Cross-cultural assessment and comparisons of risk tolerance across domains

Yiyun Shou,Meng-Cheng Wang,Joel Olney

doi:10.1007/s12144-022-02843-3

Yiyun Shou, Meng-Cheng Wang + Show 1 more

Open Access

https://doi.org/10.1007/s12144-022-02843-3

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Abstract

Risk attitudes are known to play an important role in influencing one’s behavior under conditions of uncertainty. To date, cultural influences on risk attitudes - beyond the effects they have on perceived risk - have not been well understood. Having a cross-culturally invariant measure of risk attitudes is a prerequisite for carrying out more in depth explorations in this area. The current study applied the domain-specific risk attitudes framework and focused on the Chinese and US cultural contexts. Using novel network analysis techniques, we explored domain-specific patterns of risk attitudes in Chinese and US community samples and we subsequently developed a version of the Multi-Domain Risk Tolerance scale (MDRT-EC) that had similar applicability in both samples. The MDRT-EC demonstrated excellent psychometric characteristics and achieved strong measurement invariance across both samples. The associations between MDRT-EC domain scales and criterion scales were also similar between the two samples, further indicating the measurement invariance of the MDRT-EC. Finally, we used the MDRT-EC to explore cultural differences in risk attitudes across domains and their predictive relations with a range of lifestyle behaviors.

Highlights

In much of the psychological literature, the presence of “risk” refers to the possibility of danger or negative outcomes in a given situation
Given that the legal and social norms around different lifestyle behaviors could be different between Chinese and US contexts, we explored cultural differences in how risk attitudes measured by Multi-Domain Risk Tolerance scale (MDRT-EC) predict a range of lifestyle behaviors
Confirmatory factor analysis (CFA) A six-factor model based on the items selected for the English samples did not achieve satisfactory model fit in the Chinese sample, scale shifted Comparative Fit Index (CFI) = 0.89, Tucker Lewis Index (TLI) = 0.88, RMSEA = 0.073, 90% CI = [0.069, 0.076]

Summary

Introduction

In much of the psychological literature, the presence of “risk” refers to the possibility of danger or negative outcomes in a given situation. These findings are backed up by research in the tourism literature that demonstrates that East Asian tourists are much less likely to engage in high-risk adventure activities than Euro-Americans (Pizam et al, 2004; Reisinger & Mavondo, 2006). This suggests that cultural differences in risk attitudes vary depending on the domain of risk in question as well as the nature of the tasks and measures. In terms of the level of risk-taking, Du et al (2014) reported that Chinese undergraduate students had higher scores on financial investment risk-taking, but similar scores on other domains compared to the average scores reported in Western samples

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