Indigenous
Tightness–looseness across the 50 United States
Jesse Harrington & Michele Gelfand
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 3 June 2014, Pages 7990–7995
Abstract:
This research demonstrates wide variation in tightness–looseness (the strength of punishment and degree of latitude/permissiveness) at the state level in the United States, as well as its association with a variety of ecological and historical factors, psychological characteristics, and state-level outcomes. Consistent with theory and past research, ecological and man-made threats — such as a higher incidence of natural disasters, greater disease prevalence, fewer natural resources, and greater degree of external threat — predicted increased tightness at the state level. Tightness is also associated with higher trait conscientiousness and lower trait openness, as well as a wide array of outcomes at the state level. Compared with loose states, tight states have higher levels of social stability, including lowered drug and alcohol use, lower rates of homelessness, and lower social disorganization. However, tight states also have higher incarceration rates, greater discrimination and inequality, lower creativity, and lower happiness relative to loose states. In all, tightness–looseness provides a parsimonious explanation of the wide variation we see across the 50 states of the United States of America.
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Large-Scale Psychological Differences Within China Explained by Rice Versus Wheat Agriculture
T. Talhelm et al.
Science, 9 May 2014, Pages 603-608
Abstract:
Cross-cultural psychologists have mostly contrasted East Asia with the West. However, this study shows that there are major psychological differences within China. We propose that a history of farming rice makes cultures more interdependent, whereas farming wheat makes cultures more independent, and these agricultural legacies continue to affect people in the modern world. We tested 1162 Han Chinese participants in six sites and found that rice-growing southern China is more interdependent and holistic-thinking than the wheat-growing north. To control for confounds like climate, we tested people from neighboring counties along the rice-wheat border and found differences that were just as large. We also find that modernization and pathogen prevalence theories do not fit the data.
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Why Is Polygyny More Prevalent in Western Africa? An African Slave Trade Perspective
John Dalton & Tin Cheuk Leung
Economic Development and Cultural Change, July 2014, Pages 599-632
Abstract:
Polygyny rates are higher in western Africa than in eastern Africa. The African slave trades help explain this difference. More male slaves were exported in the transatlantic slave trades from western Africa, while more female slaves were exported in the Indian Ocean slave trades from eastern Africa. The slave trades led to prolonged periods of abnormal sex ratios, which affected the rates of polygyny across Africa. In order to assess these claims, we present evidence from a variety of sources. We find that the transatlantic slave trades have a positive correlation with historical levels of polygyny across African ethnic groups. We also construct an ethnic group level data set linking current rates of polygyny with historical trade flow data from the transatlantic and Indian Ocean slave trades. We find that the transatlantic slave trades cause polygyny at the ethnic group level, while the Indian Ocean slave trades do not. We provide cross-country evidence corroborating our findings.
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Jennifer Pooler & Stacy Gleason
Journal of Nutrition Education and Behavior, May–June 2014, Pages S45–S52
Objective: To assess Special Supplemental Nutrition Program for Women, Infants, and Children (WIC) benefit use across Arab American, Hispanic, and non-Arab/non-Hispanic families participating in the Michigan WIC program using point-of-sale Electronic Benefits Transfer data.
Results: About 12% of WIC families fully redeemed their benefits in March, 2012. Compared with non-Arab/non-Hispanic families, Arab American WIC families were significantly more likely to use all of their monthly WIC benefits, even after controlling for family characteristics (adjusted odds ratio, 3.6; 95% confidence interval, 3.4–3.8). Rates of redemption for Hispanic families, however, were the same as for non-Arab/non-Hispanic families (adjusted odds ratio, 1.0; 95% confidence interval, 0.9–1.0).
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Development of Cultural Perspectives on Verbal Deception in Competitive Contexts
Dana Dmytro et al.
Journal of Cross-Cultural Psychology, forthcoming
Abstract:
Verbal deception may be considered morally reprehensible or acceptable depending on culturally relevant contextual factors and ethical perspectives. In the current study, Euro-Canadian (n = 180) and Han Chinese (n = 180) children ages 8 to 16 were recruited to investigate their moral evaluations of lying and truth-telling in competitive situations. The participants classified a story character’s statement told to either harm or help themselves or collectives of various group sizes (i.e., their class, school, or country) as a lie, the truth, or something else. Participants then made moral judgments regarding the statements and provided justifications for their evaluations. Chinese children’s evaluations became more nuanced with age: They evaluated lies told to benefit a collective as less negative than Canadian children, and truths told to harm a collective as more negative. These evaluations became more pronounced with the increasing size of the collectivity. Cultural and contextual factors relevant to evaluations and justifications of verbal deception are discussed.
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Johan Mackenbach
Health & Place, July 2014, Pages 116–132
Abstract:
Variations in ‘culture’ are often invoked to explain cross-national variations in health, but formal analyses of this relation are scarce. We studied the relation between three sets of cultural values and a wide range of health behaviours and health outcomes in Europe. Cultural values were measured according to Inglehart׳s two, Hofstede׳s six, and Schwartz׳s seven dimensions. Data on individual and collective health behaviours (30 indicators of fertility-related behaviours, adult lifestyles, use of preventive services, prevention policies, health care policies, and environmental policies) and health outcomes (35 indicators of general health and of specific health problems relating to fertility, adult lifestyles, prevention, health care, and violence) in 42 European countries around the year 2010 were extracted from harmonized international data sources. Multivariate regression analysis was used to relate health behaviours to value orientations, controlling for socioeconomic confounders. In univariate analyses, all scales are related to health behaviours and most scales are related to health outcomes, but in multivariate analyses Inglehart׳s ‘self-expression’ (versus ‘survival’) scale has by far the largest number of statistically significant associations. Countries with higher scores on ‘self-expression’ have better outcomes on 16 out of 30 health behaviours and on 19 out of 35 health indicators, and variations on this scale explain up to 26% of the variance in these outcomes in Europe. In mediation analyses the associations between cultural values and health outcomes are partly explained by differences in health behaviours. Variations in cultural values also appear to account for some of the striking variations in health behaviours between neighbouring countries in Europe (Sweden and Denmark, the Netherlands and Belgium, the Czech Republic and Slovakia, and Estonia and Latvia). This study is the first to provide systematic and coherent empirical evidence that differences between European countries in health behaviours and health outcomes may partly be determined by variations in culture. Paradoxically, a shift away from traditional ‘survival’ values seems to promote behaviours that increase longevity in high income countries.
