Recollecting Cross-Cultural Evidences: Are Decision Makers Really Foresighted in Iowa Gambling Task?

Abstract

The Iowa Gambling Task (IGT) has become a remarkable experimental paradigm of dynamic emotion decision making. In recent years, research has emphasized the "prominent deck B (PDB) phenomenon" among normal (control group) participants, in which they favor "bad" deck B with its high-frequency gain structure-a finding that is incongruent with the original IGT hypothesis concerning foresightedness. Some studies have attributed such performance inconsistencies to cultural differences. In the present review, 86 studies featuring data on individual deck selections were drawn from an initial sample of 958 IGT-related studies published from 1994 to 2017 for further investigation. The PDB phenomenon was found in 67.44% of the studies (58 of 86), and most participants were recorded as having adopted the "gain-stay loss-randomize" strategy to cope with uncertainty. Notably, participants in our sample of studies originated from 16 areas across North America, South America, Europe, Oceania, and Asia, and the findings suggest that the PDB phenomenon may be cross-cultural.

Keywords: IGT global map; cross-cultural; dynamic decision-making; foresight; gain-loss frequency; gain-stay loss-randomize decision strategy; iowa gambling task; prominent deck B phenomenon.

FIGURE 1

The Iowa Gambling Task (IGT) global map. The figure illustrates the geographical distribution of IGT-related studies that showed individual deck selections. Red circles indicate studies demonstrating the PDB phenomenon, green circles indicate studies that support the original IGT assumptions, and gray circles indicate studies that were unclassifiable. AR, Argentina; AT, Austria; AU, Australia; BR, Brazil; CA, Canada; CL, Chile; CN, China; CZ, Czechia; DE, Germany; ES, Spain; FR, France; GB, United Kingdom; IN, India; IT, Italy; JP, Japan; KR, South Korea; NL, Netherlands; NZ, New Zealand; TW, Taiwan; and US, United States of America. Adapted from “Robinson projection, national borders, areas grouped” (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Blank_maps#/media/File:BlankMap-World.svg) in the public domain.

FIGURE 2

Mean number of card selections in 86 IGT-related studies. The figure was produced by averaging the numbers of the four decks chosen across the 86 IGT-related studies. Selections of deck B were relatively higher than those of decks A and C, demonstrating that the PDB phenomenon was present. This finding is consistent with those obtained in a growing number of other IGT-related researches.