People strategize better with those from their own culture and they are poor at predicting the behavior of those from different cultures, suggests a new study led by SFI External Professor Matthew O. Jackson of Stanford University and the Canadian Institute for Advanced Research.
The study, published in PNAS, tested subjects in India and the United States using an online strategy game in which the players had to select the distribution of a reward when they chose matching strategies.
Jackson says the results show that players in each country had fundamentally different strategies and different expectations of the other player and helps to explain why people generally prefer to interact with those who have similar backgrounds.
Read the news release from the Canadian Institute for Advanced Research (July 14, 2104)
Read the paper in PNAS (July 14, 2014)
The research was funded in part by the National Science Foundation, the Air Force Office of Scientific Research and Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency and the Army Research Office Multidisciplinary University Research Initiative.