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Outcome context-dependence is not WEIRD: Comparing reinforcement- and description-based economic preferences
Hernán Anlló1,2,3, Sophie Bavard1,3,4, FatimaZzahra Benmarrakchi3,5
1Human Reinforcement Learning Team, Laboratory of Cognitive and Computational Neuroscience, ENS-PSL, Paris, France.
Research Square
|March 13, 2023
Summary
Reward value is context-dependent in human cognition across cultures, impacting decisions. This context sensitivity appears hardcoded, unlike culturally influenced risk aversion in decision-making.
Area of Science:
- Cognitive Science
- Neuroeconomics
- Cross-Cultural Psychology
Background:
- Human decision-making is often suboptimal due to context-dependent reward value encoding.
- It remains unknown if this cognitive constraint is universal across diverse populations.
Approach:
- Studied behavior across 11 countries with varied socioeconomic and cultural backgrounds.
- Employed an experimental method to quantify context effects in reinforcement learning.
- Assessed risk aversion using a separate description-based lottery task.
Key Points:
- All studied populations showed similar sensitivity to context in reward valuation.
- Suboptimal decisions from context manipulation were independent of measured risk aversion.
- Risk aversion varied significantly across different countries.
Conclusions:
- Context-dependent reward value encoding appears to be a universal, hardcoded feature of human cognition.
- Decision-making based on explicit descriptions (e.g., lotteries) is significantly influenced by cultural factors.
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