Uncultured
The Cultural Construction of Self and Well-Being: A Tale of Two Cities
Victoria Plaut et al.
Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, forthcoming
Abstract:
Does local context (e.g., city of residence) matter for self and well-being? We theorized that it does because local contexts diverge in prevalent historically-derived ideas, norms, and products. Through historical analysis, studies of norms (tightness-looseness; Study 1) and cultural products (content analyses of newspaper headlines, venture capital firm websites, hospital websites; Studies 2-4), and studies assessing individuals' self and well-being (Studies 5-7), we compared Boston and San Francisco - similar cities on many metrics. We find that self and well-being are, in some important part, local. Reflecting themes of "old and established," Boston's history and cultural products emphasize tradition, status, and community, and social norms are relatively tight; accordingly feelings and selves are socially contingent. In contrast, reflecting themes of "new and free," San Francisco's history and cultural products emphasize unlimited possibility, egalitarianism, and innovation, and social norms are relatively loose; accordingly feelings and selves are relatively less contingent on others.
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Pop Internationalism: Has Half a Century of World Music Trade Displaced Local Culture?
Fernando Ferreira & Joel Waldfogel
Economic Journal, forthcoming
Abstract:
Advances in communication technologies have increased the availability of cultural goods across borders, raising concerns that cultural products from large economies will displace those in smaller economies. This paper provides stylised facts about global music consumption and trade since 1960 using a unique data on popular music charts corresponding to over 98% of the global music market. Contrary to growing fears about large-country dominance, our gravity estimates show a substantial bias toward domestic music that has, perhaps surprisingly, increased in the past decade. Moreover, we find no evidence that new communications channels reduce the consumption of domestic music.
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Driving Dangerously: Law, Culture and Driving Habits in Iran
Reza Banakar & Shahrad Nasrolahi Fard
British Journal of Middle Eastern Studies, Summer 2012, Pages 241-257
Abstract:
Iran has the highest rate of road traffic accidents (RTAs) worldwide. Iranian studies of the growing levels of RTAs are often conducted by medical doctors, who view them in light of the increase in the production and ownership of cars and the changed lifestyle of many Iranians, and discuss them in terms of pathology, morbidity and epidemiology. This article argues that although the high levels of RTAs in Iran are new and reflective of the changing character of Iranian society, the habit of reckless driving is not. Using open and semi-structured interviews, it explores how Iranians describe their driving habits and experience RTAs. Placing the results of the interviews in the historical context of Iranian society, the article goes on to examine driving as a form of behaviour with legal and cultural dimensions indicative of how Iranians interact with each other and with the normative structures of the legal system, the state and society to create a form of social order. Being mediated through the use of automobiles, driving habits also throw light on how Iranians relate themselves to an aspect of modern technology. Thus, this study will treat Iranians' driving habits as an empirical manifestation of one aspect of their legal culture, which is mediated through the technology of the automobile.
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Discerning Cultural Identification From a Thinly Sliced Behavioral Sample
Takeshi Hamamura & Liman Man Wai Li
Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, forthcoming
Abstract:
This research examined whether individual differences in cultural identification can be discerned at zero acquaintance. This issue was examined in Hong Kong, where the idiosyncrasy of cultural identification is a salient social-psychological issue. The participants were able to perceive accurately the targets' identification with Western culture from a video clip and from a still image. Findings also indicated that a stereotype of Western cultural identity (i.e., extraversion and particular hairstyle) facilitated these perceptions. Specifically, (a) the participants with a stronger stereotype were more accurate in perceiving Western cultural identification, (b) the targets who were experimentally manipulated to appear extraverted were rated as more strongly identifying with Western culture, and (c) the participants relatively unfamiliar with these stereotypes did not correctly perceive Western cultural identification. Implications of these findings on research on multiculturalism are also discussed.
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Current and Historical Antecedents of Individual Value Differences Across 195 Regions in Europe
Hester van Herk & Ype Poortinga
Journal of Cross-Cultural Psychology, November 2012, Pages 1229-1248
Abstract:
This study analyzes differences on two value dimensions, conservation and self-enhancement, at both the individual and regional level across Europe. Within-country regions represent "cultunits" that often have belonged to different nation-states in history. Eight antecedent variables are explored. At the regional level, the variables include historical sociopolitical context, recent sociopolitical context, regional affluence, and main religion of the region; at the individual level, they feature religiousness, education, gender, and age cohort. The largest effects for region are associated with Gross Domestic Product, including differences between former Communist and non-Communist regions. Hardly any effects pertain to more distant history. At the individual level, there are substantial differences across age cohorts and effects of education, religiosity, and gender. Interactions between region- and individual-level conditions suggest people's values are shaped in their youth; the largest differences mark cohorts in Central and Western Europe who were raised during the Cold War.
