How to behave
Heterogeneity of Long-History Migration Predicts Emotion Recognition Accuracy
Adrienne Wood, Magdalena Rychlowska & Paula Niedenthal
Emotion, forthcoming
Abstract:
Recent work (Rychlowska et al., 2015) demonstrated the power of a relatively new cultural dimension, historical heterogeneity, in predicting cultural differences in the endorsement of emotion expression norms. Historical heterogeneity describes the number of source countries that have contributed to a country’s present-day population over the last 500 years. People in cultures originating from a large number of source countries may have historically benefited from greater and clearer emotional expressivity, because they lacked a common language and well-established social norms. We therefore hypothesized that in addition to endorsing more expressive display rules, individuals from heterogeneous cultures will also produce facial expressions that are easier to recognize by people from other cultures. By reanalyzing cross-cultural emotion recognition data from 92 papers and 82 cultures, we show that emotion expressions of people from heterogeneous cultures are more easily recognized by observers from other cultures than are the expressions produced in homogeneous cultures. Heterogeneity influences expression recognition rates alongside the individualism-collectivism of the perceivers’ culture, as more individualistic cultures were more accurate in emotion judgments than collectivistic cultures. This work reveals the present-day behavioral consequences of long-term historical migration patterns and demonstrates the predictive power of historical heterogeneity.
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Suicidality, Economic Shocks, and Egalitarian Gender Norms
Aaron Reeves & David Stuckler
European Sociological Review, February 2016, Pages 39-53
Abstract:
Durkheim conceived of suicide as a product of social integration and regulation. Although the sociology of suicide has focused on the role of disintegration, to our knowledge, the interaction between integration and regulation has yet to be empirically evaluated. In this article we test whether more egalitarian gender norms, an important form of macro-regulation, protects men and women against suicidality during economic shocks. Using cross-national data covering 20 European Union countries from the years 1991 to 2011, including the recent economic crises in Europe, we first assessed the relation between unemployment and suicide. Then we evaluated potential effect modification using three measures of gender equality, the gender ratio in labour force participation, the gender pay gap, and women’s representation in parliament using multiple measures. We found no evidence of a significant, direct link between greater gender equality and suicide rates in either men or women. However, a greater degree of gender equality helped protect against suicidality associated with economic shocks. At relatively high levels of gender equality in Europe, such as those seen in Sweden and Austria, the relationship between rising unemployment rates and suicide in men disappeared altogether. Our findings suggest that more egalitarian forms of gender regulation may help buffer the suicidal consequences of economic shocks, especially in men.
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Popular Attitudes towards Markets and Democracy: Russia and United States Compared 25 Years Later
Maxim Boycko & Robert Shiller
NBER Working Paper, February 2016
Abstract:
We repeat a survey we did in the waning days of the Soviet Union (Shiller, Boycko and Korobov, AER 1991) comparing attitudes towards free markets between Moscow and New York. Additional survey questions, from Gibson Duch and Tedin (J. Politics 1992) are added to compare attitudes towards democracy. Two comparisons are made: between countries, and through time, to explore the existence of international differences in allegiance to democratic free-market institutions, and the stability of these differences. While we find some differences in attitudes towards markets across countries and through time, we do not find most of the differences large or significant. Our evidence does not support a common view that the Russian personality is fundamentally illiberal or non-democratic.
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Intrinsic honesty and the prevalence of rule violations across societies
Simon Gächter & Jonathan Schulz
Nature, forthcoming
Abstract:
Deception is common in nature and humans are no exception. Modern societies have created institutions to control cheating, but many situations remain where only intrinsic honesty keeps people from cheating and violating rules. Psychological, sociological and economic theories suggest causal pathways to explain how the prevalence of rule violations in people’s social environment, such as corruption, tax evasion or political fraud, can compromise individual intrinsic honesty. Here we present cross-societal experiments from 23 countries around the world that demonstrate a robust link between the prevalence of rule violations and intrinsic honesty. We developed an index of the ‘prevalence of rule violations’ (PRV) based on country-level data from the year 2003 of corruption, tax evasion and fraudulent politics. We measured intrinsic honesty in an anonymous die-rolling experiment. We conducted the experiments with 2,568 young participants (students) who, due to their young age in 2003, could not have influenced PRV in 2003. We find individual intrinsic honesty is stronger in the subject pools of low PRV countries than those of high PRV countries. The details of lying patterns support psychological theories of honesty. The results are consistent with theories of the cultural co-evolution of institutions and values, and show that weak institutions and cultural legacies that generate rule violations not only have direct adverse economic consequences, but might also impair individual intrinsic honesty that is crucial for the smooth functioning of society.
