Cultural Narrative
Honor and The Performance of Roman State Identity
Vittorio Nicholas Galasso
Foreign Policy Analysis, April 2012, Pages 173-189
Abstract:
Are the personal identities of elite decision makers a domestic source of state identity? This article explores this question and reveals how state identity was produced in the Roman world system during the early Principate. The argument advanced proposes the Roman world was ensconced by a metavalue of honor that significantly shaped the personal identities of Rome's aristocratic decision-making classes. Competition for honor subsumed aristocratic life and shaped not only the personal identities of the elite, but also the persona of the Roman state. The Romans extrapolated their psychological framework, in which the stratification of domestic society rested on personal identities of honor, to their outlook on foreign policy. Akin to their domestic lives, those executing foreign policy conceptualized Rome as engaged in a status competition for honor with the polities existing its world system. Preserving and enhancing one's honor relative to others was fundamental in domestic life, and this was also the state's primary objective in relation to all others. The identity of the Roman state, therefore, was an aggressive status seeker.
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Deborah Cai, Edward Fink & Xiaoying Xie
Journal of Cross-Cultural Psychology, May 2012, Pages 592-613
Abstract:
This study investigates the role that culture plays in the effect of intimacy, relationship type, and resources on obligations. Participants (n = 144 U.S. undergraduates and n = 122 Chinese undergraduate and graduate students) were asked about their obligations to another person. Chinese, as compared to Americans, reported greater obligation and greater likelihood to expend money to help another. Americans reported greater intimacy with others and greater likelihood of expending time talking. Chinese are willing to "spare a dime" (i.e., help with money), whereas Americans are willing to "spare some time" (i.e., help with time). Americans exhibited a greater degree of transitivity, as assessed by the extent to which obligations to a person known directly are transferred to the person known indirectly.
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Tiffany Rinne, Daniel Steel & John Fairweather
Cross-Cultural Research, May 2012, Pages 91-108
Abstract:
Hofstede's value dimensions offer a measure of one component of culture (cultural values) and are a means of gaining greater understanding of the role culture plays in national innovation success. Hofstede's (1980) cultural measures of individualism, uncertainty avoidance, and power distance, for example, have been shown to be correlated to the number (per capita) of trademarks (Shane, 1993). Via multivariate multiple linear regression, we assess the link between Hofstede's measures of cultural values and innovation as measured by the Global Innovation Index (GII). Our analyses show a strong negative relationship between Hofstede's dimensions of power distance and GII innovation scores as well as a strong positive relationship between individualism and GII innovation scores. No relationship was found for Hofstede's measure of uncertainty avoidance.
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Chinese consumer ethnocentrism: A field experiment
Xiaogang Bi et al.
Journal of Consumer Behaviour, forthcoming
Abstract:
Consumer ethnocentrism presents barriers for internationalising organisations. In China, evidence of a resurgent nationalism partly fuelled by rapid economic growth portends a shift in consumption away from foreign towards domestic products. On the other hand, rising consumer demand for branded and luxury products cannot be fully met domestically. However, much of the available evidence on Chinese consumer ethnocentrism is anecdotal and is based on attitudinal surveys that, as accurate measures of actual purchasing behaviour, suffer from certain methodological issues. In response, we report an experiment that measures the ethnocentrism of 447 Chinese consumers as their incentive-compatible choices between foreign and domestic products in a field setting. Our findings show little effect of foreign origin on subjects' choices that were only weakly related with attitudinal measures including the commonly used consumer ethnocentric tendencies scale (CETSCALE). Our results question the existence of ethnocentric consumer behaviour in China and the use of CETSCALE to gauge it generally.
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Language Matters: Status Loss and Achieved Status Distinctions in Global Organizations
Tsedal Neeley
Organization Science, forthcoming
Abstract:
How workers experience and express status loss in organizations has received little scholarly attention. I conducted a qualitative study of a French high-tech company that had instituted English as a lingua franca, or common language, as a context for examining this question. Results indicate that nonnative English-speaking employees experienced status loss regardless of their English fluency level. Yet variability in their self-assessed fluency - an achieved status marker - was associated with differences in language performance anxiety and job insecurity in a nonlinear fashion: those who believed they had medium-level fluency were the most anxious compared with their low- and high-fluency coworkers. In almost all cases where fluency ratings differed, self-assessed rather than objective fluency determined how speakers explained their feelings and actions. Although nonnative speakers shared a common attitude of resentment and distrust toward their native English-speaking coworkers, their behavioral responses-assertion, inhibition, or learning - to encounters with native speakers differed based on their self-perceived fluencies. No status differences materialized among nonnative speakers as a function of diverse linguistic and national backgrounds. I discuss the theoretical and practical implications of these findings for status, achieved characteristics, and language in organizations.
