Strategies for Evaluating Opinions: A Cross-Cultural Study

This paper aims at checking the cross-cultural validity of well-know findings concerning the way people integrate communicated information. In a first experiment, a Japanese and a French population weighted the advices they were given in similar ways. In a second experiment, both populations showed some evidence of bias towards their own answer relative to an advice. In both experiments, participants were more prone to choose one of the possible answers than to average over them. By replicating what had been previously found only in Western populations, these findings contradict some cross-cultural predictions.