Most people turn inward to make tough decisions, a new Pitt study found

When faced with tough decisions, humans the world over prefer reflecting on their own rather than accepting advice or information gleaned elsewhere.

In a study encompassing 13 languages, 12 research teams and 12 countries over five continents, the same findings cut across a global swath: people prefer self-reliant strategies more than advice-oriented or other strategies. And that common response appeared across multiple cultures and in all the tested sites, suggesting people across the world today favor “inward-looking decision routes” as the norm.

The study was published Aug. 12 in Proceedings B of The Royal Society Publishing.

“It is important to study how people prefer to make choices — by taking advice, by following the wisdom of crowds, by trusting their gut reactions or by relying on their own reasoning — because these preferences likely influence how people actually make decisions and how they respond to how institutions frame choices for them,” said senior author Edouard Machery, Distinguished Professor of History and Philosophy of Science and director of Pitt’s Center for Philosophy of Science.

“But we shouldn’t assume a priori that the preferences of the global north are shared by the rest of the world. The inspiration behind the studies in the Geography of Philosophy Project, including this study, is that behavioral scientists should examine concepts and preferences in a thoroughly cross-cultural manner, from small to large societies, from industrial to rural settings, from educated to less-educated populations.”

Lead author Igor Grossmann, from Canada’s University of Waterloo, added that this widespread self-reliance isn’t rooted in education, politics or religious background.

The research teams ranged from Pitt to Rutgers to UCLA, from Ecuador and Peru to Ontario, from South Africa to Morocco, from Serbia to India to Japan. They wrote that the universality of their findings regarding this self-reliance preference requires a rethinking of the long-held premise in cultural psychology about independent and interdependent agency. Even the most interdependent groups in the study showed a leaning toward private deliberation.

“Whereas interdependent cultures were more likely to consider advice than independent cultures, even in the most interdependent groups the default response was to ‘go it alone,’ even if it contradicted friends’ or family’s recommendations,” Grossmann said.

Machery, whose November publication received international attention when study groups preferred AI-generated poetry to the greats, said what the dozen research teams found most surprising was that there was so little cultural variation in people’s preferences.

“One might think that if anything should vary across cultures and environments, it is preferences about how to make a decision, as decisions are arguably made quite differently across cultures. But that appears not to be the case,” he said. “We were also interested by the finding that people had little appetite for the wisdom of crowds despite the fact that often, though not always, following the wisdom of crowds lead to better decisions.”

By design, the research posed six everyday dilemmas, among them planting crops or helping a neighbor. Anthropologists, philosophers and linguists on the widespread research teams collaborated globally and on the ground to better relate to their particular sample study group. Their intention was to find how various peoples and cultures arrived at decisions while allowing for both final decisions based on internal deliberation and for advice or thoughts garnered from others.

“We also observed another near-universal tendency: When asking the same people whom they think people from their culture would choose, people were more likely to consider their friends’ advice,” Grossman said. “In other words, while most preferred to make decisions on their own when looking at the decision dilemma through their own eyes, they were more likely to consider their friends’ advice when taking a step back and considering others’ perspectives. This is noteworthy, because — all things being equal — taking a step back and considering advice of others is in fact the wiser strategy in uncertain dilemmas.”