What it's like there
Do Linguistic Structures Affect Human Capital? The Case of Pronoun Drop
Horst Feldmann
Kyklos, February 2019, Pages 29-54
Abstract:
This paper empirically studies the human capital effects of grammatical rules that permit speakers to drop a personal pronoun when used as a subject of a sentence. By de‐emphasizing the significance of the individual, such languages may perpetuate ancient values and norms that give primacy to the collective, inducing governments and families to invest relatively little in education because education usually increases the individual's independence from both the state and the family and may thus reduce the individual's commitment to these institutions. Carrying out both an individual‐level and a country‐level analysis, the paper indeed finds negative effects of pronoun‐drop languages. The individual‐level analysis uses data on 114,894 individuals from 75 countries over 1999‐2014. It establishes that speakers of such languages have a lower probability of having completed secondary or tertiary education, compared with speakers of languages that do not allow pronoun drop. The country‐level analysis uses data from 101 countries over 1972‐2012. Consistent with the individual‐level analysis, it finds that countries where the dominant languages permit pronoun drop have lower secondary school enrollment rates. In both cases, the magnitude of the effect is substantial, particularly among females.
Relational mobility and cultural differences in analytic and holistic thinking
Alvaro San Martin, Joanna Schug & William Maddux
Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, forthcoming
Abstract:
We hypothesized that individuals in cultures typified by lower levels of relational mobility would tend to show more attention to the surrounding social and physical context (i.e., holistic vs. analytic thinking) compared with individuals in higher mobility cultural contexts. Six studies provided support for this idea. Studies 1a and 1b showed that differences in relational mobility in cultures as diverse as the U.S., Spain, Israel, Nigeria, and Morocco predicted patterns of dispositional bias as well as holistic (vs. analytic) attention. Study 2 demonstrated that, for Americans and Japanese, relational mobility offered better predictive validity of these cognitive tendencies than related cultural constructs; moreover, Studies 1b and 2 showed that relational mobility mediated cross-cultural differences in perception and attribution. Studies 3a and 3b showed that lower relational mobility induces a weaker sense of internal locus of control and a stronger sense of external locus of control, which led to more holistic (vs. analytic) cognition. Last, Study 4 replicated these results in an experimental setting and demonstrated the causal effect of relational mobility on analytic/holistic cognition. Overall, we suggest that relational mobility may be an important socioecological factor that can help explain robust cognitive differences observed across cultures.
TV or not TV? The impact of subtitling on English skills
Augusto Rupérez Micola et al.
Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization, forthcoming
Abstract:
We study the influence of television translation techniques on the worldwide distribution of English-speaking skills. We identify a large positive effect for subtitled original version broadcasts, as opposed to dubbed television, on English proficiency scores. We analyze the historical circumstances under which countries opted for one of the translation modes and use it to account for the possible endogeneity of the subtitling indicator. We disaggregate the results by type of skills and find that television works especially well for listening comprehension. Our paper suggests that governments could promote subtitling as a means to improve foreign language proficiency.
Open society fosters satisfaction: Explanation to why individualism associates with country level measures of satisfaction
Kuba Krys et al.
Journal of Positive Psychology, forthcoming
Abstract:
Although the association between individualism and satisfaction in societies is well documented, the precise mechanism linking these two remained understudied so far. Here we coin and describe the specific facet of individualism responsible for the above association – the ‘open society’. Open societies foster four others-benefitting attitudes: tolerance, trust, civic engagement, and minimization of materialistic pressure. In the others-benefitting qualities of these four attitudes, this paper finds the mechanism promoting life satisfaction of societies. Further, when open society attitudes are controlled for, the most common facet of individualism (quantified by Hofstede) turns out to be a negative predictor of satisfaction in societies. At the individual level of analysis, the relation of endorsement of four open society attitudes with individual life satisfaction is almost absent. Thus, open society promotes the satisfaction of communities in a eusocial way only.
Does Individualism Promote Gender Equality?
Lewis Davis & Claudia Williamson
Mississippi State University Working Paper, November 2018
Abstract:
We argue that individualism promotes gender equality. Individualist values of autonomy and self-determination transcend gender identities and serve to legitimize women’s goals and choices. In contrast, collectivist values may subordinate women’s personal goals to their social obligations, generating greater acceptance of gender inequality. Using individual level data from World Values Surveys, we find empirical support for our hypothesis. Individualism is significantly associated with support for gender equality in key domains of life, including employment, income, education, and political leadership. In addition, individualism is associated with greater levels of female employment, higher levels of female education attainment, and lower levels of total fertility. Using instrumental variable analysis, we find evidence that the exogenous portion of individualism reduces gender inequality and the gender division of labor. These effects are also economically large. Our results are robust to controlling for income, education, religion, historical plough usage, and country and time fixed effects. Our within country analysis allows us to isolate the impact of individualism from other confounding effects.
