Way of Life
Cultural doorways in the barriers to development
Marcello D'Amato & Francesco Flaviano Russo
Journal of Economic Growth, March 2026, Pages 125-178
Abstract:
We develop novel indices of cultural similarity among ethnic groups derived from their oral traditions. We find that variation in these indices significantly affects currently observed pairwise disparities in income per capita, even after controlling for measures of geo-climatic, historical, religious, and linguistic barriers. We also propose an empirical exploration of the mechanisms linking folklore similarities to income differences. These findings lend support to the relevance of knowledge, information and technological transfers across people and societies in the diffusion of development.
Leader Choices Reflect Cultural Differences in Ideal Affect More During Organizational Growth Than Decline
Lucy Bencharit et al.
Emotion, forthcoming
Abstract:
What emotions do people prefer in their leaders, and do these emotional preferences vary depending on how their organizations are performing? In three studies conducted between 2018 and 2023 with European American, East Asian American, and Hong Kong Chinese participants, we predicted that people would choose leaders whose emotional expressions matched their culture's ideal affect (the affective states they value) more during growth, when conditions are favorable and people default to cultural ideals, than during decline, when conditions are unfavorable, and people are more open to other options. In Study 1 (N = 304), participants imagined that their own organizations were undergoing growth or decline and rated the emotions they would ideally like their leaders to have. In Studies 2 (N = 449) and 3 (N = 558), participants read hypothetical scenarios of student organizations undergoing growth and decline, and chose a leader among excited, calm, and neutral candidates. Across the studies, during growth, European Americans and East Asian Americans chose excited candidates more and calm candidates less than did Hong Kong Chinese, consistent with cultural differences in the valuation of high arousal positive affect. During decline, however, these cultural differences disappeared. Moreover, in Study 3, participants' ideal high arousal positive affect predicted their positive judgments of the excited candidate when conditions were favorable but not when they were unfavorable, suggesting one mechanism underlying these cultural differences in leader choice. Together, these studies suggest that people prefer leaders who express culturally ideal emotions more during organizational growth than decline.
Abstract core knowledge may shape the basins of cultural attraction: Romantic kissing as a case study
Hossein Samani & Ashley Thomas
Evolution and Human Behavior, March 2026
Abstract:
Romantic kissing is prevalent across human societies, yet far from universal -- a puzzling pattern given it also appears to have been invented independently across cultures. We consider the role of infant cognition -- specifically, abstract, early-emerging knowledge about social intimacy that forms part of "core knowledge." Drawing on theories of cultural attraction, we argue that the common knowledge that arises from this early-emerging knowledge shapes the "basins of attraction" for particular cultural practices. Using romantic kissing as a case study, we build on evidence that even infants interpret physical closeness and behaviors like saliva sharing as signals of intimate social relationships. When romantic love becomes personally or culturally salient, this abstract knowledge makes practices like romantic kissing intuitive to invent, learn, and maintain because they fit pre-existing expectations about how intimacy, more broadly construed, is displayed. We further suggest that variation in the prevalence of romantic kissing depends on the importance placed on romantic love within a culture. Our account provides a framework for understanding both the cross-cultural diversity and recurrent emergence of romantic kissing, and for theorizing about how universal cognitive representations may interact with local social and ecological factors to shape the emergence and form of cultural practices.
Settlers and norms
Joanne Haddad
Journal of Comparative Economics, forthcoming
Abstract:
The distinctive traits of early settlers at the initial stages of institutional development may be crucial for cultural formation. In 1973, cultural geographer Wilbur Zelinsky formalized this idea in his doctrine of "First Effective Settlement." I examine this doctrine and identify its short- and long-run implications for gender norms in the United States. To capture counties at early stages of cultural and institutional development, I focus on county creation events and proxy early settlers' gender norms using historical female labor force participation rates and women's financial rights in their places of origin. I document the distinctive characteristics of early settler populations and provide suggestive evidence of the transmission of gender norms across space and time. The results show that women's labor supply is higher, both in the short and long run, in United States counties that historically hosted larger foreign-born early settler populations from places with high female labor force participation. I provide evidence for four reinforcing mechanisms underlying this persistence: foundational influence during critical junctures, demographic dominance, intergenerational cultural transmission, and political dominance. Together, these findings shed new light on how immigrants' cultural endowments can have durable effects when introduced during critical junctures of institutional formation in host societies.
