Individualism-Collectivism and Risk Perception Around the World

Understanding cultural differences in risk perception is critical in an increasingly uncertain world. Here we examine the relationship between the individualism-collectivism continuum and risk perception around the world using a data set from the Lloyd’s Register Foundation World Risk Poll. The data set contains rich information of a representative sample of 150,000 participants from 142 countries, and investigates risk perception in terms of perceived likelihood and personal experiences for a range of risks in daily life. We observe that participants from countries with a more individualistic culture perceive lower risk after controlling their personal experiences. We observe similar but weaker patterns when we adopt an epidemiological approach to investigate the individualistic cultural influence of first- and second-generation immigrants and use historical kinship tightness to proxy for individualism. Our study sheds light on the importance of culture in shaping risk perception and contributes to understanding global differences in behavioral traits.

This paper was accepted by Ilia Tsetlin, behavioral economics and decision analysis.

Funding: This research was supported by the Social Science Research Council (Singapore, grant number MOE2022-SSRTG-029), and National Natural Science Foundation of China (grant number 72425005).

Supplemental Material: The online appendix and data files are available at https://doi.org/10.1287/mnsc.2022.01612.