A Cross-Cultural Comparison of the Impact of Individualism - Collectivism on Risk Perception of Engineering Students from Brazil and Spain

There has been an emerging interest in exploring the influence of individualism-collectivism and uncertainty avoidance cultural dimensions on risk perception at an individual level of analysis. This paper aims to evaluate the impact of both cultural dimensions on risk perception. For this purpose, a survey was conducted with 340 students; 214 Brazilian and 126 Spanish respondents participated. The data were evaluated using descriptive statistics and Fuzzy-set Quantitative Comparative Analysis (fsQCA) for hypotheses testing. Results demonstrate that collectivistic and uncertainty avoidance preferences negatively influence risk tolerance, leading to risk-avoidance behavior. The managerial contributions of this study focus on aspects that lead to a broader sense of the collective, social and environmental aspects. Furthermore, this study contributes to the academic literature by demonstrating how individualism-collectivism and uncertainty avoidance impacts risk perception.