Do People Across the World Want to Remember Positive Ingroup Histories?
Fiona Kazarovytska et al.
Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, forthcoming
Abstract:
A key assumption in collective memory research is that group members are particularly inclined to preserve history that reinforces the ingroup's positive identity. Yet, this assumption lacks solid empirical support, as research has rarely measured the identity-protective potential of historical events considered important to remember. Theoretically, this support is essential because group members may engage with history for reasons other than benefiting their ingroup. We complement existing literature by systematically testing the identity-protective tenet using a bottom-up approach. After sampling a broad set of historical events, we assessed the identity-relevant characteristics attributed to the events and examined how these characteristics relate to group members' willingness to remember them. Across a preregistered study conducted in seven different national contexts (N = 2,045 participants; N = 7,665 ratings of 360 unique events), we found that events viewed as involving the ingroup in an agentic manner were considered important to remember in most countries. At the same time, we observed notable cross-national variation in the willingness to preserve events in which the ingroup caused positive consequences, behaved morally, or experienced threats, with a stronger tendency to remember ingroup-favoring history in less individualistic or less globally connected countries. We discuss how these findings bridge a crucial empirical gap by demonstrating that identity protection likely represents only one component of collective remembrance, whose importance appears to vary considerably across countries.
Culture, risk-taking, and public leadership: Evidence from Chinese villages
Justin Jihao Hong
Journal of Development Economics, April 2026
Abstract:
This paper shows the substantial impact of traditional culture on public leadership and governance, leveraging widely-held zodiac beliefs about risk-avoidance in rural China, which follow an exogenous 12-year cycle tied to a person's birth year. Using a representative village panel, I find that village heads in their zodiac years follow governance processes more and enhance villagers' perception about responsiveness. I also observe consistent expenditure changes, with higher public good spending and a comparable decline in administration spending that is prone to misuse. However, treated leaders are also less likely to promote policy innovation. These results can be most easily reconciled with a shift in village heads' risk-taking, which may yield a potential trade-off between accountability and public entrepreneurship.
It makes a village: Child care and prosociality
Alessandra Cassar et al.
Journal of Economic Growth, March 2026, Pages 41-76
Abstract:
We examine the relationship between allomaternal care (i.e., care for children by individuals other than the mother) and prosociality (reciprocity and altruism). Motivated by ethnographic evidence of a positive association between allomaternal care and societal trust across cultures, we design an economic experiment to measure the relationship between allomaternal care and cooperative behavior among 820 participants in small scale societies of the Solomon Islands. Our results show that receiving help with child care predicts higher levels of reciprocity towards the helper. This relationship remains robust for mothers even after accounting for participant fixed effects, for the nature of the relationship between mother and helper, and for other forms of mutual assistance. Moreover, help from non-relatives is associated with altruism toward strangers, suggesting a novel channel for the development of impersonal prosociality. Strengthening the case for the importance of allomaternal care for human development, we report suggestive evidence of potential socio-cognitive benefits to children who receive care from non-relatives (based on daylong recordings of 197 children analyzed using a multilingually-trained neural network), as well as societal-level benefits in terms of economic growth.
The cultural foundations of cooperation enforcement
Max Otto
Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization, April 2026
Abstract:
The human ability to maintain large-scale cooperation despite individual incentives for defection is as perplexing as it is universal. Although research has identified several mechanisms as potential solutions to this puzzle, empirical evidence robustly shows that societies rely on vastly different enforcement practices to achieve cooperative outcomes. The paper addresses this poorly understood phenomenon by developing a game-theoretical model that links cultural differences to incentives to utilize reputation, reciprocity, and revenge to elicit cooperative behavior. The model shows that reputational enforcement is favored by large temporal discounting, group-bound morality, and high degrees of dyadic reciprocity. In contrast, revenge is supported by honor beliefs and cultural long-term orientations, while being inhibited by a greater reliance on reciprocal relationships. A comprehensive empirical evaluation of these predictions across two global datasets spanning different historical periods provides strong support for the theory. The identified relationships are robust across preindustrial societies and a newly compiled dataset of contemporary sub-national regions, suggesting that the proposed framework captures general mechanisms underlying cross-cultural variation in cooperation enforcement.