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Mohsen Joshanloo & Aaron Jarden
Personality and Individual Differences, May 2016, Pages 149–152
Abstract:
We hypothesize that hedonism (valuing pleasure) as a pathway to happiness is more strongly correlated with happiness in more individualistic (vs collectivistic) cultures. Multi-level modeling is used to test this hypothesis in a sample of 6899 individuals across 19 cultures, controlling for age, gender, and national economic prosperity. As predicted, we find that individualism moderates the relationship between hedonism and happiness, such that hedonism is more strongly related to happiness in more individualistic cultures. These results suggest that culture influences how happiness is most effectively pursued in various cultures.
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Dignity, face, and honor cultures: A study of negotiation strategy and outcomes in three cultures
Soroush Aslani et al.
Journal of Organizational Behavior, forthcoming
Abstract:
This study compares negotiation strategy and outcomes in countries illustrating dignity, face, and honor cultures. Hypotheses predict cultural differences in negotiators' aspirations, use of strategy, and outcomes based on the implications of differences in self-worth and social structures in dignity, face, and honor cultures. Data were from a face-to-face negotiation simulation; participants were intra-cultural samples from the USA (dignity), China (face), and Qatar (honor). The empirical results provide strong evidence for the predictions concerning the reliance on more competitive negotiation strategies in honor and face cultures relative to dignity cultures in this context of negotiating a new business relationship. The study makes two important theoretical contributions. First, it proposes how and why people in a previously understudied part of the world, that is, the Middle East, use negotiation strategy. Second, it addresses a conundrum in the East Asian literature on negotiation: the theory and research that emphasize the norms of harmony and cooperation in social interaction versus empirical evidence that negotiations in East Asia are highly competitive.
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Meina Liu, Lin Zhu & Ioana Cionea
Communication Research, forthcoming
Abstract:
This study examines whether and how intercultural negotiation dyads that vary in culture-role combinations experience different negotiation processes and outcomes. Participants completed an employment contract negotiation with a culturally different counterpart. Results indicated that high-status, high-power distance negotiators paired with low-status, low-power distance negotiators experienced more anger, placed less emphasis on cooperative goals, used less priority information exchange, and, consequently, gained less joint profits than high-status, low-power distance negotiators paired with low-status, high-power distance negotiators. Theoretical and practical implications of the study are discussed.
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Influence of Cultural Meaning System and Socioeconomic Change on Indecisiveness in Three Cultures
Liman Man Wai Li, Takahiko Masuda & Feng Jiang
Journal of Cross-Cultural Psychology, forthcoming
Abstract:
Psychologists have debated two external factors that influence human behaviors: current socioeconomic changes and historically shared cultural meaning systems. By conducting triangular comparisons among Hong Kong Chinese, mainland Chinese, and European Canadians, the current study examined whether these two factors differentially influence people’s indecisiveness. We found that (a) Hong Kong Chinese participants’ level of indecisiveness was highest, and there were no differences between the two other groups; (b) dialectical beliefs facilitated participants’ indecisiveness whereas optimism toward the future attenuated it across cultures and both factors explained cultural variations in indecisiveness; and (c) different from European Canadians’ optimism, optimism about the future promoted by perception of current rapid societal change made mainland Chinese more decisive. The importance of within-region analyses to disentangle varying factors in decision-making processes is discussed.
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Television exposure predicts body size ideals in rural Nicaragua
Lynda Boothroyd et al.
British Journal of Psychology, forthcoming
Abstract:
Internalization of a thin ideal has been posited as a key risk factor in the development of pathological eating attitudes. Cross-culturally, studies have found a preference for heavier bodies in populations with reduced access to visual media compared to Western populations. As yet, however, there has been little attempt to control for confounding variables in order to isolate the effects of media exposure from other cultural and ecological factors. Here, we examined preferences for female body size in relation to television consumption in Nicaraguan men and women, while controlling for the potential confounding effects of other aspects of Westernization and hunger. We included an urban sample, a sample from a village with established television access, and a sample from a nearby village with very limited television access. The highest BMI preferences were found in the village with least media access, while the lowest BMI preferences were found in the urban sample. Data from the rural sample with established television access were intermediate between the two. Amongst rural women in particular, greater television consumption was a stronger predictor of body weight preferences than acculturation, education, hunger, or income. We also found some evidence for television consumption increasing the likelihood of women seeking to lose weight, possibly via body shape preferences. Overall, these results strongly implicate television access in establishing risk factors for body image disturbances in populations newly gaining access to Western media.