What are some potential issues of self-interest that might distort decision making? Considering the information in the article "Culture and Decision-Making: Investigating Cultural Variations in the East Asian and North American Online Decision-Making Processes," , what kind of influence might culture have on self-interest in decision making?

Below is an excerpt fromthe article I thought was relevant to answer the question.

Culture and decision-making

Evidence also shows that culture influences our psycho- logical processes in the decision-making domain, showing clear cultural differences in final decisions made for East Asian and North American cultures (e.g. Briley, Morris & Simonson, 2000; Ji, Zhang & Guo, 2008; Lindridge & Dibb, 2003; Maddux & Yuki, 2006; Tse, Lee, Vertinsky & Wehrung, 1988). Extending these findings, recent researchers have also started to investigate how culturally specific thinking styles influence the processes of how East Asians and North Americans reach their decisions (e.g. Choi, Dalal, Kim-Prieto & Park, 2003; Chu & Spires, 2008). We contend that to truly understand differ- ences in decision-making for these two cultures, research needs to further investigate online processes involved in their decisions. Based on previous cross-cultural research, we identified three important components of online decision-making processes: (1) information search speed, (2) quantity of information used, and (3) type of informa- tion used.

Information search speed. Past studies suggest that East Asians are chronically exposed to information-rich cultural products (e.g. Masuda et al., 2008; Senzaki, Masuda, & Ishii, 2014; Wang, Masuda, Ito & Rashid, 2012) and envi- ronments (Miyamoto et al., 2006), as compared to North Americans. Findings also suggest that East Asians have developed the ability to parse through complex information at great speed (e.g. Wang et al., 2012): Information search speeds for mock webpages were faster for East Asians than North Americans, even when webpages were information- rich. These results suggest that chronic exposure to information-rich East Asian cultural environments leads East Asians to develop culturally appropriate cognitive skills to support fast, efficient information processing. Extending these findings, we expected that cultural variations in infor- mation search speeds would be observable in the context of decision-making, with East Asians making decisions in less time than their North American counterparts. In addition, we expected to find that East Asians would also show efficiency at searching through information in the decision-making process, parsing through similar quantities of information faster than European Canadians.

Quantity of information used. Cross-cultural studies in judgement and decision-making also suggest that East Asians are more likely than North Americans to access more information before reaching decisions (e.g. Choi et al., 2003; Ji et al., 2008; Spina et al., 2010). For example, investigating how financial decisions are made for Chinese and European Canadians, Ji et al. (2008) demon- strated that Chinese consider more information when making stock market decisions, both historical and recent, whereas European Canadians selectively focus on recent information. Choi et al. (2003) showed similar findings, looking at information taken into account to determine the motive of a hypothetical murder case, finding that Koreans tend to take into account more available information com- pared to Americans. Spina et al. (2010) also showed that in searching for causes of a given phenomenon, East Asians tend to deliberate more information by considering poten- tial associations to multiple antecedent causes, whereas North Americans tend to focus on a few causes. We expected that East Asians would show similar processes at work in their online decision-making processes, seeking a greater amount of information, relative to North Americans, to reach their decisions.

Type of information used. In addition to these findings, previous cross-cultural research in attention has shown that East Asians tend to allocate their attention to both salient foreground objects and background infor- mation, whereas North Americans mainly focus on salient foreground objects (e.g. Masuda & Nisbett, 2001). Interestingly, Choi et al. (2003) showed that this attention bias extends to the decision-making domain for their murder motive study, finding that Koreans tend to consider more information, both relevant and not, whereas Americans selectively focus only on the most relevant pieces of information. These findings suggest that East Asian and North American attention styles lead the two groups to treat information in different ways. We expected that such culturally specific attention styles would also be shown in their online decision-making pro- cesses, with East Asians attending to both information they perceived to be important and less important, and North Americans focusing on information perceived to be important.