Cultural landscape
National Happiness and Genetic Distance: A Cautious Exploration
Eugenio Proto & Andrew Oswald
University of Warwick Working Paper, July 2014
Abstract:
This paper examines a famous puzzle in social science. Why do some nations report such high happiness? Denmark, for instance, regularly tops the league table of rich nations’ wellbeing; Great Britain and the US enter further down; France and Italy do relatively poorly. Yet the explanation for this ranking – one that holds even after adjustment for GDP and socioeconomic and cultural variables – remains unknown. We explore a new avenue. Using data on 131 countries, we document a range of evidence consistent with the hypothesis that certain nations may have a genetic advantage in well-being.
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Edward Glaeser, Joshua Gottlieb & Oren Ziv
NBER Working Paper, July 2014
Abstract:
There are persistent differences in self-reported subjective well-being across U.S. metropolitan areas, and residents of declining cities appear less happy than other Americans. Newer residents of these cities appear to be as unhappy as longer term residents, and yet some people continue to move to these areas. While the historical data on happiness are limited, the available facts suggest that cities that are now declining were also unhappy in their more prosperous past. One interpretation of these facts is that individuals do not aim to maximize self-reported well-being, or happiness, as measured in surveys, and they willingly endure less happiness in exchange for higher incomes or lower housing costs. In this view, subjective well-being is better viewed as one of many arguments of the utility function, rather than the utility function itself, and individuals make trade-offs among competing objectives, including but not limited to happiness.
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The French Unhappiness Puzzle: The Cultural Dimension of Happiness
Claudia Senik
Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization, forthcoming
Abstract:
This article sheds light on the important differences in self-declared happiness across countries of similar affluence. It hinges on the different happiness statements of natives and immigrants in a set of European countries to disentangle the influence of objective circumstances versus psychological and cultural factors. The latter turn out to be of non-negligible importance. In some countries, such as France, they are responsible for the best part of the country's unobserved idiosyncratic source of unhappiness. French natives are less happy than other Europeans, whether they live in France or outside. By contrast, immigrants are not less happy in France than they are elsewhere in Europe, but their happiness fall with the passage of time and generations. I show that these gaps in self-declared happiness have a real emotional counterpart and do not boil down to purely nominal differences.
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The (True) Legacy of Two Really Existing Economic Systems
Dan Ariely et al.
Duke University Working Paper, June 2014
Abstract:
By running an experiment among Germans collecting their passports or ID cards in the citizen centers of Berlin, we find that individuals with an East German family background cheat significantly more on an abstract task than those with a West German family background. The longer individuals were exposed to socialism, the more likely they were to cheat on our task. While it was recently argued that markets decay morals (Falk and Szech, 2013), we provide evidence that other political and economic regimes such as socialism might have an even more detrimental effect on individuals’ behavior.
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Cyber-shilling in Automobile Auctions: Evidence from a Field Experiment
David Grether, David Porter & Matthew Shum
American Economic Journal: Microeconomics, forthcoming
Abstract:
We run a large field experiment with an online company specializing in selling used automobiles via ascending auctions. We manipulate experimentally the "price grid," or the possible amounts that bidders can bid above the current standing price. Using two diverse auction sites, one in New York and one in Texas, we find that buyer and seller behavior differs strikingly across the two sites. Specifically, in Texas we find peculiar patterns of bidding among a small but prominent group of buyers suggesting that they are "cyber-shills" working on behalf of sellers. These patterns do not appear in the New York auctions.
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Cultural differences in indecisiveness: The role of naïve dialecticism
Andy Ng & Michaela Hynie
Personality and Individual Differences, November 2014, Pages 45–50
Abstract:
East Asians exhibit naïve dialecticism, a set of worldviews that tolerates contradictions. As influenced by naïve dialecticism, East Asians are more likely to hold and less likely to change ambivalent attitudes, compared with European North Americans. If East Asians have a heightened tendency to see both positive and negative aspects of an object or issue, but a lesser inclination to resolve these inconsistencies, East Asians (vs. European North Americans) may experience more difficulty in committing to an action, and thus be more indecisive. Consistent with this hypothesis, we found that East Asian Canadians scored higher on a measure of chronic indecisiveness than did European Canadians and South Asian Canadians, and that naïve dialecticism and need for cognition mediated the relationship between culture and indecisiveness. These results add to the extant literature on indecisiveness, demonstrating cultural variations in indecisiveness and an underlying cultural factor that is responsible for these cultural differences.
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T.M. Luhrmann et al.
British Journal of Psychiatry, forthcoming
Aims: To compare auditory hallucinations across three different cultures, by means of an interview-based study.