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Conscience and Context: Attitudes Toward Abortion in Mexico
John Tuman, Danielle Roth-Johnson & Ted Jelen
Social Science Quarterly, forthcoming
Objective: We seek to explain variation in attitudes toward legal abortion in Mexico, a nation in which the abortion issue has become quite salient.
Methods: Using data from the 2005 World Values Survey, we estimate an ordered logistic model to analyze the effects of different demographic and attitudinal variables on Mexican abortion attitudes.
Results: In general, the attitudinal and demographic predictors of abortion attitudes in Mexico are similar to those found in other Western democracies, such as the United States. In two areas, Mexican attitudes seem distinctive. First, contrary to expectations, opposition to legal abortion is not related to strong identification with the National Action Party (PAN), but support for legal abortion is positively related to strong support for the Democratic Revolutionary Party (PRD). Second, opposition to abortion is strongest among residents of the northern region, which we attribute to the region's proximity to the United States.
Conclusion: The effects of party identification and region on Mexican abortion attitudes provide distinctive national sources of abortion attitudes in Mexico. In other respects, the correlates of abortion attitudes closely resemble those of other nations.
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The foundations of Chinese attitudes towards advocating luxury spending
Hsiao Ping Peng & Ming Chung Chang
European Journal of the History of Economic Thought, September/October 2012, Pages 691-708
Abstract:
In China, some scholars have argued that luxury spending is socially beneficial to equalise wealth, under the assumption that the total endowment of resources is a fixed amount. This argument is not only consistent with Confucianism but also might point to another lesser known side of Confucianism that the luxury spending of the rich can be regarded as a wealth-transferring mechanism. Furthermore, luxury spending was encouraged for purposes of enjoyment; it did not involve the consideration of power and protection. This is in sharp contrast to the extravagance of the European nobility; their intention was to maintain a hierarchical structure.
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Huaitang Wang et al.
Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, forthcoming
Abstract:
Literature in cultural psychology suggests that compared with North Americans, East Asians prefer context-rich cultural products (e.g., paintings and photographs). The present article further examines the preferred amount of information in cultural products produced by East Asians and North Americans (Study 1: Society for Personality and Social Psychology conference posters; Study 2: government and university portal pages). The authors found that East Asians produced more information-rich products than did North Americans. Study 3 further examined people's information search speed when identifying target objects on mock webpages containing large amounts of information. The results indicated that East Asians were faster than North Americans in dealing with information on mock webpages with large amounts of information. Finally, the authors found that there were cultural differences as well as similarities in functional and aesthetic preferences regarding styles of information presentation. The interplay between cultural products and skills for accommodating to the cultural products is discussed.
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Junsheng Liu et al.
Journal of Research on Adolescence, September 2012, Pages 393-399
Abstract:
The market-oriented economic reform in China over the past two decades has resulted in considerable changes in social attitudes regarding youth's behaviors. This study examined the relations of shyness and aggression to adjustment in Chinese adolescents at different historical times. Participants came from two cohorts (1994 and 2008) of adolescents in Shanghai (N = 540 and 728, respectively; M age = 13 years), and data were obtained from multiple sources. Although aggression was associated with adjustment problems in both cohorts, there were significant cross-cohort differences in the relations between shyness and adjustment. In the 1994 cohort, shyness was positively associated with teacher-rated competence, leadership, and academic achievement. In the 2008 cohort, however, shyness was negatively associated with peer preference and positively associated with loneliness.
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The Organization of Firms across Countries
Nicholas Bloom, Raffaella Sadun & John Van Reenen
Quarterly Journal of Economics, forthcoming
Abstract:
We argue that social capital as proxied by trust increases aggregate productivity by affecting the organization of firms. To do this we collect new data on the decentralization of investment, hiring, production, and sales decisions from Corporate Headquarters to local plant managers in almost 4,000 firms in the United States, Europe, and Asia. We find that firms headquartered in high trust regions are significantly more likely to decentralize. To help identify causal effects, we look within multinational firms, and show that higher levels of bilateral trust between the multinational's country of origin and subsidiary's country of location increases decentralization, even after instrumenting trust using religious similarities between the countries. Finally, we show evidence suggesting that trust raises aggregate productivity by facilitating reallocation between firms and allowing more efficient firms to grow, as CEOs can decentralize more decisions.
