Cultured Shock
Cohort Succession Explains Most Change in Literary Culture
Ted Underwood et al.
Sociological Science, May 2022
Abstract:
Many aspects of behavior are guided by dispositions that are relatively durable once formed. Political opinions and phonology, for instance, change largely through cohort succession. But evidence for cohort effects has been scarce in artistic and intellectual history; researchers in those fields more commonly explain change as an immediate response to recent innovations and events. We test these conflicting theories of change in a corpus of 10,830 works of fiction from 1880 to 1999 and find that slightly more than half (54.7 percent) of the variance explained by time is explained better by an author's year of birth than by a book's year of publication. Writing practices do change across an author's career. But the pace of change declines steeply with age. This finding suggests that existing histories of literary culture have a large blind spot: the early experiences that form cohorts are pivotal but leave few traces in the historical record.
Communal expectations conflict with autonomy motives: The western drive for autonomy shapes women's negative responses to positive gender stereotypes
Devon Proudfoot & Aaron Kay
Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, forthcoming
Abstract:
Western culture idealizes an autonomous self - a self that strives for independence and freedom from the influence and control of others. We explored how the value placed on autonomy in Western culture intersects with the normative trait expectations experienced by men and women. While trait expectations placed on men (i.e., to be confident and assertive) affirm an autonomous sense of self, trait expectations placed on women (i.e., to be caring and understanding) conflict with an autonomous sense of self. We theorized that this conflict contributes to women's resentment toward positive gender stereotypes that emphasize women's interdependent qualities. Six preregistered studies (N = 2,094) demonstrated that U.S. women experienced more anger in response to positive-gendered trait expectations and less motivation to comply with them compared to U.S. men. We found that these effects were partially attributable to stereotypically feminine communal expectations affirming autonomy less than stereotypically masculine agentic expectations. Cross-cultural comparisons between the U.S. (a Western context) and India (a non-Western context) further indicated that the conflict between communal expectations placed on women and Western prioritization of autonomy contributes to U.S. women's anger toward positive gender stereotypes: Although traits expected of women in both the U.S. and India oriented women away from feeling autonomous more than traits expected of men, this diminished sense of being autonomous only elicited anger in a U.S. context. For Western societies, findings illuminate the uniquely frustrating nature of stereotyped expectations that demand interdependence and thus the unequal psychological burden placed on those who must contend with them.
A Golden Opportunity: The Gold Rush, Entrepreneurship and Culture
Michael Stuetzer et al.
Indiana University Working Paper, November 2021
Abstract:
We study the origins of entrepreneurship (culture) in the United States. For the analysis we make use of a quasi-natural experiment - the gold rush in the second part of the 19th century. We argue that the presence of gold attracted individuals with entrepreneurial personality traits. Due to a genetic founder effect and the formation of an entrepreneurship culture, we expect gold rush counties to have higher entrepreneurship rates. The analysis shows that gold rush counties indeed have higher entrepreneurship rates from 1910, when records began, until the present as well as a higher prevalence of entrepreneurial traits in the populace.
The Cultural Roots of Firm Entry, Exit, and Growth
Katharina Erhardt & Simon Haenni
Economic Journal, forthcoming
Abstract:
Can culture explain persistent differences in economic activity among individuals and across regions? A novel measure of cultural origin enables us to contrast entrepreneurial activity of individuals located in the same municipality but whose ancestors lived just on opposite sides of the Swiss language border in the 18th century. Individuals with ancestry from the German-speaking side create 20% more firms than those with ancestry from the French-speaking side. These differences persist over generations and independent of the predominant culture at the current location. Yet, founders' ancestry does not affect exit or growth of newly-founded firms, suggesting that preferences are pivotal.
Letting Old Data Speak: Local Cultural Traits in Qing China Grain Prices
Terry Cheung, Shaowen Luo & Kwok Ping Tsang
Virginia Tech Working Paper, May 2022
Abstract:
Detecting data manipulation in the Qing dynasty (1644-1912) reveals that such cheating behavior has persisted in modern China, for centuries. Qing prefectural officials were responsible for collecting and reporting local grain price data. We use the fact that grain prices are seasonal and grain price data cannot stay constant for a prolonged period as an indicator for Qing data manipulation. Using the instrumental variable approach, we find that Qing data quality reliably predicts data misreporting and exaggeration in modern China. We also identify areas where the persistence was higher: treaty port and coastal areas, affluent places where cheating leads to higher rewards.