Method: An anthropologist and several psychiatrists interviewed participants from the USA, India and Ghana, each sample comprising 20 persons who heard voices and met the inclusion criteria of schizophrenia, about their experience of voices.
Results: Participants in the USA were more likely to use diagnostic labels and to report violent commands than those in India and Ghana, who were more likely than the Americans to report rich relationships with their voices and less likely to describe the voices as the sign of a violated mind.
Conclusions: These observations suggest that the voice-hearing experiences of people with serious psychotic disorder are shaped by local culture. These differences may have clinical implications.
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Kosuke Sato, Masaki Yuki & Vinai Norasakkunkit
Journal of Cross-Cultural Psychology, forthcoming
Abstract:
The authors propose that cross-cultural differences in sensitivity to social rejection, or the extent to which one is alert to potential rejection from significant others, can be understood as an adaptation to different social ecological contexts varying in the degrees of relational mobility. In societies low in relational mobility, such as East Asia, relationships and group memberships are stable and exclusive, and thus it is difficult for individuals to recover once rejected from current relationships or groups. In these contexts, one would expect people to be continuously paying attention to negative feedback from others to avoid potential rejection. In contrast, this type of anxiety will be less pronounced in societies high in relational mobility, such as North America, because there are a greater number of relationship alternatives available, even if individuals were to be excluded from a particular relationship. Results from two cross-national studies showed that, as expected, individuals’ perceptions of relational mobility partially mediated rejection sensitivity (Study 1) and Taijin Kyofusho, an allocentric subtype of social anxiety (Study 2).
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How Persistent Are Consumption Habits? Micro-Evidence from Russia's Alcohol Market
Lorenz Kueng & Evgeny Yakovelv
NBER Working Paper, July 2014
Abstract:
We use the Anti-Alcohol Campaign in 1986 and the rapid expansion of the beer market after the collapse of the Soviet Union as two quasi-natural experiments to identify highly persistent habit formation in alcohol consumption among Russian males. Importantly, these results apply to all levels of alcohol consumption and are not driven by heavy drinking or alcoholism. The two large shocks combined with persistent habits lead to large cohort differences in consumer behavior even decades later. We derive a basic model of habit formation with homogeneous preferences over two habit-forming goods, which is consistent with these facts. Using placebo tests as well as simple descriptive statistics, we show that habits are formed during early adulthood and remain largely unaffected afterward. The main alternative hypotheses such as income effects, unobserved taste heterogeneity, stepping-stone effects, and changes in culture or social norms are inconsistent with those patterns. Using the experiments as IVs, we estimate the first-order autoregressive coefficient to be 0.83, which is almost three times larger than its OLS estimate. Finally, our results suggest that male mortality in Russia will decrease by one quarter within twenty years even under current policies and prices due to the long-run consequences of the large changes in the alcohol market.
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Gonen Dori-Hacohen
Journal of Pragmatics, September 2014, Pages 1–15
Abstract:
This study describes the differing overall structural organization of political radio phone-in interactions in Israel and the USA. The American phone-in is highly organized, tightly controlled by the host, who knows and introduces the caller at the opening, and closes the interaction unilaterally. In the Israeli phone-in, the opening resembles the mundane phone call: the call-taker acts as if he responds to a summons, there are greeting sequences, and the caller has the task of self-identification, since hosts do not know with whom they talk. Closings in Israel are negotiated and include pre-closings and closing sequences. Unlike the US structure, the Israeli structure promotes non-hierarchical institutional relations between participants, akin to mundane relations, often taken as relations between equals. The conclusion connects the overall structural organizations with the communication patterns in each society, suggesting phone-ins are one site that resonates and recreates societal norms.
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Katherine Curhan et al.
Social Psychological and Personality Science, forthcoming
Abstract:
Hierarchy can be conceptualized as objective social status (e.g., education level) or subjective social status (i.e., one’s own judgment of one’s status). Both forms predict well-being. This is the first investigation of the relative strength of these hierarchy–well-being relationships in the U.S. and Japan, cultural contexts with different normative ideas about how social status is understood and conferred. In probability samples of Japanese (N = 1,027) and U.S. (N = 1,805) adults, subjective social status more strongly predicted life satisfaction, positive affect, sense of purpose, and self-acceptance in the United States than in Japan. In contrast, objective social status more strongly predicted life satisfaction, positive relations with others, and self-acceptance in Japan than in the United States. These differences reflect divergent cultural models of self. The emphasis on independence characteristic of the United States affords credence to one’s own judgment (subjective status), and the interdependence characteristic of Japan gives weight to what others can observe (objective status).
