Experience and Customary Judgment Demands

Experience and Customary Judgment Demands

When we are unfamiliar with a task, we tend to perform it inconsistently. Suppose, for instance, that expressing one’s opinions about the chances of an event’s occurrence in the form of probabilities is rarely demanded in Chinese cultures (e.g., people seldom ask one another, “What do you think is the probability of rain tomorrow?”). Then, when probability judgment studies such as those we have described are performed in those cultures, we should observe a high degree of inconsistency in respondents’ assessments. As noted previously, Yates et al. (1998) observed greater inconsistency among the Chinese participants in their studies of probabilistic medical diagnoses in an artificial ecology. Similar inconsistency was likely to have been a major contributor to the noisiness of the judgments reported by the Chinese participants in Yates et al.’s (1989) general-knowledge study. There are two avenues by which unfamiliarity-induced inconsistency could degrade the quality of Chinese probability judgments. The first is direct, via the noise dimension of overall accuracy isolated in the covariance decomposition of , as discussed before (Yates, 1982). The other route is more indirect, through overconfidence. Several investigators, including Erev, Wallsten, and Budescu (1994), have shown formally how, depending on particular assumptions about the underlying process, inconsistency can contribute to some measures of overconfidence.

Is there independent evidence that the expression of uncertainty in terms of probability is relatively uncommon in Chinese cultures? Unfortunately, there have been no direct investigations of the issue. However, there have been several studies using a methodology developed by the Wright and Phillips group that seem to imply this conclusion. That methodology relies on an instrument called the Views of Uncertainty Questionnaire (VUQ), which presents the respondent with a long list of questions such as whether one will catch a cold within the next 3 months and whether Baghdad is the capital of Iraq. It then asks the participant to write a “reasonable and appropriate response” to each question (Wright & Phillips, 1980, p. 241). The responses are sorted into several categories and key statistics noted, including the number of verbal probability expressions (e.g., “probably”) the respondent reported and the number of different expressions of that type the respondent used. Repeatedly, the Wright and Phillips group found that their British participants used probability responses more often than their Asian participants and many more different probability responses. More recently, Lau and Ranyard (1999) performed a similar investigation and observed essentially the same pattern. They reported, for instance, that although their Chinese respondents on average used 1.8 different probability responses, their English respondents used 4.3. Verbal probability phrases are not the same as numeric probabilities, but if verbal probabilistic expression is relatively uncommon in Chinese discourse, it is hard to imagine that numeric likelihood expression would be common either.

Findings like these implicate the roles of customs and norms in cross-cultural variations. There is no reason to expect such differences to rest on immutable, biological foundations. That is, such variations must be learned. How easily and rapidly do culture-specific judgment routines change when people are exposed to other customs? Recall the experimental findings from the Yates et al. artificial medical ecology studies in which the Chinese participants spontaneously made especially great strides in reducing the overconfidence in their diagnoses over time. These results suggest that similar speed in custom changes might occur in more naturalistic settings. Indeed, it is not implausible that the same kinds of learning processes were responsible historically for the fact that overconfidence among Japanese and Singaporeans, as discussed previously, is more like that of Westerners than other Asians. Both Japan and Singapore are almost unique in Asia in their broad-based integration of international commerce into their cultures.