argument that decisions in the wild are often cultural-domain-specific (e.g., only used for blackjack or for Micronesian canoe navigation) and inseparable from systems of beliefs, values, practices, task environments, and people. Furthermore, these cases suggest that by removing cultural content and context from experimental stimuli to get at putatively basic cognitive processes, researchers may have systematically overgeneralized and misidentified both heuristics and biases. The paper concludes by recommending expanded methodological and theoretical approaches for identifying and evaluating judgment and decision making that take culture’s importance to cognition seriously. This expansion emphasizes the value of (1) ethnographic methods that richly explore the decision task environment and folk conceptions of decision processes as part of the hypothesis generation stage; and (2) cross-cultural and longitudinal comparative research to test those hypotheses and further explore how decision processes and their effectiveness vary over time and place “in the wild.”