Across cultures and continents, most people prefer to tackle life’s toughest choices alone, trusting their own gut or inner voice over the counsel of friends or the wisdom of the crowd, according to a new study.
Should I change careers? Is it time to end a relationship? Should I relocate? How should I invest my savings? These are just some of the big, often consequential, decisions we have to make in life. When making these sorts of decisions, people have options about who, if anyone, they turn to for advice.
In a new international study led by the University of Waterloo in Ontario, Canada, over 40 researchers investigated how people from different countries and cultures preferred to make decisions, whether on their own or after turning to friends or the wisdom of the crowd. What they found might surprise you.
“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 the study’s lead and corresponding author, Igor Grossmann, PhD, professor in the Department of Psychology at Waterloo. “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.”
The researchers recruited 3,517 adult study participants from 12 countries, including two Indigenous Amazonian communities, the Shipibo in Peru and the Shiwiar in Ecuador. Participants were from a range of backgrounds, including university students, community members, and rural villagers. Average ages ranged from 20 to 40, and they had education levels ranging from primary school to graduate degrees. About half of the participants (52%) were female.
They were presented with six decision-making scenarios that varied in complexity and interpersonal stakes. To make sure they were culturally relevant, the scenarios were selected after input from anthropologists, philosophers and linguists. Half of the scenarios involved a choice between two attractive options, such as choosing between two universities or between two travel destinations. The other half involved a dilemma between self-interest and the interests of others, and had ambiguous outcomes, such as deciding whether to help a neighbor at the expense of personal work deadlines.
Participants read the scenario and were told that there were “several ways this person could handle the situation,” and were prompted to choose their preferred decision strategy from one of four distinct strategies. Two primarily relied on inner mental processes (intuition or deliberation), and two involved advice from other people (friends or crowd wisdom). They rated which strategy they thought was the wisest, and were asked to predict what most people in their culture would do. They also rated how good they’d feel after using each strategy.
The researchers found that, across all societies, self-reliant strategies (deliberation, especially, followed by intuition) were the most popular. Advice-oriented strategies were consistently chosen less. Friends’ advice was preferred by between 9% and 22% of participants, and crowd wisdom was as low as 2% and as high as 12%. Even in strongly interdependent cultures, where people prioritize the needs and goals of the group over their own, most people preferred to decide alone.
People tended to see deliberation as the wisest method of decision-making. But when guessing what others in the culture would do, friends’ advice was sometimes expected to be just as common as self-reliance, which highlights a gap between personal ideals and perceived social norms. The preference for self-reliance held both for personal-choice dilemmas and social dilemmas, where helping someone could hurt one’s own interests. Advice from friends was even less likely in social dilemmas, possibly due to reputational concerns. For example, asking others whether you should help might make you look selfish.
The study had some limitations. Samples weren’t nationally representative; most were convenience samples. Scenarios were hypothetical rather than real-life, so results may differ in practice. There’s the potential for social desirability bias, where people may have answered in ways they thought were expected. And, the study measured stated preferences, not actual decision-making behavior.
Regardless, what’s interesting here is that the tendency toward self-reliance in decision-making appears to be a human universal, not just a Western trait. It remained across languages, religions, and educational levels. Culture and personality factors tuned the strength of this preference but didn’t reverse it.
“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 question is, though, how to use these findings across areas such as business, healthcare, and education. The researchers say that they suggest that there’s a need “to distinguish how people acquire social information (often implicitly) from whether they believe they need explicit advice.” These insights could help leaders, educators, and clinicians design decision-making processes that respect our instinct for autonomy while still inviting valuable outside perspectives. Striking this balance might unlock better outcomes without undermining our sense of agency.
The study was published in the journal Proceedings of the Royal Society B Biological Sciences.
Source: University of Waterloo