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Mortality Salience and Cultural Cringe: The Australian Way of Responding to Thoughts of Death
Emiko Kashima et al.
Journal of Cross-Cultural Psychology, forthcoming
Abstract:
Terror Management Theory predicts that mortality salience (MS) instigates cultural worldview defenses, especially among individuals with lower self-esteem. That MS intensifies positive evaluations of pro-U.S. essay authors, and negative evaluations of anti-U.S. essay authors have been documented as supportive evidence. However, the evidence to date may have been limited to where praising for the former and rejection of the latter authors is consistent with a shared cultural script and thus normative. In the case of Australian people, the cultural script of cringe prescribes them to evaluate their country modestly and to reject high praise of their country. We therefore predicted that MS (vs. control) should lead Australians, with low self-esteem in particular, to evaluate pro-Australia essay authors less positively while not affecting their evaluations of anti-Australia essay authors. Results from two studies were consistent with this prediction. It is important to distinguish MS effects on adherence to cultural norms from those on reaffirming collective self-esteem, and to consider relevant cultural scripts when interpreting evidence for worldview defenses.
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Karisa Cloward
International Organization, Summer 2014, Pages 495-526
Abstract:
A substantial international relations literature addresses the various ways in which international actors, and the norms they promote, influence state behavior. But less attention has been paid to the influence these actors directly exert at the local level, despite the fact that many transnational campaigns promote norms for which individuals — not states — are the primary transgressors. If individuals behave as some states do, publicly embracing international norms only because they expect a financial or reputational benefit from doing so, then the campaigns have not fully succeeded. But when do individuals engage in real behavior change, and when do they simply change the public image they present to the international community? To begin to address this question, I employ a randomized field experiment to evaluate individuals' willingness to make claims that differ from their true normative commitments. I conducted the experiment in the context of an original 2008 opinion survey about female genital mutilation and early marriage, run in rural Kenya. I find that respondents misrepresent their behavior and intentions, and I supplement these findings with an exploration of causal mechanisms through qualitative interviews.
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Juanma de la Fuente et al.
Psychological Science, forthcoming
Abstract:
In Arabic, as in many languages, the future is “ahead” and the past is “behind.” Yet in the research reported here, we showed that Arabic speakers tend to conceptualize the future as behind and the past as ahead of them, despite using spoken metaphors that suggest the opposite. We propose a new account of how space-time mappings become activated in individuals’ minds and entrenched in their cultures, the temporal-focus hypothesis: People should conceptualize either the future or the past as in front of them to the extent that their culture (or subculture) is future oriented or past oriented. Results support the temporal-focus hypothesis, demonstrating that the space-time mappings in people’s minds are conditioned by their cultural attitudes toward time, that they depend on attentional focus, and that they can vary independently of the space-time mappings enshrined in language.
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Culture and the Ownership Concentration of Public Corporations around the World
Clifford Holderness
Journal of Corporate Finance, forthcoming
Abstract:
As a country’s attitude toward egalitarianism increases, which means a societal preference for the equal as opposed to hierarchical treatment of individuals, the ownership of the public corporations in the country becomes more concentrated. This finding is robust to a wide range of specifications and methodologies. Once egalitarianism is accounted for, there is no evidence that other cultural attitudes, including trust and religion, or legal protections for public market investors, including those laws that figure prominently in the literature, are related to ownership concentration. One explanation for the robust association between egalitarianism and ownership concentration is that large shareholders are valuable when employees have strong legal rights.
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Derya Güngör et al.
Journal of Cross-Cultural Psychology, forthcoming
Abstract:
In this research, we compare two forms of interdependent agency. Whereas all interdependent cultures emphasize interpersonal connectedness, we suggest that the nature of this connection may differ between face and honor cultures. In a large survey, with 163 Japanese and 172 Turkish students, we tested the idea that, consistent with the concern for face, Japanese interdependence emphasizes conformity; that is, fitting in, whereas, consistent with the concern for honor, Turkish interdependence stresses relatedness; that is, sticking together. The results confirmed these hypotheses: Japanese described their agency more in terms of conformity than Turks, whereas Turks described their agency more in terms of relatedness. Moreover, relational well-being was predicted by conformity in the Japanese group and by relatedness in the Turkish group. Autonomy was also important for both samples, and it predicted personal well-being. Results suggest that a multi-dimensional approach to interdependent agency is needed to distinguish meaningfully between different interdependent cultures.
