The Role of Culture in Health Reporting Bias

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 and 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.