  For synergistic interactions between humans and artificial intelligence (AI)
systems, AI outputs often need to be explainable to people. Explainable AI
(XAI) systems are commonly tested in human user studies. However, whether XAI
researchers consider potential cultural differences in human explanatory needs
remains unexplored. We highlight psychological research that found significant
differences in human explanations between many people from Western, commonly
individualist countries and people from non-Western, often collectivist
countries. We argue that XAI research currently overlooks these variations and
that many popular XAI designs implicitly and problematically assume that
Western explanatory needs are shared cross-culturally. Additionally, we
systematically reviewed over 200 XAI user studies and found that most studies
did not consider relevant cultural variations, sampled only Western
populations, but drew conclusions about human-XAI interactions more generally.
We also analyzed over 30 literature reviews of XAI studies. Most reviews did
not mention cultural differences in explanatory needs or flag overly broad
cross-cultural extrapolations of XAI user study results. Combined, our analyses
provide evidence of a cultural bias toward Western populations in XAI research,
highlighting an important knowledge gap regarding how culturally diverse users
may respond to widely used XAI systems that future work can and should address.
