Trad Culture
Speaking of gender: Language genderedness and its association with gender differences in personality across 48 languages
Roxana Hofmann & René Mõttus
Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, forthcoming
Abstract:
Previous studies have suggested that personality assessments can be influenced by the language people speak. Therefore, gendered ways of thinking, feeling, and behaving may be associated with gendered structures encoded in different languages. Here, we study the association between gender differences in personality traits as measured by the IPIP-NEO-120 (n = 755,307; representing 48 languages from 122 countries, with English being the language of assessment and therefore held constant) and the genderedness of languages as rated by experts, estimated by word-embedding models on large-scale text corpora from movie subtitles and Wikipedia, and rated by large language models such as ChatGPT-5.2, Gemini 2.5 Pro, and DeepSeek-V3.2. Consistent across all measures of language genderedness, more gendered languages were associated with stronger gender differences in personality traits compared to less gendered languages (r = .51–.59), suggesting that language might influence people’s self-concept in terms of their gender.
Household Finance at the Origin: Home Ownership as a Cultural Heritage from Agriculture
Guillaume Vuillemey
Journal of Financial and Quantitative Analysis, forthcoming
Abstract:
I show that home ownership decisions across countries and individuals are shaped by a cultural heritage from agriculture. For centuries, dominant assets in preindustrial economies were either land or cattle. Consequently, the type of farming prevailing locally shaped preferences and beliefs about the relative value of immovable and movable assets. This cultural heritage had long-lasting consequences. Today, individuals originating from societies with a history of crop agriculture -- where the dominant asset was land -- are more likely to be homeowners. For identification, I rely both on home ownership decisions of second-generation immigrants in the US and on an instrument.
Population for civilization: The aspiration for whiteness in (post)colonial Korea
Yeon-Hwa Lee
Social Problems, forthcoming
Abstract:
While postcolonial and race scholarship has extensively illuminated the cultural and epistemological domination of the West, less attention has been paid to how postcolonial subjects actively negotiated and rearticulated these dominant forms of knowledge. Mid-twentieth-century global family planning initiatives -- typically viewed through the lens of Western power and policy diffusion -- offer a particularly rich yet underexamined site for addressing this gap. South Korea’s early and proactive adoption of family planning in the 1960s, an unusual move among postcolonial nations, is examined here. Korea’s shift from pronatalism to antinatalism is understood not simply as a developmental or demographic decision, but as a racialized civilizational project -- driven by an aspiration to approximate Western ideals of modernity, civility, and rationality. Drawing on archival materials from the 1880s to the 1970s, attention is given to how Korean intellectuals first idealized Western low fertility rates during the colonial period and later rearticulated this logic in the postcolonial era through a rural–urban binary. By examining the entanglement of coloniality, local realities, and racialized civilizational discourse, it is shown that global narratives of reproduction and population gained traction in Korea through (post)colonial negotiation rather than simple diffusion.
When society feels broken: How perceptions of anomie shape donation tendencies across cultures
Fei Gao & Lan Xia
Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, July 2026
Abstract:
Across five studies, this research examines how perceived anomie, defined as individuals' perception of societal breakdown, influences donation tendencies and identifies the underlying psychological mechanisms and cultural conditions shaping this relationship. We distinguish between two dimensions of anomie: leadership anomie (perceived failure of government leadership) and moral anomie (perceived erosion of shared moral norms). Studies 1a and 1b (correlational, conducted in the U.S. (individualistic culture) and China (collectivistic culture) show that higher perceived leadership anomie is consistently associated with lower donation tendencies through reduced perceived personal responsibility and efficacy of contributions in both cultural contexts. In contrast, higher perceived moral anomie was associated with lower donation tendencies in China, and this association was mediated by reduced personal responsibility and efficacy; no such association was observed in the U.S. Studies 2 and 3 employed experiments to establish causality. Studies 2a and 2b manipulated perceived leadership anomie in China and the U.S., respectively, and showed that heightened perceptions reduced donation tendencies through diminished responsibility and efficacy. Study 3 manipulated perceived moral anomie and replicated the culturally contingent effect: donation tendencies declined in China but not in the U.S. Study 3 further demonstrated that this reduction in China was mediated by lower perceived personal responsibility and efficacy of contributions. This research contributes to the literature on anomie, prosociality, and moral psychology by demonstrating how perceived leadership and moral breakdowns shape helping behavior and by identifying culturally contingent mechanisms through which these effects occur.
