The way we do it
Hierarchical cultural values predict success and mortality in high-stakes teams
Eric Anicich, Roderick Swaab & Adam Galinsky
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 3 February 2015, Pages 1338–1343
Abstract:
Functional accounts of hierarchy propose that hierarchy increases group coordination and reduces conflict. In contrast, dysfunctional accounts claim that hierarchy impairs performance by preventing low-ranking team members from voicing their potentially valuable perspectives and insights. The current research presents evidence for both the functional and dysfunctional accounts of hierarchy within the same dataset. Specifically, we offer empirical evidence that hierarchical cultural values affect the outcomes of teams in high-stakes environments through group processes. Experimental data from a sample of expert mountain climbers from 27 countries confirmed that climbers expect that a hierarchical culture leads to improved team coordination among climbing teams, but impaired psychological safety and information sharing compared with an egalitarian culture. An archival analysis of 30,625 Himalayan mountain climbers from 56 countries on 5,104 expeditions found that hierarchy both elevated and killed in the Himalayas: Expeditions from more hierarchical countries had more climbers reach the summit, but also more climbers die along the way. Importantly, we established the role of group processes by showing that these effects occurred only for group, but not solo, expeditions. These findings were robust to controlling for environmental factors, risk preferences, expedition-level characteristics, country-level characteristics, and other cultural values. Overall, this research demonstrates that endorsing cultural values related to hierarchy can simultaneously improve and undermine group performance.
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Psychological Language on Twitter Predicts County-Level Heart Disease Mortality
Johannes Eichstaedt et al.
Psychological Science, February 2015, Pages 159-169
Abstract:
Hostility and chronic stress are known risk factors for heart disease, but they are costly to assess on a large scale. We used language expressed on Twitter to characterize community-level psychological correlates of age-adjusted mortality from atherosclerotic heart disease (AHD). Language patterns reflecting negative social relationships, disengagement, and negative emotions — especially anger — emerged as risk factors; positive emotions and psychological engagement emerged as protective factors. Most correlations remained significant after controlling for income and education. A cross-sectional regression model based only on Twitter language predicted AHD mortality significantly better than did a model that combined 10 common demographic, socioeconomic, and health risk factors, including smoking, diabetes, hypertension, and obesity. Capturing community psychological characteristics through social media is feasible, and these characteristics are strong markers of cardiovascular mortality at the community level.
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Children’s inequity aversion depends on culture: A cross-cultural comparison
Markus Paulus
Journal of Experimental Child Psychology, forthcoming
Abstract:
Recent work showed the presence of strong forms of inequity aversion in young children. When presented with an uneven number of items, children would rather tend to throw one item away than to distribute them unequally between two anonymous others. The current study examined whether or not this pattern is a universal part of typical development by investigating 6- and 7-year-old Ugandan children. Results revealed that the Ugandan children, in contrast to their U.S. peers, tended to distribute the resources unequally rather than to throw the remaining resource away. This points to cross-cultural differences in the development of children’s fairness-related decision making.
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Social Structure, Infectious Diseases, Disasters, Secularism, and Cultural Change in America
Igor Grossmann & Michael Varnum
Psychological Science, forthcoming
Abstract:
Why do cultures change? The present work examined cultural change in eight cultural-level markers, or correlates, of individualism in the United States, all of which increased over the course of the 20th century: frequency of individualist themes in books, preference for uniqueness in baby naming, frequency of single-child relative to multichild families, frequency of single-generation relative to multigeneration households, percentage of adults and percentage of older adults living alone, small family size, and divorce rates (relative to marriage rates). We tested five key hypotheses regarding cultural change in individualism-collectivism. As predicted by previous theories, changes in socioeconomic structure, pathogen prevalence, and secularism accompanied changes in individualism averaged across all measures. The relationship with changes in individualism was less robust for urbanization. Contrary to previous theories, changes in individualism were positively (as opposed to negatively) related to the frequency of disasters. Time-lagged analyses suggested that only socioeconomic structure had a robust effect on individualism; changes in socioeconomic structure preceded changes in individualism. Implications for anthropology, psychology, and sociology are discussed.
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“Heroes” and “Villains” of World History across Cultures
Katja Hanke et al.
