Using a (mostly) culture-fair paradigm to compare advice taking between cultures

Most studies on advice taking use the judge-advisor system (JAS), in which one participant makes an initial judgment, then receives advice from another person, and subsequently makes a final judgment. Research using the JAS has shown that decision-makers egocentrically discount advice, that is, they overweight their own initial judgments. While advice taking has been studied in different countries, there is still a lack of cross-cultural comparisons. The main problem is that the judgment tasks used so far are not culture fair because they require general knowledge that may differ depending on where participants grew up. For example, European participants may find it easy to estimate distances between European cities but may have difficulties estimating the caloric content of Manti dumplings. Since task difficulty is a strong predictor of advice taking, differences in task difficulty due to different knowledge backgrounds produce a confound in cross-cultural comparisons. Here, we aimed to remedy this problem by developing a (largely) culture fair estimation task that only requires secondary school level mathematics knowledge. In this task, participants estimate annual rainfall based on a certain number of measurements. They receive the estimate of a simulated colleague as advice along with information about the number of measurement available to that colleague. Using this task, we compared advice taking between German and Chinese university students. Our results show evidence of egocentric advice discounting in both groups, but the effect is more pronounced in the German sample.