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When the Transmission of Culture Is Child's Play
Mark Nielsen, Jessica Cucchiaro & Jumana Mohamedally
PLoS ONE, March 2012
Background: Humans frequently engage in arbitrary, conventional behavior whose primary purpose is to identify with cultural in-groups. The propensity for doing so is established early in human ontogeny as children become progressively enmeshed in their own cultural milieu. This is exemplified by their habitual replication of causally redundant actions shown to them by adults. Yet children seemingly ignore such actions shown to them by peers. How then does culture get transmitted intra-generationally? Here we suggest the answer might be ‘in play'.
Principal Findings: Using a diffusion chain design preschoolers first watched an adult retrieve a toy from a novel apparatus using a series of actions, some of which were obviously redundant. These children could then show another child how to open the apparatus, who in turn could show a third child. When the adult modeled the actions in a playful manner they were retained down to the third child at higher rates than when the adult seeded them in a functionally oriented way.
Conclusions: Our results draw attention to the possibility that play might serve a critical function in the transmission of human culture by providing a mechanism for arbitrary ideas to spread between children.
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Hugh Whitt & Grant Tietjen
Homicide Studies, May 2012, Pages 151-174
Abstract:
Contrary to what would be expected from Norbert Elias, whose theory of the civilizing process links criminal violence to impulsivity, data from the Comptes généraux de l'administration de la justice criminelle en France show that rates of homicide due to imprudence in controlling a horse or cart increased with modernization across départements early in the nineteenth century. Drawing on work by Elias and others, we suggest an interpretation based on traffic congestion and changes in the social construction of time as Western societies became more modernized and urbanized.
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Predicting Societal Corruption Across Time: Values, Wealth, or Institutions?
Seini O'Connor & Ronald Fischer
Journal of Cross-Cultural Psychology, May 2012, Pages 644-659
Abstract:
Across cultures, corruption is widely thought to be a destructive social phenomenon. Despite considerable efforts to understand its causes, there are still gaps in our understanding of how country corruption levels change over time. This study provides new insights by comparing the influence of societal values, wealth and political institutions on corruption for 59 countries from 1980 to 2008. Results suggest that self-expression societal values, wealth, and government size separate those countries that are less corrupt from those that are more corrupt. However, within countries, only increasing wealth is related to decreasing corruption, and this relationship varies across countries. This finding suggests that cross-sectional analyses provide an inadequate understanding of the dynamics of corruption over time; and that attempting to import institutions or impose values from low-corruption countries onto high-corruption countries is unlikely to be an effective short-term corruption-reduction strategy.
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Middle Eastern Impression-Management Communication
Rebecca Merkin
Cross-Cultural Research, May 2012, Pages 109-132
Abstract:
This study examines Israeli and Syrian impression management (facework), drawing on Hofstede's theory of cultural dimensions. Using a MANCOVA design while controlling for social desirability and gender, it measured the influence of country on direct, aggressive, competitive, and harmonious facework strategies from self-report questionnaires (n = 176) collected in Israel and Syria. Consistent with the hypotheses, Israelis exhibit more direct, aggressive, and competitive facework strategies than Syrians. Israeli facework strategies corresponded to cultural individualism and a low power distance, whereas Syrian facework corresponded to cultural collectivism and a high power distance. Contrary to expectation, Israeli facework is more harmonious. A unique contribution of the present study is the identification of changes in facework necessary for avoiding a loss of face among two populations whose previous diplomatic efforts have not succeeded.
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Income Comparisons Among Neighbours and Satisfaction in East and West Germany
Gundi Knies
Social Indicators Research, May 2012, Pages 471-489
Abstract:
A series of studies have suggested that changes in others' income may be perceived differently in post-transition and capitalist societies. This paper draws on the German Socio-economic Panel Study (SOEP) matched with micro-marketing indicators of population characteristics in very tightly drawn neighbourhoods to investigate whether reactions to changes in their neighbours' income divide the German nation. We find that the neighbourhood income effect for West Germany is negative (which is in line with the ‘relative income' hypothesis) and slightly more marked in neighbourhoods that may be assumed to be places where social interactions between neighbours take place. In contrast, the coefficients on neighbourhood income in East Germany are positive (which is consistent with the ‘signalling' hypothesis), but statistically not significant. This suggests not only that there is a divide between East and West Germany, but also that neighbours may not be a relevant comparison group in societies that have comparatively low levels of neighbouring.