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Trust Issues: Evidence on the Intergenerational Trust Transmission among Children of Immigrants
Martin Ljunge
Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization, October 2014, Pages 175–196
Abstract:
This paper estimates the intergenerational transmission of trust by studying children of immigrants in 29 European countries with ancestry in 87 nations. There is significant transmission of trust on the mother's side, and the transmission is significantly stronger than on the father's side. The transmission is stronger in high trust countries. Building trust in high trust environments is a process lasting generations. Intriguingly, trust transmission is strong also in low trust birth countries if ancestral trust is very high. There is persistence of very high trust in low trusting environments through cultural transmission in the family.
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Culture-dependent strategies in coordination games
Matthew Jackson & Yiqing Xing
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 22 July 2014, Pages 10889-10896
Abstract:
We examine different populations’ play in coordination games in online experiments with over 1,000 study participants. Study participants played a two-player coordination game that had multiple equilibria: two equilibria with highly asymmetric payoffs and another equilibrium with symmetric payoffs but a slightly lower total payoff. Study participants were predominantly from India and the United States. Study participants residing in India played the strategies leading to asymmetric payoffs significantly more frequently than study participants residing in the United States who showed a greater play of the strategy leading to the symmetric payoffs. In addition, when prompted to play asymmetrically, the population from India responded even more significantly than those from the United States. Overall, study participants’ predictions of how others would play were more accurate when the other player was from their own populations, and they coordinated significantly more frequently and earned significantly higher payoffs when matched with other study participants from their own population than when matched across populations.
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“Express the Real You”: Cultural Differences in the Perception of Self-Expression as Authenticity
Michail Kokkoris & Ulrich Kühnen
Journal of Cross-Cultural Psychology, September 2014, Pages 1221-1228
Abstract:
Prior research shows that people feel authentic when they express themselves. In this research, we examined how people from different cultures make inferences about a target person’s authenticity based on information about that person’s self-expression. Our cultural-fit hypothesis proposes that acts of self-expression enhance perceptions of authenticity when they are congruent with the culturally prevalent self-expression norms. In an experiment with Germans and Chinese reading scenarios and making inferences about a hypothetical person, we found that authenticity judgments were the highest, when the target person’s self-expression matched the culturally valued self-expression style — that is, expressing both likes and dislikes in Germany, and expressing only likes but no dislikes in China. Moreover, we found that the interactive effect of self-expression and culture had downstream effects on information processing, such that in the case of counter-cultural self-expression practices participants were more likely to seek information that would compensate for this cultural incongruence.
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Cross-Cultural Agreement in Facial Attractiveness Preferences: The Role of Ethnicity and Gender
Vinet Coetzee et al.
PLoS ONE, July 2014
Abstract:
Previous work showed high agreement in facial attractiveness preferences within and across cultures. The aims of the current study were twofold. First, we tested cross-cultural agreement in the attractiveness judgements of White Scottish and Black South African students for own- and other-ethnicity faces. Results showed significant agreement between White Scottish and Black South African observers' attractiveness judgements, providing further evidence of strong cross-cultural agreement in facial attractiveness preferences. Second, we tested whether cross-cultural agreement is influenced by the ethnicity and/or the gender of the target group. White Scottish and Black South African observers showed significantly higher agreement for Scottish than for African faces, presumably because both groups are familiar with White European facial features, but the Scottish group are less familiar with Black African facial features. Further work investigating this discordance in cross-cultural attractiveness preferences for African faces show that Black South African observers rely more heavily on colour cues when judging African female faces for attractiveness, while White Scottish observers rely more heavily on shape cues. Results also show higher cross-cultural agreement for female, compared to male faces, albeit not significantly higher. The findings shed new light on the factors that influence cross-cultural agreement in attractiveness preferences.
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Catherine Prado et al.
Motivation and Emotion, June 2014, Pages 420-428
Abstract:
This study investigated how the cultural match or mismatch between observer and perceiver can affect the accuracy of judgements of facial emotion, and how acculturation can affect cross-cultural recognition accuracy. The sample consisted of 51 Caucasian-Australians, 51 people of Chinese heritage living in Australia (PCHA) and 51 Mainland Chinese. Participants were required to identify the emotions of happiness, sadness, fear, anger, surprise and disgust displayed in photographs of Caucasian and Chinese faces. The PCHA group also responded to an acculturation measure that assessed their adoption of Australian cultural values and adherence to heritage (Chinese) cultural values. Counter to the hypotheses, the Caucasian-Australian and PCHA groups were found to be significantly more accurate at identifying both the Chinese and Caucasian facial expressions than the Mainland Chinese group. Adoption of Australian culture was found to predict greater accuracy in recognising the emotions displayed on Caucasian faces for the PCHA group.