PLoS ONE, February 2015
Abstract:
Emergent properties of global political culture were examined using data from the World History Survey (WHS) involving 6,902 university students in 37 countries evaluating 40 figures from world history. Multidimensional scaling and factor analysis techniques found only limited forms of universality in evaluations across Western, Catholic/Orthodox, Muslim, and Asian country clusters. The highest consensus across cultures involved scientific innovators, with Einstein having the most positive evaluation overall. Peaceful humanitarians like Mother Theresa and Gandhi followed. There was much less cross-cultural consistency in the evaluation of negative figures, led by Hitler, Osama bin Laden, and Saddam Hussein. After more traditional empirical methods (e.g., factor analysis) failed to identify meaningful cross-cultural patterns, Latent Profile Analysis (LPA) was used to identify four global representational profiles: Secular and Religious Idealists were overwhelmingly prevalent in Christian countries, and Political Realists were common in Muslim and Asian countries. We discuss possible consequences and interpretations of these different representational profiles.
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Language and Female Economic Participation
Victor Gay et al.
University of Chicago Working Paper, January 2015
Abstract:
This paper explores the relationship between the use of gender in language and the gender gap in economic participation. Using the American Community Survey, we show that among female migrants to the U.S., those who speak a language which makes sex-based grammatical gender distinctions exhibit lower labor force participation, hours worked, and weeks worked during the year, with larger effects for languages with more pervasive gender elements. To account for the impact of correlated origin country influences, we employ a fixed effects strategy and obtain identification off of variation in language spoken across immigrants from the same country.
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Money vs. Prestige: Cultural Attitudes and Occupational Choices
Crystal Zhan
Labour Economics, January 2015, Pages 44–56
Abstract:
This paper studies the occupational choices of highly educated native-born American males and links their choices to cultural attitudes towards pecuniary rewards and social prestige in their ancestral countries. These cultural attitudes were reported in the World Values Survey, which surveyed individuals’ opinions on a series of subjects in various societies. The empirical analysis verifies that cultural attitudes play a significant role in occupational choices: when other factors that may be correlated with one’s opportunity and advantage are controlled for, a stronger cultural demand for pecuniary rewards leads individuals to choose more lucrative jobs, and a stronger demand for social prestige leads them to choose more prestigious jobs. The paper further explores neighborhood effects on cultural transmission and finds a positive relationship between the proportion of the population from the same ancestry in the residential area and the effects of cultural attitudes on occupational selection.
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Genetic polymorphisms predict national differences in life history strategy and time orientation
Michael Minkov & Michael Harris Bond
Personality and Individual Differences, April 2015, Pages 204–215
Abstract:
The existence of a genetic factor behind group-level differences in life history strategy (LHS) has long been disputed. A number of recent studies suggest that some polymorphisms in the androgen receptor gene AR, the dopamine receptor gene DRD4, and the 5-HTTLPR VNTR of the serotonin transporter gene are associated with risk acceptance versus prudence and a short-term versus long-term time orientation, which are important aspects of LHS. We integrated studies from diverse nations reporting the prevalence of these three polymorphisms for many countries. We collected national indices for each of the three polymorphisms and found that they define a strong, single factor, yielding a single LHS-related, national genetic index. As expected, this index is strongly associated with reported national measures of LHS and time orientation, even after controlling for socioeconomic variables. The genetic effect seems especially strong across societies with high socioeconomic inequality.
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Michaela Pfundmair et al.
Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, March 2015, Pages 363-378
Abstract:
We investigated how participants with collectivistic and individualistic orientation cope with social exclusion on a behavioral level. In Studies 1 and 2, we found participants with more individualistic orientation to indicate more antisocial behavioral intentions in response to exclusion than in response to inclusion; however, participants with more collectivistic orientation did not differ in their behavioral intentions between exclusion and inclusion. In the third and fourth study, we replicated our findings across cultures: German and U.S. participants indicated more antisocial and avoiding behavioral intentions under exclusion than under inclusion, whereas Turkish and Indian participants did not differ in their behavioral intentions between exclusion and inclusion. In Studies 3 and 4, only German and U.S. participants were significantly affected by exclusion, showing more negative mood, which correlated with their behavioral intentions. In Study 4, the different behavioral intentions of collectivists and individualists were mediated by a different threat experience. The findings emphasize the role of self-construal and culture, as well as the self-threat inherent in exclusion.
