XCWG: Overconfidence Across Cultures

Overconfidence is a robust cognitive bias with far-reaching implications, but prior research on cultural differences in overconfidence has been conflicting. We present two studies that measure the three forms of overconfidence across cultures, allowing us to paint a more complete picture of cross-cultural overconfidence than previous studies. In Study 1, we compare overconfidence among participants from cultures traditionally considered individualistic (the US and UK) with participants from cultures traditionally conceptualized as collectivistic (India and China). In Study 2, we employ a new task to compare overconfidence in participants from the US and India. Our first key result is the successful cross-cultural replication, in both studies, of the effect of task difficulty on overestimation and overplacement, which bolsters our faith that our measures operate similarly across cultures. Our second key finding is that, while we find evidence of higher overestimation in our Indian participants, neither overplacement nor overprecision show consistent cross-cultural differences. Taken as a whole, our results suggest that previous findings of increased overconfidence in participants from collectivistic cultures may not be as robust as previously reported.

过度的自信是一种具有深远影响的稳固的认知偏差，然而，关于文化差异对过度自信的研究结果并不一致。本研究呈现了两项研究，旨在衡量跨文化背景下的三种过度自信形式，以构建比以往研究更为完整的跨文化过度自信的图景。在第一项研究中，我们比较了传统上被视为个体主义文化（如美国和英国）的参与者与那些被视为集体主义文化的参与者（如印度和中国）之间的过度自信。在第二项研究中，我们采用了一项新的任务来比较美国和印度参与者的过度自信。我们的第一个关键发现是，在两项研究中，任务难度对过度估计和过度定位的影响在跨文化背景下得到了成功复制，这增强了我们对于所采取措施在不同文化中具有相似操作的信心。我们的第二个关键发现是，尽管我们发现在印度参与者中存在更高的过度估计的证据，但过度定位和过度精确并未显示出一致的跨文化差异。综合来看，我们的研究结果暗示，以往关于集体主义文化参与者过度自信增加的发现可能并不像先前报道的那样稳固。