Citation

Pattaratanakun JA, Mak V. Psychol. Sci. 2015; 26(8): 1229-1240.

Affiliation

Cambridge Judge Business School, University of Cambridge v.mak@jbs.cam.ac.uk.

Copyright

(Copyright © 2015, Association for Psychological Science, Publisher John Wiley and Sons)

DOI

10.1177/0956797615583979

PMID

26113063

Abstract

Prior studies suggest that people often search insufficiently in sequential-search tasks compared with the predictions of benchmark optimal strategies that maximize expected payoff. However, those studies were mostly conducted in individualist Western cultures; Easterners from collectivist cultures, with their higher susceptibility to escalation of commitment induced by sunk search costs, could exhibit a reversal of this undersearch bias by searching more than optimally, but only when search costs are high. We tested our theory in four experiments. In our pilot experiment, participants generally undersearched when search cost was low, but only Eastern participants oversearched when search cost was high. In Experiments 1 and 2, we obtained evidence for our hypothesized effects via a cultural-priming manipulation on bicultural participants in which we manipulated the language used in the program interface. We obtained further process evidence for our theory in Experiment 3, in which we made sunk costs nonsalient in the search task-as expected, cross-cultural effects were largely mitigated.

Language: en