Foreign to me
Magdalena Rychlowska et al.
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 12 May 2015, Pages E2429-E2436
Abstract:
A small number of facial expressions may be universal in that they are produced by the same basic affective states and recognized as such throughout the world. However, other aspects of emotionally expressive behavior also vary widely across culture. Just why do they vary? We propose that some cultural differences in expressive behavior are determined by historical heterogeneity, or the extent to which a country's present-day population descended from migration from numerous vs. few source countries over a period of 500 y. Our reanalysis of data on cultural rules for displaying emotion from 32 countries [n = 5,340; Matsumoto D, Yoo S, Fontaine J (2008) J Cross Cult Psychol 39:55-74] reveals that historical heterogeneity explains substantial, unique variance in the degree to which individuals believe that emotions should be openly expressed. We also report an original study of the underlying states that people believe are signified by a smile. Cluster analysis applied to data from nine countries (n = 726), including Canada, France, Germany, India, Indonesia, Israel, Japan, New Zealand, and the United States, reveals that countries group into "cultures of smiling" determined by historical heterogeneity. Factor analysis shows that smiles sort into three social-functional subtypes: pleasure, affiliative, and dominance. The relative importance of these smile subtypes varies as a function of historical heterogeneity. These findings thus highlight the power of social-historical factors to explain cross-cultural variation in emotional expression and smile behavior.
---------------------
Scott Fulford, Ivan Petkov & Fabio Schiantarelli
Boston College Working Paper, May 2015
Abstract:
The United States provides a unique laboratory for understanding how the cultural, institutional, and human capital endowments of immigrant groups shape economic outcomes. In this paper, we use census micro-sample information to reconstruct the country-of-ancestry distribution for US counties from 1850 to 2010. We also develop a county-level measure of GDP per capita over the same period. Using this novel panel data set, we investigate whether changes in the ancestry composition of a county matter for local economic development and the channels through which the cultural, institutional, and educational legacy of the country of origin affects economic outcomes in the US. Our results show that the evolution of the country-of-origin composition of a county matters. Moreover, the culture, institutions, and human capital that the immigrant groups brought with them and pass on to their children are positively associated with local development in the US. Among these factors, measures of culture that capture attitudes towards cooperation play the most important and robust role. Finally, our results suggest that while fractionalization of ancestry groups is positively related with county GDP, fractionalization in attributes such as trust, is negatively related to local economic performance.
---------------------
Culture and current account balances
Mika Nieminen, Kari Heimonen & Esa Mangeloja
Applied Economics Letters, Summer 2015, Pages 886-890
Abstract:
This article contributes to the literature of current account balances by introducing cultural variables that until now have been omitted. The World Values Survey indicates that the Roman Catholics do not consider thrift as important as others. We propose that Catholic countries tend to run current account deficits. This result remains robust even if we control for close to all of the determinants that have been included in previous studies. We find evidence that the inclination of Catholic countries to have high levels of uncertainty avoidance goes to a great length in explaining the result.
---------------------
Risk taking in adversarial situations: Civilization differences in chess experts
Philippe Chassy & Fernand Gobet
Cognition, August 2015, Pages 36-40
Abstract:
The projections of experts in politics predict that a new world order will emerge within two decades. Being multipolar, this world will inevitably lead to frictions where civilizations and states will have to decide whether to risk conflict. Very often these decisions are informed if not taken by experts. To estimate risk-taking across civilizations, we examined strategies used in 667,617 chess games played over ten years by chess experts from 12 different civilizations. We show that some civilizations are more inclined to settle for peace. Similarly, we show that once engaged in the battle, the level of risk taking varies significantly across civilizations, the boldest civilization using the riskiest strategy about 35% more than the most conservative civilization. We discuss which psychological factors might underpin these civilizational differences.
---------------------
National Culture and Home Advantage in Football
Garry Gelade
Cross-Cultural Research, July 2015, Pages 281-296
Abstract:
This article examines home advantage (HA) in association football (soccer). HA is the tendency for teams to perform better when playing on their home ground than when playing away. National variations in HA are found to be related to national cultural and social characteristics. HA tends to be elevated in countries with high levels of collectivism and in-group favoritism, and in countries where governance is prone to corruption and where the rule of law is not strictly adhered to. These findings are consistent with the concept of HA as a social phenomenon that derives from the influence of spectators on the match officials. HA is also found to be elevated in countries with diverse terrain, but the effects of culture persist even when diversity of terrain is controlled for. On the other hand, the hypothesis that HA is elevated in the presence of large crowds or potentially violent spectators was not supported.