Culture and social influence: Evidence from online reviews
Cayrua Chaves-Fonseca
Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization, May 2026
Abstract:
Research based on surveys and lab experiments indicates that people in more individualistic cultures are less likely to conform to the opinions of others. However, it remains unclear how well these findings generalize to real-world settings. This paper examines how culture shapes social influence in the context of online consumer reviews. By leveraging discontinuities in Tripadvisor’s display of average ratings, I estimate how reviewers from different countries respond to the average opinion of prior consumers. When a restaurant’s displayed average rating increases by 0.5 stars, reviewers from less individualistic cultures give ratings about 0.1 stars higher. This conformity effect declines with individualism and disappears entirely among reviewers from the most individualistic cultures. The pattern is not explained by differences in observable reviewer characteristics or by country-level socioeconomic factors correlated with individualism, such as income or religion. These findings highlight that cultural values shape user behavior on online review platforms and may ultimately affect the accuracy of the information these systems aggregate.
When Strong Social Norms Divide: The Paradoxical Role of Cultural Tightness–Looseness in the Polarity of Online Discourse
Peter Nguyen & Zhiyong Yang
Journal of Cross-Cultural Psychology, forthcoming
Abstract:
While online polarization has garnered significant global attention, the role of societal culture in shaping polarized discourse remains underexplored. This research examines how cultural tightness–looseness -- the extent to which social norms are strongly enforced and deviance is sanctioned -- influences the polarity of online discourse, conceptualized as divergence in expressed evaluations across users rather than individual extremity. Building on compensatory behavior theory, the authors propose that chronic normative constraint in tight cultures motivates compensatory expression in digital environments where monitoring and sanctions are weaker, producing greater dispersion in expressed evaluations. Across three large-scale field studies, tight (vs. loose) cultures exhibit systematically different levels of discourse polarity across reviews, Twitter microblogs, and The New York Times comment forums, at both national and U.S. state levels. Critically, this compensatory dynamic is context-dependent: cultural tightness amplifies discourse polarity in low-normative-salience domains (e.g., product and service evaluations) but constrains polarized expression in high-normative-salience domains (e.g., political discourse). These findings advance tightness–looseness theory by revealing its context-sensitive effects on expression, extend compensatory behavior theory to aggregate online discourse, and position societal norm strength as a macro-level driver of polarization in digital environments.
Can Italians Understand Spanish? Language Closeness Exacerbates the Illusion of Understanding
Ziyu Ren, Leigh Grant & Boaz Keysar
Psychological Science, May 2026, Pages 365-374
Abstract:
People often understand parts of languages that are closely related to their native tongue. But do they understand what the speaker intends to convey? We discovered that linguistic similarity induces an illusion of understanding, leading people to believe they understand more than they actually do. In Study 1, adult native Italian speakers overestimated their understanding of a speaker’s intent more when they listened to Spanish (close language) than to Northern Jiangsu Chinese (distant language). In Study 2, adult native Mandarin Chinese speakers overestimated their understanding more when they listened to Northern Jiangsu Chinese (close language) than to Spanish (distant language). When listening to the closer language, listeners were more confident, and this mediated their overestimation of understanding. An illusion of understanding, then, increases not despite language closeness but because of it. This has theoretical implications for the role of calibration in communication and practical implications for miscommunication in international settings.
Traditional beliefs matter in the marriage market: Evidence from zodiac compatibility in China
Lingwei Wu & Danyan Zha
Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization, June 2026
Abstract:
We examine the impact of traditional beliefs on spousal matching in China, focusing on the role of the zodiac compatibility system, which predicts a couple’s potential compatibility into three types: good, bad, and neutral. Using observational data from the population census, we document that couples with bad compatibility are significantly less prevalent than those with neutral compatibility, while good compatibility has an insignificant positive effect. To shed light on the mechanism, we use an incentivized online survey experiment to elicit individual-level evaluations of potential matches based on zodiac compatibility, where the findings are consistent with the observational analysis. Lastly, we also examine the cost of the culture, where the results show that individuals facing a “worse” marriage market regarding zodiac compatibility are more likely to remain single.