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A Gender-Based Theory of the Origin of the Caste System of India
Chris Bidner & Mukesh Eswaran
Journal of Development Economics, May 2015, Pages 142–158
Abstract:
We propose a theory of the origins of India’s caste system by explicitly recognizing the productivity of women in complementing their husbands’ occupation-specific skill. The theory explains the core features of the caste system: its hereditary and hierarchical nature, and its insistence on endogamy (marriage only within castes). Endogamy is embraced by a group to minimize an externality that arises when group members marry outsiders. We demonstrate why the caste system embodies gender asymmetries in punishments for violations of endogamy and tolerates hypergamy (marrying up) more than hypogamy (marrying down). Our model also speaks to other aspects of caste, such as commensality restrictions and arranged/child marriages. We suggest that India’s caste system is so unique because the Brahmins sought to preserve and orally transmit the Hindu scriptures for over a millennium with no script. We show that economic considerations were of utmost importance in the emergence of the caste system.
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Climate, vocal folds, and tonal languages: Connecting the physiological and geographic dots
Caleb Everett, Damián Blasi & Seán Roberts
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 3 February 2015, Pages 1322–1327
Abstract:
We summarize a number of findings in laryngology demonstrating that perturbations of phonation, including increased jitter and shimmer, are associated with desiccated ambient air. We predict that, given the relative imprecision of vocal fold vibration in desiccated versus humid contexts, arid and cold ecologies should be less amenable, when contrasted to warm and humid ecologies, to the development of languages with phonemic tone, especially complex tone. This prediction is supported by data from two large independently coded databases representing 3,700+ languages. Languages with complex tonality have generally not developed in very cold or otherwise desiccated climates, in accordance with the physiologically based predictions. The predicted global geographic–linguistic association is shown to operate within continents, within major language families, and across language isolates. Our results offer evidence that human sound systems are influenced by environmental factors.
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Jesse Bockstedt, Cheryl Druehl & Anant Mishra
Journal of Operations Management, forthcoming
Abstract:
Innovation contests allow firms to harness specialized skills and services from globally dispersed participants for solutions to business problems. Such contests provide a rich setting for Operations Management (OM) scholars to explore problem solving in global labor markets as firms continue to unbundle their innovation value chains. In this study, we examine the implications of specific types of diversity in innovation contests on problem-solving effort and success. First, we conceptualize diversity among contestants in terms of national wealth (measured as Gross Domestic Product per capita (GDPP) adjusted for purchasing power parity) and national culture (measured using the culture dimensions of performance orientation and uncertainty avoidance) and examine how such factors influence problem-solving effort. Next, we examine how differences between contestants and contest holders in terms of the above factors influence contest outcomes. Using data from a popular online innovation contest platform and country-level archival data, we find that contestants from countries with lower levels of GDPP are more likely to exert greater problem-solving effort compared to other contestants. With regards to national culture, we find that performance orientation and uncertainty avoidance have positive and negative effects, respectively, each of which weakens with increasing levels of GDPP. Finally, our analysis provides evidence of homophily effects indicating that contestants who share greater similarities with the contest holder in terms of national wealth and national culture are more likely to be successful in a contest. We discuss the implications of the study's findings for contest holders and platform owners who organize innovation contests, and for emerging research on innovation contests.
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Shinobu Kitayama et al.
Psychological Science, February 2015, Pages 211-220
Abstract:
Expression of anger is associated with biological health risk (BHR) in Western cultures. However, recent evidence documenting culturally divergent functions of the expression of anger suggests that its link with BHR may be moderated by culture. To test this prediction, we examined large probability samples of both Japanese and Americans using multiple measures of BHR, including pro-inflammatory markers (interleukin-6 and C-reactive protein) and indices of cardiovascular malfunction (systolic blood pressure and ratio of total to HDL cholesterol). We found that the link between greater expression of anger and increased BHR was robust for Americans. As predicted, however, this association was diametrically reversed for Japanese, among whom greater expression of anger predicted reduced BHR. These patterns were unique to the expressive facet of anger and remained after we controlled for age, gender, health status, health behaviors, social status, and reported experience of negative emotions. Implications for sociocultural modulation of bio-physiological responses are discussed.
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Rate of language evolution is affected by population size
Lindell Bromham et al.
