Massachusetts Undergraduate Research Conference (MassURC)

Early and current research efforts have shown that individuals from individualistic or collectivist cultures approach decision-making through different lenses. While individualistic societies tend to emphasize the pursuit of self-interest, collectivist societies typically prioritize group consensus. However, scant attention has been directed specifically towards individuals with exposure to both cultural structures. To obtain a more nuanced comprehension of how cultural context shapes decision-making, we aim to assess the performance of four distinct groups of college students—international East Asian, international White/Caucasian, domestic East Asian, and domestic White/Caucasian—using an explore-exploit decision-making task. In this task, participants were asked to select between three images, each randomly assigned a low (p=0.2), medium (p=0.5), or high (p=0.8) reward or loss probability. Every few trials, one of the images was replaced with a novel option. To maximize their gains or minimize their losses, participants must learn to balance the dual goals of exploiting familiar options to obtain known rewards and exploring unfamiliar options to gain information. We anticipate that international East Asian college students will exhibit a tendency towards exploration, reflected in more varied image choices, mouse movements, and mid-trajectory adjustments. In contrast, college students from the remaining groups will frequently select the same image choice, demonstrating more direct movements towards the known, higher-probability images. The successful completion of this research project will lead to a better understanding of how individuals from Western and Eastern cultures vary in terms of preferred choice strategies.

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