Are you happy for me?: Responses to sharing good news in North America and East Asia
Harry Reis et al.
Journal of Social and Personal Relationships, forthcoming
Abstract:
Previous research has shown that enthusiastic responses to personal good news are associated with positive relationship qualities, whereas more muted or ambivalent responses tend to have negative effects on relationships. This process, called capitalization, has been studied almost exclusively in Western cultures. The present research examined capitalization in three East Asian cultural groups (Mainland China, Hong Kong, and Taiwan), as well as in the United States. Whereas enthusiastic responses were associated with positive relationship outcomes in all groups, muted and critical responses showed significant moderation by culture. In three North American samples, these responses were negatively associated with relationship qualities. However, muted and critical responses revealed strong and positive correlations with relationship outcomes in Mainland China, non-significant associations in Hong Kong, and significant negative (but still weaker than in North America) associations in Taiwan. These findings point to the importance of examining relationship processes in the context of culture.
Collectivist Cultures and the Emergence of Family Firms
Joseph Fan, Qiankun Gu & Xin Yu
Journal of Law and Economics, February 2022, Pages S293-S325
Abstract:
Using a sample of 1,103 Chinese private-sector firms that went public during 2004-16, we find that founders of firms from regions with stronger collectivist cultures engage more family members as managers, retain more ownership in the family, and share the controlling ownership with more family members. These findings are robust to a battery of diagnostic tests to account for alternative institutional factors that may induce the relationships. The results are consistent with the hypothesis that because the collectivist culture reduces information asymmetry, shirking problems, and associated monitoring costs among family members, more family ownership and management are expected in firms when founders are from collectivist regions. The overall evidence supports the theory of the firm pioneered by Harold Demsetz and his coauthors.
Conflicts and son preference: Micro-level evidence from 58 countries
Srinivas Goli et al.
Economics & Human Biology, forthcoming
Abstract:
Research on the association between armed conflict and son preference has largely been based on single-country studies, often presenting descriptive patterns. This paper empirically analyzes the association between conflict and son preference using a sample of more than 1.1 million individuals from 58 countries over the period 2003-2018. We empirically show that both the incidence and intensity of conflict exposure are associated with greater son preference. Moreover, conflict-exposed individuals are likely to realise their preference for sons, as reflected in the systematically higher prevalence of sons over daughters among these individuals. To explore the aggregate effects of these findings, we conduct a cross-country analysis of sex ratios and show that history of conflict exposure plays an important role in explaining the cross-country differences in sex ratios.
Culture Shapes the Distinctiveness of Posed and Spontaneous Facial Expressions of Anger and Disgust
Xia Fang et al.
Journal of Cross-Cultural Psychology, June 2022, Pages 471-487
Abstract:
There is a growing consensus that culture influences the perception of facial expressions of emotion. However, relatively few studies have examined whether and how culture shapes the production of emotional facial expressions. Drawing on prior work on cultural differences in communication styles, we tested the prediction that people from the Netherlands (a low-context culture) produce facial expressions that are more distinct across emotions compared to people from China (a high-context culture). Furthermore, we examined whether the degree of distinctiveness varies across posed and spontaneous expressions. Dutch and Chinese participants were instructed to either pose facial expressions of anger and disgust, or to share autobiographical events that elicited spontaneous expressions of anger or disgust. Using a supervised machine learning approach to categorize expressions based on the patterns of activated facial action units, we showed that both posed and spontaneous facial expressions of anger and disgust were more distinct when produced by Dutch compared to Chinese participants. Yet, the distinctiveness of posed and spontaneous expressions differed in their sources. The difference in the distinctiveness of posed expressions appears to be due to a larger array of facial expression prototypes for each emotion in Chinese culture than in Dutch culture. The difference in the distinctiveness of spontaneous expressions, however, appears to reflect the greater similarity of expressions of anger and disgust from the same Chinese individual than from the same Dutch individual. The implications of these findings are discussed in relation to cross-cultural emotion communication, including via cultural products.