The impact of national culture in cognitive biases and its relationship with workplace teams’ formation

Abstract

The environment we live in is known to influence our decisions. Culture has been studied and examined within several spectrums by many people. Also, we already understood that our decisions are not completely rational due to the existence of cognitive biases, a field of study that has been growing interest in the current times. This study aims to relate the two concepts,by trying to understand if being from one type of culture (measured through Hofstede’s cultural dimensions) can influence the level of cognitive biases, more specifically: optimism bias, confirmation bias and intuitive thinking bias. Additionally, I try to extrapolate the implications found into the workplace environment when trying to form multicultural teams to see if it is possible to balance cognitive biases by joining people from opposite cultures. The results of this study show a significant relationship between three of the six cultural dimensions with optimism bias and between two cultural dimensions and intuitive thinking bias. Regarding confirmation bias, no significant relationship was found. Finally, the implications of these results are discussed, along with some limitations and ideas for future studies.

Date of Award	2 Feb 2022
Original language	English
Awarding Institution	Universidade Católica Portuguesa
Supervisor	Cristina Soares Pacheco Mendonça (Supervisor)