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Body Dissatisfaction and Disordered Eating in Three Cultures: Argentina, Brazil, and the U.S.
Gordon Forbes et al.
Sex Roles, May 2012, Pages 677-694
Abstract:
Body dissatisfaction and associated attitudes were studied in 18-24 years old women from universities in Rosario, Santa Fe, Argentina (N = 118), João Pessoa, Paraíba, Brazil (N = 81), and mid-Atlantic U.S. (N = 102). Based on anecdotal reports, theoretical concerns, and empirical studies, we expected greater body dissatisfaction and negative body attitudes in our Argentine and Brazilian samples than in the U.S. sample. Body dissatisfaction was a significant problem in all samples, but we found few differences in levels of body dissatisfaction. The Argentine and Brazilian samples scored lower than the U.S. sample on measures associated with disordered eating, experienced less pressure to be thin, and were less likely to internalize the thin body ideal. Body shame was highest in the Brazilian sample and lowest in the Argentine sample. Cultural features in Argentina and Brazil that may offer some level of protection against the thin body ideal were discussed.
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Warwick Anderson
Current Anthropology, April 2012, Pages S95-S107
Abstract:
In the 1920s and 1930s, U.S. physical anthropologists imagined Hawai‘i as a racial laboratory, a controllable site for the study of race mixing and the effects of migration on bodily form. Gradually a more dynamic and historical understanding of human populations came to substitute for older classificatory and typological approaches in the colonial laboratory, leading to the creation of the field of human biology and challenges to scientific racism. Elite U.S. institutions and philanthropic foundations competed for the authority to define Pacific bodies and mentalities during this period. The emergent scientific validation of liberal Hawaiian attitudes toward human difference and race amalgamation or formation exerted considerable influence on biological anthropology after World War II, but ultimately it would fail in Hawai‘i to resist the incoming tide of continental U.S. racial thought and practice.
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Inferring the Emotions of Friends Versus Strangers: The Role of Culture and Self-Construal
Christine Ma-Kellams & Jim Blascovich
Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, forthcoming
Abstract:
Three studies examined cross-cultural differences in empathic accuracy (the ability to correctly infer another's emotional experience) within the context of different relationships. East-West cultural differences in self-construal were hypothesized to differentiate levels of empathic accuracy across relationship types. In contrast to the independent self prevalent among members of Western cultures, members of Eastern cultures generally view the self as interdependent with those with whom they have a relationship. Easterners, relative to Westerners, are more concerned with the thoughts or feelings of close others and less concerned with the thoughts or feelings of those with whom they have no relational link (i.e., strangers). Across three studies, the authors found that East Asians, compared with European Americans, made more accurate inferences regarding the emotions of close others (i.e., friends), but less accurate inferences regarding the emotions of strangers. Furthermore, individual differences in interdependent self-construal among East Asians predicted the degree of empathic accuracy.
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Anne Janssen & Christian Geiser
Journal of Cross-Cultural Psychology, May 2012, Pages 533-557
Abstract:
Cultural differences in performance and solution strategies on the Mental Rotations Test (MRT; Peters et al., 1995; Vandenberg & Kuse, 1978) and the Cube Comparison Test (CCT; Amthauer, Brocke, Liepmann, & Beauducel, 2001) were studied in 656 Cambodian and German students. Germans outperformed Cambodians on both the MRT (d = 1.57) and CCT (d = 0.99). The large differences could be explained by Cambodian participants being more prone to analytic strategies, whereas most Germans preferred a holistic strategy. Sex differences on the MRT in favor of males were found in both Cambodia (d = 0.37) and Germany (d = 0.87). On the CCT, sex differences with males outperforming females were only found for the German sample (d = 0.43). In both samples, more females preferred an analytic solution strategy, whereas more males tended to use a holistic strategy. We argue that the huge differences between nations can partly be attributed to differences in the mathematics curriculum.
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Young-Hoon Kim et al.
