Culture War
A theory of cultural continuity: Heritage culture retention as an important psychological motivation
Cory Cobb, Seth Schwartz & Charles Martinez
Psychological Review, forthcoming
Abstract:
In this article, we advance the thesis, called the cultural continuity hypothesis, which states that heritage culture retention represents an important psychological motivation that underlies a wide array of human behaviors and that is important for positive psychosocial functioning. Cultural continuity entails the purposeful preservation of salient features of one’s heritage culture across time and is both functional and adaptive. By integrating diverse bodies of literature across disciplines, we provide robust evidence for consistent and universal value attached to the goals that serve to satisfy the need for cultural continuity and that these goals are present from an early age. We also provide robust evidence that the successful attainment of goals related to satisfying the need for cultural continuity is important for psychosocial health and well-being. We conclude by providing explicit criteria that would subject the cultural continuity hypothesis to rigorous empirical tests, followed by future directions for heritage culture retention research. Cultural continuity appears to be an important psychological motivation that transcends populations and contexts and that is important for positive human functioning.
Culture and Immigrant Selectivity in Shaping Asian American Education: Evidence from Historical Census Data
ChangHwan Kim
American Sociological Review, forthcoming
Abstract:
Asian Americans, even those from lower socioeconomic backgrounds, achieve extraordinary educational outcomes, defying the expectations of the well-established status attainment theory that family background is strongly associated with educational attainments. This phenomenon is known as the Asian American Achievement Paradox (AAAP). Positive selectivity of Asian immigrants and cultural accounts are two competing explanations, but they are rarely disentangled empirically due to the high collinearity between immigrant selectivity and culture. This study offers a modified version of cultural explanations, clarifies the distinctions between competing explanations based on the same criteria, and tests them by investigating the educational achievements of second-generation Asian Americans using the full-count 1940 Census matched to the 1930 Census. During this period, Asian immigrants were not hyper-selected, so the entanglement of immigrant selectivity and culture is less of a concern. The results are largely consistent with the cultural explanation, revealing the AAAP to be a century-old phenomenon with a previously unknown complexity. The transmission of culture from the society of origin is further evident in that the AAAP is limited to East Asians and does not apply to Filipino Americans, even though contextual selectivity in education is similar across Asian ethnic groups in 1940.
Slavery and collectivism in the postbellum American South
Yeonha Jung
Journal of Comparative Economics, forthcoming
Abstract:
The deep marks of American slavery extend to cultural traits. This study suggests that historical slave concentration was followed by more collectivist cultures, with this relationship becoming evident after Reconstruction. Our proposed mechanism rests on the interaction between slavery and subsequent institutional changes: historical prevalence of slavery led to a stronger implementation of post-Reconstruction policies aimed at restoring the racial hierarchy, contributing to the reinforcement of group identity and collectivism. County-level evidence supports this hypothesis. Using the share of uncommon names as a proxy for individualism-collectivism, we show that the relationship between slavery and collectivism emerged after Reconstruction. Beyond the temporal coincidence, we present a case study on anti-enticement laws to investigate the institutional mechanism of this cultural shift. The cultural legacy of slavery persists to this day, as evidenced by survey-based outcomes and measures of civic engagement.
Positive risk taking across the world
Natasha Duell et al.
Journal of Research on Adolescence, June 2025
Abstract:
Around the world, adolescence is characterized by increased risk taking. Much research has focused on negative risk taking, but there is growing recognition of positive risk taking, which can benefit adolescent development. So far, research on positive risk taking has been limited to Western samples. This study examined a self-report scale of positive risk taking with a sample of 962 adolescents (Mage = 18.51 years) from nine diverse countries: China, Colombia, Italy, Jordan, Kenya, the Philippines, Sweden, Thailand, and the United States of America. There were three aims: (1) Examine the measurement invariance of positive risk taking across countries, (2) examine whether positive and negative risk taking are distinct constructs, and (3) compare positive risk taking endorsement and perceptions of its safety and benefits across countries and sex. Results indicated that the 14-item positive risk-taking scale was invariant across all nine countries. Evidence also suggested that positive and negative risk taking were distinct constructs. Endorsement of positive risk taking varied significantly across all countries, with adolescents from China and Jordan exhibiting the lowest endorsement. Although positive risk taking was generally perceived as safe and beneficial, adolescents from Asian countries perceived positive risk taking to be less safe and beneficial than their peers from other countries. Together, findings from this study offer evidence of a promising positive risk-taking measure for cross-national use. Future research directions for identifying cultural factors that can help explain cross-national differences in positive risk taking are discussed.
Social Class, Control, and Culture: Individuals with Low Socioeconomic Status Perceive Less Control in Relationally Immobile Societies
Kuan-Ju Huang
Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, forthcoming
Abstract:
Studies have shown that individuals with high socioeconomic status (SES) perceive a greater sense of control than those with lower SES. However, no studies have examined how sociocultural contexts affect perceived control of individuals from different SES backgrounds. Studies 1 and 2 found that the association between SES and sense of control was stronger in countries with low relational mobility (e.g. East Asia, the Middle East, and North Africa) compared to those with high relational mobility (e.g. Latin America), largely due to lower perceived control among low-SES individuals in immobile societies. Study 3 demonstrated that self-reported relational mobility mediated the cross-country differences in SES-control associations. Study 4 experimentally manipulated relational mobility to establish its causal effect on the SES-control association. These findings suggest that social environments that afford less-flexible social networks exacerbate SES disparities in perceived control and highlight how social ecology may disproportionately impact individuals with lower SES.