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Lost in Translation? The Effect of Cultural Values on Mergers Around the World
Kenneth Ahern, Daniele Daminelli & Cesare Fracassi
Journal of Financial Economics, forthcoming
Abstract:
We find strong evidence that three key dimensions of national culture (trust, hierarchy, and individualism) affect merger volume and synergy gains. The volume of cross-border mergers is lower when countries are more culturally distant. In addition, greater cultural distance in trust and individualism leads to lower combined announcement returns. These findings are robust to year and country-level fixed effects, time-varying country-pair and deal-level variables, as well as instrumental variables for cultural differences based on genetic and somatic differences. The results are the first large-scale evidence that cultural differences have substantial impacts on multiple aspects of cross-border mergers.
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Cultural Variation in Implicit Mental Illness Stigma
Bobby Cheon & Joan Chiao
Journal of Cross-Cultural Psychology, October 2012, Pages 1058-1062
Abstract:
Culture shapes how individuals perceive and respond to others with mental illness. Prior studies have suggested that Asians and Asian Americans typically endorse greater stigma of mental illness compared to Westerners (White Europeans and Americans). However, whether these differences in stigma arise from cultural variations in automatic affective reactions or deliberative concerns of the appropriateness of one's reactions to mental illness remains unknown. Here we compared implicit and explicit attitudes toward mental illness among Asian and Caucasian Americans. Asian Americans showed stronger negative implicit attitudes toward mental illness relative to Caucasian Americans, suggesting that cultural variation in stigma of mental illness can be observed even when concerns regarding the validity and appropriateness of one's attitudes toward mental illness are minimized. Asian Americans also explicitly endorsed greater desire for social distance from mental illness relative to Caucasian Americans. These findings suggest that cultural variations in mental illness stigma may arise from cultural differences in automatic reactions to mental illness, though cultural variations in deliberative processing may further shape differences in these immediate reactions to mental illness.
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Psychopathic Traits in Females and Males across the Globe
Craig Neumann et al.
Behavioral Sciences & the Law, forthcoming
Abstract:
The current study examined the prevalence and structure of psychopathic traits in females and males using a very large world sample (N = 33,016, females = 19,183). Psychopathic traits were assessed with the Self-Report Psychopathy (SRP) scale, and structural equation modeling (SEM) was used to test the four-factor model of psychopathy (interpersonal, affective, lifestyle, antisocial) both in the total sample and in the separate samples of females and males. Multi-sample confirmatory factor analysis was used to test for invariance of model parameters across sex as well as across females from different world regions. Inferential statistics were used to examine how the mean-level average of the four SRP facets varied as a function of culture and sex. Finally, the SRP data were linked to objective world health data (e.g., mortality, fertility, gross domestic product) from relevant world regions. The results indicated good support for the four-factor model, as well as invariance across sex and reasonably good evidence of invariance across females from different world regions. Variation in the elevation of SRP facet scores across major world regions suggested that cultural factors moderated the expression of the level of psychopathic propensities and that these traits were strongly correlated with the world health data.
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Aging and Wisdom: Culture Matters
Igor Grossmann et al.
Psychological Science, forthcoming
Abstract:
People from different cultures vary in the ways they approach social conflicts, with Japanese being more motivated to maintain interpersonal harmony and avoid conflicts than Americans are. Such cultural differences have developmental consequences for reasoning about social conflict. In the study reported here, we interviewed random samples of Americans from the Midwest United States and Japanese from the larger Tokyo area about their reactions to stories of intergroup and interpersonal conflicts. Responses showed that wisdom (e.g., recognition of multiple perspectives, the limits of personal knowledge, and the importance of compromise) increased with increasing age among Americans, but older age was not associated with wiser responses among Japanese. Younger and middle-aged Japanese showed greater use of wise-reasoning strategies than younger and middle-aged Americans did. This cultural difference was weaker for older participants' reactions to interpersonal conflicts and was actually reversed for intergroup conflicts. This research has important implications for the study of aging, cultural psychology, and wisdom.
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Andrew Elliot et al.
Emotion, forthcoming
Abstract:
The authors examined avoidance personal goals as concurrent (Study 1) and longitudinal (Study 2) predictors of multiple aspects of well-being in the United States and Japan. In both studies, participants adopted more avoidance personal goals in Japan relative to the United States. Both studies also demonstrated that avoidance personal goals were significant negative predictors of the most relevant aspects of well-being in each culture. Specifically, avoidance personal goals were negative predictors of intrapersonal and eudaimonic well-being in the United States and were negative predictors of interpersonal and eudaimonic well-being in Japan. The findings clarify and extend puzzling findings from prior empirical work in this area, and raise provocative possibilities about the nature of avoidance goal pursuit.