Emotion, forthcoming
Abstract:
Research in the past 2 decades has made great strides in understanding cross-cultural differences in the correlates and causes of subjective well-being. On the basis of past findings on the cross-cultural differences in temporal perspectives of the self, the present research examined a cross-cultural difference in individuals' subjective well-being as a function of how positively they viewed their present and past selves. Study 1 showed that both European and Asian Americans had higher subjective well-being when they viewed their present selves more positively. However, positive evaluations of the past self were accompanied by higher subjective well-being only among Asian Americans. Study 2 showed that when induced to think positively (vs. negatively) of the present self, both European and Asian Americans judged their current lives more favorably. However, when led to view the past self positively (vs. negatively), only Asian Americans made more favorable judgments about their current lives.
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Paul Christesen
Significance, April 2012, Pages 37-39
Abstract:
The date of the first-ever Olympic Games seems unimpeachable. But recent analysis shows that it is nothing more than a statistical approximation - one of the earliest ever made. The approximator - our proto-statistician - was Hippias of Elis. Before statisticians claim him as one of their own, they should know that he fudged his data.
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Christine Caldwell et al.
Journal of Comparative Psychology, forthcoming
Abstract:
It has been proposed that the uniqueness of human cumulative culture may be attributable to humans' greater orientation toward copying the process of behavior (imitation), as compared with the products (emulation), resulting in particularly high fidelity transmission. Following from previous work indicating that adult human participants can exhibit cumulative learning on the basis of product copying alone, we now investigate whether such learning involves high fidelity transmission. Eighty adult human (Homo sapiens) participants were presented with a task previously shown to elicit cumulative learning under experimental conditions, which involved building a tower from spaghetti and modeling clay. Each participant was shown two completed towers, ostensibly built by previous participants, but actually built to prespecified designs by the experimenter. This end state information was provided either in the form of photographs, or the presence of actual towers. High fidelity matching to these end states was apparent in both demonstration conditions, even for a design that was demonstrably suboptimal with regard to the goal of the task (maximizing tower height). We conclude that, although high fidelity transmission is likely to be implicated in cumulative culture, action copying is not always necessary for this to occur. Furthermore, since chimpanzees apparently copy behavioral processes and well as products, and also transmit behavior with high fidelity, the stark absence of unequivocal examples of cumulative culture in nonhumans may be attributable to factors other than imitative ability.
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Facial expressions of emotion are not culturally universal
Rachael Jack et al.
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, forthcoming
Abstract:
Since Darwin's seminal works, the universality of facial expressions of emotion has remained one of the longest standing debates in the biological and social sciences. Briefly stated, the universality hypothesis claims that all humans communicate six basic internal emotional states (happy, surprise, fear, disgust, anger, and sad) using the same facial movements by virtue of their biological and evolutionary origins [Susskind JM, et al. (2008) Nat Neurosci 11:843-850]. Here, we refute this assumed universality. Using a unique computer graphics platform that combines generative grammars [Chomsky N (1965) MIT Press, Cambridge, MA] with visual perception, we accessed the mind's eye of 30 Western and Eastern culture individuals and reconstructed their mental representations of the six basic facial expressions of emotion. Cross-cultural comparisons of the mental representations challenge universality on two separate counts. First, whereas Westerners represent each of the six basic emotions with a distinct set of facial movements common to the group, Easterners do not. Second, Easterners represent emotional intensity with distinctive dynamic eye activity. By refuting the long-standing universality hypothesis, our data highlight the powerful influence of culture on shaping basic behaviors once considered biologically hardwired. Consequently, our data open a unique nature-nurture debate across broad fields from evolutionary psychology and social neuroscience to social networking via digital avatars.
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Ashleigh Shelby Rosette et al.
Journal of Cross-Cultural Psychology, May 2012, Pages 628-643
Abstract:
This research examines the extent to which the email medium exacerbates the aggressiveness of opening offers made by negotiators from two distinct cultures. Hypotheses derived from negotiation, communication, and culture research predict that Hong Kong Chinese negotiators using email would exhibit a reactance effect and consequently engage in more aggressive opening offers and claim higher distributive outcomes than similar negotiators in the United States. Study 1 examines intercultural email negotiations and results indicate that Hong Kong Chinese negotiators made more aggressive opening offers and attained higher distributive outcomes than their U.S. counterparts. Study 2 results replicate Study 1 findings in an intracultural negotiation setting and also show favorable outcomes for Hong Kong email negotiators when compared to both Hong Kong and U.S. face-to-face negotiators. Overall, the findings suggest that Hong Kong Chinese and U.S. negotiators vary substantially in how they negotiate via email and face to face, which results in differences in distributive outcomes.
