The Role of Culture in Health Reporting Bias

摘要

In this paper, I creatively use the cognitive bias of self-control to express the differences between Eastern and Western cultures, and then clarify the formation mechanism of two types of health reporting behaviors: truthful reporting (in Western countries) and reporting only the good news while concealing unpleasant information (in East Asian countries). Using panel data from 13 countries from 2000 to 2016, I analyzed the role of culture in health reporting bias by using sex index and Confucianism dummy variable as proxy variables for culture. The results show that traditional variables have only a 50% explanatory ability in interpreting the reporting bias in health between East a nd West. Unobservable national individual factors such as culture that do not change over time can account for the remaining 44% of health reporting bias. Among these individual factors, 92.3% can be attributed to culture as represented by the sex index, and about 0.23% can be explained by the Confucianism dummy variable. In addition, the popularization of tertiary education can effectively correct the cognitive bias of self-control, thus eliminating the deep inhibition of culture on health reporting behavior. My research provides inspiration and technical support for improving the accuracy of self-reporting health in the future.