Introduction

A common characteristic of the experimental research discussed in previous chapters is that most studies examine human decision-making stemming from subjects who have been considered as being WEIRD (western, educated, industrialized, rich, democratic). Relying on students who form the bulk of the database in experimental research provides useful insights of actual behaviour, but at the same time, only focusing on findings from this subpopulation may hide important patterns of economic behaviour which may be uncovered by extending the focus of experimental research and examining countries characterized by different cultural and societal traditions. A key question to address is whether human behaviour from WEIRD populations is representative to wider contexts and if so, what the underlying processes and motivational forces shaping behaviour in such populations are.

Behavioural scientists are therefore faced with a challenge calling for more experimentation that explores behaviour in less standard populations. This has recently led to a significant increase in the number of experimental studies gathering evidence comparing the motivational universality of WEIRD populations to broader subject samples. In this chapter, we will discuss various cross-cultural studies examining key aspects of social preferences such as fairness, trust, cooperation and negative reciprocity. Before we turn our attention to these studies, it is important to highlight that conducting cross-cultural research is a challenging task that behavioural scientists are confronted with. There are several issues that need to be taken care of in order to minimize potential differences in the experimental protocols, allowing to achieve the maximum possible level for the comparison of human behaviour across a diverse set of societies. The focus of our analysis is on five factors which we discuss below. These issues are also discussed in the cross-cultural experiments by Roth et al. (1991) and Herrmann et al. (2008) who conduct cross-cultural experiments.

Language effects

There is a substantial body of research offering evidence that framing of the decision-making problem does matter. Consequently, how the context in which subjects interact is described is a key issue for which experimenters should pay attention in cross-cultural studies.