Some Biases Are Weirder Than Others: Testing Canonical Behavioral Biases In Two Non-Weird Samples

Authors:

Abstract: How generalizable are behavioral biases to under-researched populations? This paper presents results from an experiment testing 10 of the canonical biases from the behavioral economics literature amongst two distinct “non-WEIRD” (Western Educated Industrialized Rich and Democratic) populations: low-income Indians, and university students from an elite Indian university. We test for each “behavioral bias” with the pooled “non-WEIRD” sample, and for heterogeneity across each sub-sample. We find that both sub-samples display significant bias in the majority of tests, suggesting that these biases are not peculiar to Western populations. We further find that the patterns of effects are similar for each sub-sample, but that there are notable exceptions for a small subset of biases. In these cases, the student sample, closer to typical Western samples, is more biased than the low-income sample, suggesting that some populations might indeed be WEIRD-er than others.

Track: CULTGEN

Keywords: replication; cultural psychology; behavioral biases; heterogeneity