Cultural Factors in Complex Decision Making

Complex decision-making is conceptualised as the process of problem solving in meaningful and important, but complex, dynamic and partially opaque situations. This process is open to a number of cultural influences, among them educational practices, environmental predictability, and power distance. Two empirical studies that explore into the cultural relativity of this type of decision making use interactive computer simulations of complex problems as research instruments. There are a number of behavioural differences between participants from India and Germany which can be explained within a culture-theoretical framework and give reason for the plea to include cultural factors in theories on human decision making. Creative Commons License This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 License. This article is available in Online Readings in Psychology and Culture: http://scholarworks.gvsu.edu/orpc/vol4/iss1/1