Generalizability is not optional: insights from a cross-cultural study of social discounting.

ABSTRACT: Current scientific reforms focus more on solutions to the problem of reliability (e.g. direct replications) than generalizability. Here, we use a cross-cultural study of social discounting to illustrate the utility of a complementary focus on generalizability across diverse human populations. Social discounting is the tendency to sacrifice more for socially close individuals-a phenomenon replicated across countries and laboratories. Yet, when adapting a typical protocol to low-literacy, resource-scarce settings in Bangladesh and Indonesia, we find no independent effect of social distance on generosity, despite still documenting this effect among US participants. Several reliability and validity checks suggest that methodological issues alone cannot explain this finding. These results illus

SUBMITTER: Tiokhin L 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC6408392 | biostudies-literature | 2019 Feb

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature