No matter where we live, most of us look inward first when making big decisions.
A large international study spanning 12 countries has found that when people face complicated choices, they are more likely to rely on their own thinking than to ask others for advice.
The research was led by scientists at the University of Waterloo and included more than 3,500 participants. Respondents ranged from residents of major cities to members of small Indigenous communities in the Amazon rainforest. According to the team, this project represents the most extensive cross-cultural examination of decision-making styles so far.
Self-Reliance Across Cultures
The findings suggest that even in societies that emphasize close social ties and interdependence, most individuals still prefer to make up their own minds, regardless of outside opinions. Recognizing this shared tendency may help reduce misunderstandings between cultures and highlight the fact that people everywhere wrestle with similar internal questions before deciding.
“Realizing that most of us instinctively ‘go it alone’ helps explain why we often ignore good counsel, be it for health tips or financial planning, despite mounting evidence that such counsel may help us make wiser decisions,” said Dr. Igor Grossmann, professor in the Department of Psychology at Waterloo and first author on the paper. “This knowledge can help us design teamwork better by working with this self-reliant tendency and letting employees reason privately before sharing advice that they might reject.”
Challenging Assumptions About Independence
The results challenge the long-standing idea that people in Western cultures tend to decide independently while those in other parts of the world depend more heavily on others. Across every country included in the study, participants favored intuition and personal reflection over input from friends or crowds. However, the strength of that preference differed based on how much a culture values independence compared with interdependence.
“Our take-home message is that we all look inward first, yet the wisest moves may happen when solo reflections are shared with others,” Grossmann said. “What culture does is controls the volume knob, dialing up that inner voice in highly independent societies and softening it somewhat in more interdependent ones.”
The study was published in Proceedings of the Royal Society B Biological Sciences.
Reference: “Decision-making preferences for intuition, deliberation, friends or crowds in independent and interdependent societies” by Igor Grossmann, Maksim Rudnev, Anna Dorfman, Mohammad Atari, Kelli Barr, Abdellatif Bencherifa, Wesley Buckwalter, Rockwell F. Clancy, German Cuji Dahua, Norberto Cuji Dahua, Yasuo Deguchi, Ancon Lopez Wilmer, Emanuele Fabiano, Badr Guennoun, Julia Halamová, Takaaki Hashimoto, Joshua Homan, Martin Kanovský, Kaori Karasawa, Hackjin Kim, Jordan Kiper, Minha Lee, Xiaofei Liu, Veli Mitova, Rukmini Nair Ljiljana Pantovic, Brian Porter, Pablo Quintanilla, Josien Reijer, Pedro P. Romero, Yuri Sato, Purnima Singh, Salma Tber, Daniel Wilkenfeld, Lixia Yi, Stephen Stich, H. Clark Barrett and Edouard Machery, 13 August 2025, Proceedings of the Royal Society B Biological Sciences.
DOI: 10.1098/rspb.2025.1355
Close to 40 researchers contributed to the project through the Geography of Philosophy Project, directed by Dr. Edouard Machery at the University of Pittsburgh.
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