The pioneering work of psychologists Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky, augmented by the work of behavioral economists Richard Thaler and Cass Sunstein and practitioners such as Lord Mervyn King leaves little doubt that individuals, when faced with having to make decisions in the face of uncertainty, act—to coin a phrase—a little weirdly. Specifically, they respond to a host of cognitive biases that lead to poor decisions. These include:
- the framing bias whereby losses are more sharply felt than gains of the same size;
- a propensity to overestimate both the probabilities and costs of harm from low-probability, high-cost events;
- substituting the answer to a simpler question for which the answer is known in response to a question for which the situation is complex and the answer unknown; and
- a propensity to rush to action when in fact it may have been better to wait and get more information before proceeding.
Subsequently, work by Joseph Henrich and others has shown that, while cognitive biases are universal, there are important differences, especially in relation to trust, between individuals in WEIRD—that is Western, Educated, Industrialized Rich and Democratic—and non-WEIRD countries. Henrich hypothesizes that for the WEIRD countries to become EIRD (the W being a catchall summarizing the combined effects and geography) they have had to develop institutions that enabled relative safety and security when engaging and trading with strangers. Whereas in the non-WEIRD countries, individuals place high trust in relationships with close contacts (friends, family, neighbors, proximate communities), WEIRD individuals place less emphasis on interpersonal trust and much more on the formal institutions that have evolved alongside (and enabled) the growth in material prosperity that characterizes their WEIRD societies. While it is impossible to assign causality in this co-evolving environment, the apparently greater success in Democratic countries in Industrializing and Educating their populations to create greater Riches (wealth) demarcates both the countries and—by experimental demonstration—the cognitive psychological programming of their citizens.
The effects of these differences play out starkly when attitudes towards Artificial Intelligence (AI) are sampled. Polling firm Ipsos, commissioned by Google, conducts regular surveys across a wide range of countries on attitudes to AI. The 2023 report sampled individuals in 31 countries worldwide, with both developed and developing countries in the sample, and with wide scope across Africa (South Africa) , Asia, (India, Singapore, Malaysia, Indonesia, Thailand, South Korea, Japan), Oceania (Australia and New Zealand), South (Chile, Argentina, Colombia, Peru), Central (Mexico) and North (Canada, USA) America, Eurasia (Turkey) and Europe (both developed western and emerging eastern countries). A key finding of the survey was that trust in AI varies widely and is “generally much higher in emerging markets and among people under 40 than in high income countries and among Gen Xers and Boomers.”
Further research conducted on the Ipsos data showed that while within each country, trust was generally higher amongst individuals with higher levels of education, income and decision-making responsibility, on the country level, the opposite applied. In countries with higher levels of wealth, education and scores on The Economist Democracy Index, there were proportionately lower levels of trust, confidence in their knowledge of AI, and expectations that AI had or would change their lives. The most consistently statistically significant effect (most reliable predictor) was the Democracy Index. That is, the more democratic a country was, the lower was trust, confidence in and expectations of AI. Moreover, the more democratic (and richer, urbanized (as a proxy for industrialized) and educated) the country was, the more nervous its people were about AI.
This almost certainly indicates the effects of WEIRD psychology at play in the face of a new—and currently quite uncertain—technology. However, it also poses some very important questions about the role of institutions—and in particular, regulation—in the genesis of these observations. Are the WEIRD countries less trusting of AI because it has not yet been regulated (there were, in 2023, no formal regulatory institutions governing it – the EU AI Act not being ratified until 2024), whereas the non-WEIRD countries are more trusting because they are relying on their own experience (and that of close associates) when forming their views? This begs the question of whether the WEIRD societies have reached the point where the confidence to use new technologies with uncertain effects is so low that regulation is needed before people will trust and use it, even before the effects are known. This poses a very different role for regulation than in the past where it has been used to correct for or prevent demonstrated harms.
Note then that the 2023 White House AI Executive Order was for the Safe, Secure and Trustworthy Development and Use of AI.
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