Speaker: Mei Wang, Professor, WHU-Otto Beisheim School of Management

Time: 13:00 - 14:30, Oct. 10.

Venue: Room 1206, Wang Kezhen Building

Abstract: Culture influences our thinking style which in turn influences our decisions. We illustrate this connection on a recent experimental study in Germany and Vietnam with N=296 subjects. We elicit their decisions in classical framing effect questions with between-subject comparisons. Previous research has found that East Asians tend to be more prone to the framing effect.We show that this is not necessarily so, but depends on the information structure of the question: in certain situations, Vietnamese perform actually better than Germans, as predicted by our theory. We also use two methods to measure holistic versus analytic thinking style for all subjects and demonstrate that this distinction is indeed a crucial factor in explaining the country difference. In the second part of our presentation, we present an ongoing large-scale project on preferences, attitudes, norms and decisions in Asia (PANDA study) that might provide an interesting framework for empirical research on the intersections between psychology, economics and cultural studies on East Asia.

Host: Xiaofei Xie