To save or lose? A cross‐national examination of the disease risk framing effect and the influence of collectivism

Abstract

Using a large dataset from the COVIDiSTRESS Global Survey Consortium spanning 49 countries (N = 102,830), we examined the robustness of Tversky and Kahneman's (1981) framing effect within each country using a variation of the classic Asian Disease Scenario. Results indicated that the framing effect-where respondents are more likely to take the safe option (i.e., a known number of lives saved or lost) than the risky option (i.e., a probability of saving lives) when framed as a gain (i.e., number of lives saved) instead of a loss (i.e., number of lives lost)-was replicated in 100% of the countries examined (h = 0.612, 95% CI [0.568, 0.656]). Results showed that societal collectivism was negatively associated with individual propensity to select the safer option in both the gain and loss framed conditions. Collectivism was also partly related to smaller framing effect sizes at the country level. Implications and future directions are discussed.

COVID-19 and Social Distancing: A Cross-Cultural Study of Interpersonal Distance Preferences and Touch Behaviors Before and During the Pandemic

“…We may assume that enforcing a physical distance of 1.5–2 m and promoting the absence of interpersonal touch can represent a particularly serious challenge in some regions, especially in those highly valuing close social contacts (Creighton et al, 2022). On the other hand, the body of literature in this area generally finds that collectivism, which is also associated with a high value of interpersonal closeness, generally predicts greater COVID-19 protection compliance (Cho et al, 2022; Im & Chen, 2022; Leong et al, 2022; Lu et al, 2021), and higher self-importance/expectation to engage in behaviors known to prevent the COVID-19 spread (Cho et al, 2022). This trend may be driven by collectivism being associated with a belief that other members of a community consider it important to engage in preventive behaviors (Cho et al, 2022).…”

Meta-analyses in Economic Psychology: A sustainable approach to cross-cultural differences

“…What is more, in 19 of these 25 manuscripts the authors only control for geographic differences through dummy variables in meta-regressions and subgroup analyses, meaning that any related findings can hardly be interpreted and lots of research opportunities lie in this area. It is unsurprising that the remaining 6 papers out of 25 (Oosterbeek et al, 2004;Yilmaz and Alper, 2019;Cochard et al, 2021;Markowsky and Beblo, 2022;Im and Chen, 2022;Marini, 2023) mostly implement traditional meta-analyses, given the suitability of the latter for explaining heterogeneity in Böckenholt, 2017) when conclusively summarizing multiple studies in the same manuscript. They are instead called single-project meta-analyses when self-contained and the included studies are published as separate papers.…”

“…In detail,Im and Chen (2022) is an internal meta-analysis, Yilmaz and Alper (2019) is a meta-analysis of crowd-sourced data, and the other four are traditional meta-analyses.…”

“…For example, in our dataset multilevel models with country as a random factor are used in the metaanalysis byIm and Chen (2022).…”