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Social-Cognitive Processes in Preschoolers' Selective Trust: Three Cultures Compared
Amanda Lucas et al.
Developmental Psychology, forthcoming
Abstract:
Research on preschoolers' selective learning has mostly been conducted in English-speaking countries. We compared the performance of Turkish preschoolers (who are exposed to a language with evidential markers), Chinese preschoolers (known to be advanced in executive skills), and English preschoolers on an extended selective trust task (N = 144). We also measured children's executive function skills and their ability to attribute false belief. Overall we found a Turkish (rather than a Chinese) advantage in selective trust and a relationship between selective trust and false belief (rather than executive function). This is the 1st evidence that exposure to a language that obliges speakers to state the sources of their knowledge may sensitize preschoolers to informant reliability. It is also the first demonstration of an association between false belief and selective trust. Together these findings suggest that effective selective learning may progress alongside children's developing capacity to assess the knowledge of others.
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Timothy Church et al.
Journal of Cross-Cultural Psychology, November 2012, Pages 1268-1296
Abstract:
Cultural differences in implicit theories and self-perceptions of traitedness were examined in the United States (N = 198), Mexico (N = 257), the Philippines (N = 212), and Japan (N = 225). Participants in all four cultures endorsed beliefs about the longitudinal stability, cross-situational consistency, and predictive validity of traits. At the same time, Americans and Mexicans, more than Filipinos and Japanese, endorsed implicit trait or dispositionist perspectives and described their own behavior as traited or consistent (i.e., lower in self-monitoring). Alternative measurement formats were compared and led to the conclusion that forced-choice measures may be advantageous in some cases, particularly when acquiescence bias may impact cross-cultural comparisons. Cultural differences were observed in participants' perceptions of the individualism-collectivism, dialecticism, and tightness-looseness of their respective cultures and these measures partially mediated some of the cultural differences in traitedness. Overall, the results supported an integration of trait and cultural psychology perspectives, leading to a more comprehensive understanding of the relationship between culture and personality.
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Exploring the Cross-Cultural Generalizability and Scope of Morally Motivated Intolerance
Linda Skitka et al.
Social Psychological and Personality Science, forthcoming
Abstract:
Research conducted in Western cultural contexts has discovered that people are more intolerant of moral than demographic diversity, prefer greater social and physical distance from morally dissimilar others, and actively discriminate against those who do not share their moral attitudes. The goal of the current work was to test whether (a) these findings generalize across cultural contexts and (b) similar patterns would emerge with not only social but also political intolerance. Strength of moral conviction associated with participants' most important issue was associated with higher and similar levels of social intolerance of attitudinally dissimilar others in both China and the United States but was only related to political intolerance in China. These results demonstrate that moral mandate effects are not unique to highly individualized cultural contexts and reveal a possible boundary condition on the links between moral conviction and intolerance. Implications are discussed.
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Sujin Lee, Jeanne Brett & Ji Hyearn Park
Negotiation Journal, October 2012, Pages 429-452
Abstract:
East Asian cultures are widely held to be fairly homogeneous in that they highly value harmonious social relationships. We propose, however, that the focus (dyadic versus group) and the nature (emotional versus instrumental) of social relations vary among the Chinese, Japanese, and Korean cultures in ways that have important implications for the negotiation tactics typically employed by managers from these three cultures. Our data are from a web survey administered to three hundred eighty-eight managers from China, Japan, and South Korea. In this article, we discuss how the differences in the focus and the nature of business relationships in China, Japan, and Korea are manifested in the different norms for negotiation tactics endorsed by managers from these three countries.
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Effect of Academic Comparisons on the Subjective Well-Being of Chinese Secondary School Students
Yinghua Ye et al.
Social Behavior and Personality, September 2012, Pages 1233-1238
Abstract:
We studied the effect of academic comparisons on the subjective well-being (SWB) of 330 students from 3 Chinese secondary schools. The results showed that the SWB of Chinese secondary school students (a) is relatively low; (b) is affected primarily by 4 demographic factors, namely, grade, gender, academic achievements, and family financial background; and (c) is significantly affected by academic comparisons in that self-comparison, upward comparison, and parallel comparison have a positive impact on SWB, and downward comparison has a negative impact on SWB. Both parents and teachers should guide students to draw appropriate academic comparisons.