Behavioral sciences generally tend to assume human behavior as universal and to ignore systematic differences in how people perceive life (Levinson and Peng, 2004). Since the 1990s, some cultural psychologists have started to show that the way people perceive basic events and the reflections of this perception in the decision-making process are systematically affected by culture (Ji et al, 2001; Nisbett et al., 2001). Three important theories help social psychologists to explain these systematic cultural differences: individualism-collectivism theory (Hofstede, 1980; Triandis, 1995) and dependent, independent self theory (Markus and Kitayama, 1991) are powerful concepts in understanding social phenomenons. The third theory, based on the cognitive explanations underlying cultural differences, is the model developed by Nisbett (Nisbett et al., 2001) and sheds light on how culture can affect the way people perceive economic and financial concepts. In light of the mentioned theories, it is possible to predict the fundamental differences in financial forecasts, economic decisions and owned cognitive bias through the world perception of the individuals. In this way, we can interpret how behavioural economics and finance can be shaped by culture with the guidance of cultural psychology.
Traditional economic models do not take into consideration ownership of the investment amount and the investment-gambling dilemma. Oppositely new generation behavioral economics, emotions (De Martino et al. 2010; Sokol-Hessner, Camerer, & Phelps, 2013), genetics (Cesarini et al. 2009a, 2009b; Cesarini et al. 2010; Zhong, Chew et al. 2009; Cesarini, Johannesson, Magnusson and Wallace 2011), gender, age, religion and race (Barsky et al. 1997), education (Grable & Joo 1997), culture (Wang, Rieger, & Hens, 2017) and many other variables have been observed to be effective in the financial decision-making process. It is extremely important to understand this process and to analyze people's economic and financial behavior for predicting the individual and general results of financial behavior. As a new concept, cultural finance (Breuer and Quinten, 2009) mainly deals with the differences between eastern and western cultures and tries to create hetero-cultural-economicus by taking support from behavioral economics that transform homo-economicus of traditional theories into hetero-economicus. According to mentioned priorities, the main purpose of our study is to explore behavior sets' and cultural variations' influence on the individual's perspective on gambling and investment decisions.