The cultural roots of free will beliefs: How Singaporean and U.S. children judge and explain possibilities for action in interpersonal contexts
Nadia Chernyak, Carissa Kang & Tamar Kushnir
Developmental Psychology, forthcoming
Abstract:
Making sense of human actions involves thinking about both endogenous influences (the internal mental states of agents) and exogenous influences (social, moral, and interpersonal constraints). Culture impacts how we weight the relative causal influence of these two influences. To examine these cultural influences in depth, we asked 147 4–11-year-olds in 3 cultural groups (Singaporean Chinese, Singaporean Malay, and U.S. Americans) about the possibility of acting on desires that go against social, moral, and interpersonal norms (i.e., “free will,” defined as the ability to do otherwise). By age 4, U.S. children were more likely to endorse the freedom to act against norms than Singaporean children, and these cultural differences were more prevalent at older ages. Children’s explanations mirrored between- and within-culture differences in causal beliefs about action: Both groups of Singaporean children referenced interdependent causes/consequences in their explanations than U.S. children, and Singaporean Malay children referenced more interdependent causes/consequences than Singaporean Chinese children. Singaporean children were more likely to elaborate on lack of free will by referencing punishment and/or having to seek permission from authorities, revealing a local cultural influence of growing up in an authoritarian society. These results underscore the critical role of culture in shaping how children understand mind, self, and action.
Culture and cannabinoid receptor gene polymorphism interact to influence the perception of happiness
Masahiro Matsunaga et al.
PLoS ONE, December 2018
Abstract:
Previous studies have shown that a cytosine (C) to thymine (T) single nucleotide polymorphism (SNP) of the human cannabinoid receptor 1 (CNR1) gene is associated with positive emotional processing. C allele carriers are more sensitive to positive emotional stimuli including happiness. The effects of several gene polymorphisms related to sensitivity to emotional stimuli, such as that in the serotonin transporter gene-linked polymorphic region (5HTTLPR), on emotional processing have been reported to differ among cultures – e.g., between those that are independent and interdependent. Thus, we postulated that the effects of the CNR1 genotype on happiness might differ among different cultures because the concept of happiness varies by culture. We recruited healthy male and female young adults in Japan, where favorable external circumstances determine the concept of happiness, and Canada, where the concept of happiness centers on positive inner feelings, and compared the effects of the CNR1 genotype on both subjective happiness levels (self-evaluation as being a happy person) and situation-specific happiness (happy feelings accompanying various positive events) by using a questionnaire. We found that the effect of CNR1 on subjective happiness was different between the Japanese and Canadian groups. The subjective happiness level was the highest in Japanese individuals with the CC genotype, whereas in Canadian participants, it was the highest in individuals with the TT genotype. Furthermore, the effects of CNR1 genotype on situation-specific happiness were also different between the groups. Happiness accompanied with being surrounded by happy people was the highest among Japanese individuals with the CC genotype, whereas among Canadian individuals, it was the highest in TT genotype carriers. These findings suggest that culture and CNR1 polymorphism interact to influence the perception of happiness.
Coping with unpleasant group memberships in Japan and Germany: Cultural differences in disidentification, confrontation and emotion regulation
Isabel Bierle, Julia Becker & Tomoko Ikegami European
Journal of Social Psychology, forthcoming
Abstract:
Disidentification, the psychological distancing from unpleasant group memberships, has mainly been studied in individualistic societies. We tested whether disidentification is a coping strategy to deal with conflicts in small and large groups, in Japan and Germany. Study 1 (N = 79) illustrates that Japanese recalled more unpleasant situations related to small than large groups. Study 2 (N = 198) confirms that Japanese, but not German students’ disidentification varied with group size and was stronger after small‐group conflict. Study 3 (N = 132) shows that anger was related to disidentification in Japan but to confrontation in Germany. Study 4 (N = 335) shows that, after group conflict, Japanese felt relieved when imagining to disidentify, whereas Germans felt relieved when imagining to confront the source of conflict. Combining correlational and experimental designs with culture‐sensitive situation sampling, we show that disidentification exists as a psychological construct across cultures, albeit serving different psychological functions.
The universal decay of collective memory and attention
Cristian Candia et al.
Nature Human Behaviour, January 2019, Pages 82–91
Abstract:
Collective memory and attention are sustained by two channels: oral communication (communicative memory) and the physical recording of information (cultural memory). Here, we use data on the citation of academic articles and patents, and on the online attention received by songs, movies and biographies, to describe the temporal decay of the attention received by cultural products. We show that, once we isolate the temporal dimension of the decay, the attention received by cultural products decays following a universal biexponential function. We explain this universality by proposing a mathematical model based on communicative and cultural memory, which fits the data better than previously proposed log-normal and exponential models. Our results reveal that biographies remain in our communicative memory the longest (20–30 years) and music the shortest (about 5.6 years). These findings show that the average attention received by cultural products decays following a universal biexponential function.