Making Sense of Honor Killings
Ozan Aksoy & Aron Szekely
American Sociological Review, forthcoming
Abstract:
Honor killings, which occur when women are perceived to have broken purity norms and bring “dishonor” to their family, pose profound moral and societal problems and underrecognized sociological puzzles. Given the immense cost, why do families murder their own daughter, niece, or cousin? Conversely, given the tragic consequences, why are norms broken in the first place? Drawing on accounts of honor killings, we characterize the key actors, actions, and incentives, and develop two interlinked theoretical models, one on norm-enforcement and another on norm-breaking. The former specifies the conditions under which honor norms should hold, the latter, counterintuitively, predicts that honor killings occur most frequently when honor norms are contested; not when they are strictest. Analyzing data from 24 countries and ~26,000 individuals and building a unique dataset of honor killings from Turkey, we find support for the hypotheses. Honor norms are stronger when laws offer leniency for honor killings, families’ loss of reputation is more consequential, and community cohesion is higher. Actual killings have an inverse-U-shaped link with the prevalence of honor norms. Our work advances the theoretical understanding of honor norms and killings and offers one of the most comprehensive empirical analyses of the factors influencing honor killings.
Cultural identity as worldviews: A natural experiment with Maya adolescents before and after community adoption of digital communication
Adriana Maria Manago, Maria Margarita Perez de la Torre & Mariano Crisóforo de la Torre Sánchez
Developmental Psychology, forthcoming
Abstract:
The spread of digital communication around the globe has raised questions about the nature of digitally mediated cultural identity and how worldviews are constructed in the context of permeable and dynamic communities less tethered to physical geography. To expand research on the impacts of digital communication on cultural identity development among adolescents in the Majority World, the present study compared the worldviews of indigenous Maya adolescents before and after the Internet and mobile devices became widely used in their community. Adolescents were interviewed in 2009 (N = 80; 40 girls, Mage = 16.94) and in 2018 (N = 79; 44 girls, Mage = 15.91) using eight vignettes that were developed from ethnographic work in the community and designed to elicit participants’ cultural beliefs and values. In each story, one character articulates a traditional, collectivistic worldview, and another articulates a Western, individualistic worldview present in the community. Participants were asked who they agreed with and why, and responses were analyzed quantitatively (pattern of character endorsements) and qualitatively (frameworks of meaning). Analysis of covariance showed no differences in character endorsements across the two cohorts. Schooling, not the use of mobile devices or social media, uniquely predicted alignment with individualistic characters in regression analyses. Although individualistic values did not increase, qualitative analyses of frameworks of meaning showed that adolescents in the two cohorts differed in how they integrated individualistic and collectivistic perspectives. The study demonstrates the importance of locally relevant mixed methods for understanding changes in the contents of cultural identity over historical time.
‘Cubs of Wall Street’: Cocaine Use in Top-Boy Culture
Rikke Tokle & Willy Pedersen
British Journal of Sociology, forthcoming
Abstract:
Although cocaine use is rising among youth in many countries, little is known about the social context and its influence on this new pattern of use. Drawing on a theoretical framework of class, gender, and peer-status dynamics and extensive data from personal interviews, we investigate how cocaine use is culturally situated and socially organised in certain Norwegian high school cultures. The focal sample consists of study participants who stated that they had used cocaine. They totalled 32 persons, of whom 28 were boys. We identify four key cultural characteristics linked to cocaine use: (i) affluence: users often had backgrounds rich in economic capital; (ii) a party-centred culture: cocaine was introduced in contexts with excessive partying and binge drinking; (iii) top-level networks: cocaine use was linked to exclusive social networks, based in Norwegian high school graduation celebrations; and (iv) masculinity: boys used more cocaine than girls, to boost their energy and self-confidence. We conclude that the key driver of cocaine use is a structurally determined socialisation pattern, which we theorise as a ‘top-boy’ culture. This culture is anchored in status-seeking elite school milieus characterised by affluence, heavy partying, and exclusive homosocial networks. Boys invested in this culture may engage in cocaine use to signal membership and to mimic the hallmark of ‘ease’, in accordance with a rather orthodox type of masculinity. Whereas youth cultures often represent pockets of resistance to traditional hierarchies, this culture instead seems to strengthen such established hierarchical arrangements.
A century of art dealing in New York. The rise of American art
Federico Etro & Elena Stepanova
Economic History Review, forthcoming
Abstract:
We study art trade in New York between 1870 and 1970, analysing returns on investment by the renowned Knoedler gallery to shed light on the evolution of the American art market. A generalist art gallery should allocate investments to equalize expected returns, with differences in effective returns depending on purchase prices, number of traded works per artists, search costs, and shocks. We confirm these principles, finding that returns were higher for cheaper artworks, by more frequently traded artists, in stock for a shorter time, after solo exhibitions for the authors, or during booms and after the death of the artists. A key interest in the story of New York's leading gallery is in its connection with the history of American art over a crucial century. We find that the returns on European old masters follow an inverse U-shape, peaking during the First World War and declining thereafter, whilst the returns on American modern artists increase consistently throughout the century. This pattern aligns with a shift in demand towards American art that began in the 1920s and was instrumental in promoting the innovations of the New York school from Abstract Expressionism to Pop Art.