---------------------
The Mesh of Civilizations in the Global Network of Digital Communication
Bogdan State et al.
PLoS ONE, May 2015
Abstract:
Conflicts fueled by popular religious mobilization have rekindled the controversy surrounding Samuel Huntington's theory of changing international alignments in the Post-Cold War era. In The Clash of Civilizations, Huntington challenged Fukuyama's "end of history" thesis that liberal democracy had emerged victorious out of Post-war ideological and economic rivalries. Based on a top-down analysis of the alignments of nation states, Huntington famously concluded that the axes of international geo-political conflicts had reverted to the ancient cultural divisions that had characterized most of human history. Until recently, however, the debate has had to rely more on polemics than empirical evidence. Moreover, Huntington made this prediction in 1993, before social media connected the world's population. Do digital communications attenuate or echo the cultural, religious, and ethnic "fault lines" posited by Huntington prior to the global diffusion of social media? We revisit Huntington's thesis using hundreds of millions of anonymized email and Twitter communications among tens of millions of worldwide users to map the global alignment of interpersonal relations. Contrary to the supposedly borderless world of cyberspace, a bottom-up analysis confirms the persistence of the eight culturally differentiated civilizations posited by Huntington, with the divisions corresponding to differences in language, religion, economic development, and spatial distance.
---------------------
Redistribution and Group Participation: Comparative Experimental Evidence from Africa and the UK
Marcel Fafchamps & Ruth Vargas Hill
NBER Working Paper, April 2015
Abstract:
We design an original laboratory experiment to investigate whether redistributive actions hinder the formation of Pareto-improving groups. We test, in an anonymous setting with no feedback, whether people choose to destroy or steal the endowment of others and whether they choose to give to others, when granted the option. We then test whether subjects join a group that increases their endowment but exposes them to redistribution. We conduct the experiment in three very different settings with a priori different norms of pro-social behavior: a university town in the UK, the largest urban slum in Kenya, and rural Uganda. We find a lot of commonality but also large differences between sites. UK subjects behave in a more selfish and strategic way -- giving less, stealing more. Kenyan and Ugandan subjects behave in a more altruistic and less strategic manner. However, pro-social norms are not always predictive of joining behavior. African subjects are less likely to join a group when destruction or stealing is permitted. It is as if they are less trusting even though they are more trustworthy. These findings contradict the view that African current underdevelopment is due to a failure of generalized morality.
---------------------
Exposure to Television and Individual Beliefs: Evidence from a Natural Experiment
Tanja Hennighausen
Journal of Comparative Economics, forthcoming
Abstract:
Does the information provided by mass media have the power to persistently affect individual beliefs about the drivers of success in life? To answer this question empirically, this contribution exploits a natural experiment on the reception of West German television in the former German Democratic Republic. After identifying the impact of Western television on individual beliefs and attitudes in the late 1980s, longitudinal data from the German Socio-Economic Panel is used to test the persistence of the television effect on individual beliefs during the 1990s. The empirical findings indicate that Western television exposure has made East Germans more inclined to believe that effort rather than luck determines success in life. Furthermore, this effect still persists several years after the German reunification.
---------------------
Danika Hiew et al.
Journal of Cross-Cultural Psychology, June 2015, Pages 684-701
Abstract:
This study compared the endorsement of Chinese and Western relationship standards by Chinese, Western, and intercultural Chinese-Western couples. All couples were living in Australia. Couples' relationship standards differed in line with predictions. Western couples rated intimacy and the demonstration of love and caring (assessed by the Couple Bond scale) as more important for a successful couple relationship than Chinese couples. Chinese couples rated relations with the extended family, relational harmony, face maintenance, and traditional gender roles (assessed by the Family Responsibility scale) as more important than Western couples. Intercultural couples endorsed the standards to an extent that was intermediate between the Chinese and Western couples. Cultural differences were smaller on Couple Bond standards (small to medium effects) than on Family Responsibility standards (medium to large effects). Almost all cultural combinations of partners shared greater similarity on Couple Bond and Family Responsibility standards than would be expected by chance, with the notable exception that Chinese women's standards were less similar to their male partner's standards than was the case for Western women. Across cultural combinations of partners, high endorsement of Couple Bond standards, low endorsement of Family Responsibility standards, and high agreement between partners on both standards predicted high relationship satisfaction. Our results suggest that partner selection and convergence on relationship standards are important avenues for future research.
