Culture versus other sources of variance in risk and benefit perceptions: A comparison of Japan and the United States

Abstract

To what extent do countries and people within countries vary in their perceptions about the risks and benefits of engaging in risky activities? And to what extent are these variations influenced by risk domains? We used generalizability theory to identify and quantify the variance components in perceived risk and benefit ratings that are attributable to differences between cultures, across raters within cultures, and across risk domains. Our results, based on two archival datasets from the United States and Japan, revealed that, although there is nontrivial variability in risk and benefit perceptions between American and Japanese raters, the amount of variability was smaller between cultures compared with across raters within cultures. Moreover, investment risk perceptions and gambling benefit perceptions were predominantly influenced by differences across raters within cultures, and hence, large numbers of raters would be needed to properly represent ratings of the corresponding populations. Our findings suggest that variability in risk and benefit judgments across raters from different cultures should not be simply attributed to pure cultural differences. Rather, a multi‐faceted approach, where multiple sources of variance are simultaneously considered, should be adopted to properly understand and effectively influence judgments of risk and benefit.

An Application of Judgement Modeling to Examine Inter-Cultural Differences Regarding Perceptions of Business Skill Importance

“…Further, while some of the studies above made direct comparisons between student/recent graduate, employer, and instructor perceptions, there appears to be a dearth of more recent studies making direct comparisons of perceptions across cultures. Direct comparisons of cultural influence for other facets of business include Kashefi-Pour et al (2020), Driskill andRankin (2020), andWang et al (2022). These studies appear in Table 1 referenced 14-16.…”

“…Kashefi-Pour et al (2020) found that, across 24 OECD countries, natural culture impacts investment cash flow sensitivity, while Driskill and Rankin (2020) findings indicate that US students exhibit higher ethical reasoning skills than do Chinese students. Wang et al (2022) examined risk versus benefit perceptions between US and Japanese cultures finding greater variance among raters within the same culture than across cultures.…”

Measuring Risk Tolerance Among Japanese Adults and Cross-National Comparison of Its Role in COVID-19 Attitudes

“…To date, limited studies on domain-specific risk attitudes have investigated Japanese cultural contexts or had direct cross-cultural comparisons that involve Japanese individuals. A few studies involving Japanese speakers have focused on risk perceptions (Gierlach et al, 2010; Kleinhesselink & Rosa, 1991; Wang et al, 2022) or a limited set of behaviors rather than applying a domain-specific approach (Law et al, 2022). Cultural differences in risk attitudes – beyond perceived risk and behavioral tendency – are yet to be fully explored.…”