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, forthcoming
Abstract:
The effect of population size on patterns and rates of language evolution is controversial. Do languages with larger speaker populations change faster due to a greater capacity for innovation, or do smaller populations change faster due to more efficient diffusion of innovations? Do smaller populations suffer greater loss of language elements through founder effects or drift, or do languages with more speakers lose features due to a process of simplification? Revealing the influence of population size on the tempo and mode of language evolution not only will clarify underlying mechanisms of language change but also has practical implications for the way that language data are used to reconstruct the history of human cultures. Here, we provide, to our knowledge, the first empirical, statistically robust test of the influence of population size on rates of language evolution, controlling for the evolutionary history of the populations and formally comparing the fit of different models of language evolution. We compare rates of gain and loss of cognate words for basic vocabulary in Polynesian languages, an ideal test case with a well-defined history. We demonstrate that larger populations have higher rates of gain of new words whereas smaller populations have higher rates of word loss. These results show that demographic factors can influence rates of language evolution and that rates of gain and loss are affected differently. These findings are strikingly consistent with general predictions of evolutionary models.
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Kristina Holmqvist Gattario et al.
Psychology of Men & Masculinity, forthcoming
Abstract:
Previous research has suggested that men’s conformity to masculine norms (CMN) is an important correlate of men’s drive for muscularity. The present study aimed to further delineate the relationship between masculinity and men’s body image by examining various dimensions of CMN in relation to various dimensions of men’s body image (muscularity, leanness, and fitness) in a cross-national sample. Participants comprised young men from the United States (n = 192), the United Kingdom (n = 141), Australia (n = 160), and Sweden (n = 142). Multigroup path analyses showed that CMN was related to drive for muscularity, leanness, and fitness in all 4 countries, but there were differences across countries in which dimensions of CMN predicted men’s body image. Whereas conformity to the masculine norm of winning was a salient predictor across the 4 countries, conformity to the norm of risk-taking was linked to Australian men’s body image, and conformity to the norm of violence to British men’s body image. The findings support previous research suggesting that men’s endorsement of the male gender role plays a significant role in their desire for an ideal body, but the results uniquely document that this relationship may differ across countries.
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Capturing Culture: A New Method to Estimate Exogenous Cultural Effects Using Migrant Populations
Javier Polavieja
American Sociological Review, February 2015, Pages 166-191
Abstract:
We know that culture influences people’s behavior. Yet estimating the exact extent of this influence poses a formidable methodological challenge for the social sciences. This is because preferences and beliefs are endogenous, that is, they are shaped by individuals’ own experiences and affected by the same macro-structural conditions that constrain their actions. This study introduces a new method to overcome endogeneity problems in the estimation of cultural effects by using migrant populations. This innovative method uses imputed traits, generated from non-migrating equivalents observed at the country of origin, as instruments for immigrants’ own cultural traits measured at the country of destination. By construction, imputed traits are exogenous to immigrants’ host social environment. The predicted power of imputed traits over observed traits in instrumental-variable estimation captures the non-idiosyncratic component of preferences and beliefs that migrants and non-migrating equivalents share as members of the same national-origin group, that is, their culture. I use this innovative method to estimate the net exogenous impact of traditional values on female labor-force participation in Europe. I find that this impact is much larger than standard regression methods would suggest.
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Pierrick Gomez & Carlos Torelli
Journal of Consumer Psychology, forthcoming
Abstract:
This research examines how cultural mindsets cued by a salient identity can influence how consumers interpret seemingly benign nutrition information in foods. Results show that nutrition information can be incongruent with the cultural norm of food enjoyment distinctively associated with French (and not American) identity. This occurs because of a conflict between the motivation to enjoy foods activated by a salient French identity and the utilitarian nature of nutrition information in foods — that does not belong to a French-culture mindset. Three studies demonstrate that French (and not American) consumers with a salient cultural identity are more sensitive (i.e., perceive as riskier for their health) and evaluate more negatively foods that display (vs. not) nutrition information. Furthermore, this devaluation effect is mediated by anticipated feelings that the foods would not be enjoyable. Providing further evidence for the motivational inconsistency between the culturally-distinctive norm of food enjoyment cued by a salient French-culture mindset, French (and not American) consumers with a salient (vs. not) cultural identity experienced more disfluency when processing nutrition information in foods.