---------------------
Jinkyung Na et al.
Psychological Science, forthcoming
Abstract:
Competence judgments based on facial appearance predict election results in Western countries, which indicates that these inferences contribute to decisions with social and political consequence. Because trait inferences are less pronounced in Asian cultures, such competence judgments should predict Asian election results less accurately than they do Western elections. In the study reported here, we compared Koreans' and Americans' competence judgments from face-to-trait inferences for candidates in U.S. Senate and state gubernatorial elections and Korean Assembly elections. Perceived competence was a far better predictor of the outcomes of real elections held in the United States than of elections held in Korea. When deciding which of two candidates to vote for in hypothetical elections, however, Koreans and Americans both voted on the basis of perceived competence inferred from facial appearance. Combining actual and hypothetical election results, we conclude that for Koreans, competence judgments from face-to-trait inferences are critical in voting only when other information is unavailable. However, in the United States, such competence judgments are substantially important, even in the presence of other information.
---------------------
English as a gatekeeper: Inequality between Jews and Arabs in access to higher education in Israel
Yariv Feniger & Hanna Ayalon
International Journal of Educational Research, forthcoming
Abstract:
Access to the universities and many colleges in Israel is conditioned on the attainment of a specific matriculation certificate that includes a passing grade in advanced level English. Arab students in Israel are required to study English in addition to Arabic and Hebrew, unlike Jewish students, who are not obliged to take a second foreign language in addition to English. This puts Arab students in an inferior position. An analysis of a large sample of high school graduates showed that the English requirement incurs larger gaps than two other subjects that were examined: history and math. Logistic regression models confirmed that the gaps in meeting the English requirement can help explain the Jewish-Arab discrepancy in enrollment in higher education.
---------------------
Miyuki Fukushima Tedor, Susan Sharp & Emiko Kobayashi
Sociological Inquiry, forthcoming
Abstract:
Using comparable self-reported survey data collected among college students in the United States (n = 502) and Japan (n = 441), this study examines a paradox of higher academic deviance among otherwise more conforming Japanese youth while revisiting the debate concerning the disjuncture between aspirations and expectations/perceived outcomes in Agnew's general strain theory (GST). Confirming the paradox, our results indicate that Japanese students are significantly more deviant academically than American students. However, contrary to the expectation of GST, but in support of past empirical studies, the higher academic deviance among the Japanese, as compared to Americans, is explained by their lower aspirations, irrespective of the levels of expectations/perceived outcomes.
---------------------
Peter Smith
Journal of Cross-Cultural Psychology, forthcoming
Abstract:
Nation-level differences in individuals' reports of helping strangers, donating money to charity, and volunteering time were analyzed, drawing on nationally representative survey data from 135 nations. Frequency of these three behaviors yielded a reliable index of pro-social behavior. All three behaviors were found to be more frequent in nations that score low on an index of in-group favoritism and score low on uncertainty avoidance. Helping a stranger was also more frequent in nations with greater income inequality. The use of a wide sample of nations provides a more valid understanding of what kinds of cultures favor pro-social actions and indicates that national wealth is a less important contributor to the differences that are found than is the case in other aspects of cultural difference.
---------------------
Brent Strickland et al.
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 12 May 2015, Pages 5968-5973
Abstract:
According to a theoretical tradition dating back to Aristotle, verbs can be classified into two broad categories. Telic verbs (e.g., "decide," "sell," "die") encode a logical endpoint, whereas atelic verbs (e.g., "think," "negotiate," "run") do not, and the denoted event could therefore logically continue indefinitely. Here we show that sign languages encode telicity in a seemingly universal way and moreover that even nonsigners lacking any prior experience with sign language understand these encodings. In experiments 1-5, nonsigning English speakers accurately distinguished between telic (e.g., "decide") and atelic (e.g., "think") signs from (the historically unrelated) Italian Sign Language, Sign Language of the Netherlands, and Turkish Sign Language. These results were not due to participants' inferring that the sign merely imitated the action in question. In experiment 6, we used pseudosigns to show that the presence of a salient visual boundary at the end of a gesture was sufficient to elicit telic interpretations, whereas repeated movement without salient boundaries elicited atelic interpretations. Experiments 7-10 confirmed that these visual cues were used by all of the sign languages studied here. Together, these results suggest that signers and nonsigners share universally accessible notions of telicity as well as universally accessible "mapping biases" between telicity and visual form.