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Recognizing Leadership at a Distance: A Study of Leader Effectiveness Across Cultures
Peter Harms, Guohong Han & Huaiyu Chen
Journal of Leadership & Organizational Studies, May 2012, Pages 164-172
Abstract:
The present study investigated whether personality and leadership evaluations based on photographs of Chinese CEOs made by Western raters were accurate at predicting organizational outcomes. Consistent with implicit leadership prototypes held by Westerners, perceived effectiveness was associated with higher levels of perceived intelligence, dominance, and positivity. However, actual organization performance was associated with the culturally appropriate leadership trait of risk taking. These findings suggest that although it is possible to use perceptions of personality based on photographs to predict objective leader effectiveness, individuals using a leadership paradigm suited to Western cultures are poor judges of potential success in Eastern cultures.
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A study of surnames in China through isonymy
Yan Liu et al.
American Journal of Physical Anthropology, forthcoming
Abstract:
The isonymy structure of 1.28 billion people registered in China's National Citizen Identity Information System was studied at the provincial, prefectural, and county administrative division levels. The isonymy was 0.026 for China as a whole. The average value of isonymy was 0.033 for the 30 provinces, 0.035 for the 334 prefectures, and 0.040 for the 2811 counties. The isonymy in China was much higher than in other countries. This finding may be partly explained by the low number of surnames in the Chinese language. Two regional features can be identified from the geographic distributions of isonymy. One feature is that the middle and lower reaches of the Yangtze River had the lowest values of isonymy at both the provincial and county levels. The second feature is that most counties with the highest values of isonymy were distributed in the provinces with high proportions of ethnic minorities. According to the dendrogram of surname distances, several clusters could be identified. Most provinces in a cluster were conterminous with one another. The one exception could be explained by demic migration called "braving the journey to the northeast of China." Isolation by distance could be detected because the correlation coefficients between Nei's distance and the geographic distances at the provincial, prefectural, and county levels were 0.64, 0.43, and 0.37, respectively. Human behaviors in Chinese history that may have caused these results have been discussed, including cultural origin, migration, residential patterns, and ethnic distribution.
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Toshie Imada
Journal of Cross-Cultural Psychology, May 2012, Pages 576-591
Abstract:
Besides teaching academic knowledge and skills, imparting cultural values and behavioral standard is also an important function of formal education. The present work examines stories sampled from American and Japanese school textbooks (Ns = 72 and 71, respectively) for their cultural values and characteristics. The study found that the stories in American textbooks highlighted themes of individualism such as self-direction and achievement, whereas the Japanese counterparts highlighted themes of collectivism such as conformity and group harmony. The study also found cultural differences in story characteristics (e.g., the narrator, attribution of the outcome, picture content) that are also related to individualism and collectivism. Implications and future directions are discussed.
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Effects of Culture on Musical Pitch Perception
Patrick Wong et al.
PLoS ONE, April 2012
Abstract:
The strong association between music and speech has been supported by recent research focusing on musicians' superior abilities in second language learning and neural encoding of foreign speech sounds. However, evidence for a double association - the influence of linguistic background on music pitch processing and disorders - remains elusive. Because languages differ in their usage of elements (e.g., pitch) that are also essential for music, a unique opportunity for examining such language-to-music associations comes from a cross-cultural (linguistic) comparison of congenital amusia, a neurogenetic disorder affecting the music (pitch and rhythm) processing of about 5% of the Western population. In the present study, two populations (Hong Kong and Canada) were compared. One spoke a tone language in which differences in voice pitch correspond to differences in word meaning (in Hong Kong Cantonese, /si/ means ‘teacher' and ‘to try' when spoken in a high and mid pitch pattern, respectively). Using the On-line Identification Test of Congenital Amusia, we found Cantonese speakers as a group tend to show enhanced pitch perception ability compared to speakers of Canadian French and English (non-tone languages). This enhanced ability occurs in the absence of differences in rhythmic perception and persists even after relevant factors such as musical background and age were controlled. Following a common definition of amusia (5% of the population), we found Hong Kong pitch amusics also show enhanced pitch abilities relative to their Canadian counterparts. These findings not only provide critical evidence for a double association of music and speech, but also argue for the reconceptualization of communicative disorders within a cultural framework. Along with recent studies documenting cultural differences in visual perception, our auditory evidence challenges the common assumption of universality of basic mental processes and speaks to the domain generality of culture-to-perception influences.