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Lisa Dragoni et al.
Journal of Applied Psychology, forthcoming
Abstract:
To respond to the challenge of how organizations can develop leaders who can think strategically, we investigate the relation of leaders’ global work experiences — that is, those experiences that require the role incumbent to transcend national boundaries — to their competency in strategic thinking. We further examine whether leaders’ exposure to a country whose culture is quite distinct from the culture of their own country (i.e., one that is culturally distant) moderates these relationships. Our analyses of 231 upper level leaders reveals that the time they have spent in global work experiences positively relates to their strategic thinking competency, particularly for leaders who have had exposure to a more culturally distant country. We discuss these findings in light of the research on international work experiences and leader development.
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Frédéric Godart et al.
Academy of Management Journal, forthcoming
Abstract:
The current research explores whether the foreign professional experiences of influential executives predict firm-level creative output. We introduce a new theoretical model, the Foreign Experience Model of Creative Innovations, to explain how three dimensions of executives' foreign work experiences — breadth, depth, and cultural distance — predict an organization's creative innovations, which we define as the extent to which final, implemented products or services are novel and useful from the standpoint of external audiences. We examined 11 years (21 seasons) of fashion collections of the world's top fashion houses and found that the foreign professional experiences of creative directors predicted the creativity ratings of their collections. The results revealed individual curvilinear effects for all three dimensions: moderate levels of breadth and cultural distance were associated with the highest levels of creative innovations, whereas depth showed a decreasing positive effect that never turned negative. A significant three-way interaction shows that depth is the most critical dimension for achieving creative innovations, with breadth and cultural distance important at low but not high levels of depth. Our results show how and why leaders' foreign professional experiences can be a critical catalyst for creativity and innovation in their organizations.
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Beliefs in Emotional Residue in Japan and the United States
Helen Boucher & MacKenzie Vile
Journal of Cross-Cultural Psychology, July 2014, Pages 986-991
Abstract:
Japanese participants endorsed a belief in emotional residue (i.e., emotions lingering in a physical space can affect a new person entering it) more strongly than Americans when the question was posed with explicit items. However, both Japanese and Americans expressed the belief when it was measured with indirect, scenario-based questions. Also, both groups thought that negative emotional residues would decay over time. We discuss future research directions.
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Liman Man Wai Li, Takahiko Masuda & Matthew Russell
Personality and Individual Differences, October 2014, Pages 6–12
Abstract:
Previous findings in cultural psychology suggest that East Asians are more likely than North Americans to view the world dialectically and that this dialectic view of the world affects their psychological tendencies. Extending these findings, our research examined the relationship between dialecticism and indecisiveness in European Canadians and Hong Kong Chinese. Evidence from three studies demonstrated that: Hong Kong Chinese were more indecisive than European Canadians and that dialecticism mediated this cultural difference (Study 1), dialectically primed individuals were more likely than non-dialectically primed individuals to experience indecisiveness (Study 2), and decisions’ importance affected cultural variations: no cultural difference in indecisiveness was found for important decisions, with Hong Kong Chinese reporting a higher level of indecisiveness for less important decisions compared to European Canadians. Furthermore, the cultural variation for less important decisions was mediated by dialecticism (Study 3). The importance of studying decision making processes across cultures is discussed.
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Duane Rudy et al.
Journal of Cross-Cultural Psychology, July 2014, Pages 905-920
Abstract:
In this study, we examined whether culture moderates the correlates of psychological control as a function of the type of measure used. We administered two measures of parental psychological control to university undergraduates from India (n = 166) and the United States (n = 177), as well as a measure of participants’ self-esteem. One measure assessed harsh psychologically controlling tactics; the other relationship-oriented guilt induction. We argued that while relationship-oriented guilt induction might be deemed inappropriate in the United States, Indian parents might more frequently use this technique to promote familial interdependence, a culturally specific value. Harsh psychological control, on the other hand, is unlikely to be used for benign purposes in either group. We had the following hypotheses: (a) across groups, harsh psychological control would be more strongly associated than relationship-oriented guilt induction with lower levels of reported self-esteem; (b) reports of relationship-oriented guilt induction and harsh psychological control would be more strongly associated in the United States than in India; (c) reports of relationship-oriented parental guilt induction would be more strongly associated with lower levels of self-esteem in the United States than in India; and (d) the negative associations between relationship-oriented guilt induction and self-esteem for students from the United States would become non-significant when controlling for harsh parental psychological control. Support was found for all hypotheses. Unexpectedly, in the Indian group, relationship-oriented guilt induction was positively associated with self-esteem. The implications for the measurement of psychological control are discussed.
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Marta Blangiardo & Gianluca Baio
Journal of Applied Statistics, October 2014, Pages 2312-2322
Abstract:
The Eurovision Song Contest is an annual musical competition held among active members of the European Broadcasting Union since 1956. The event is televised live across Europe. Each participating country presents a song and receive a vote based on a combination of tele-voting and jury. Over the years, this has led to speculations of tactical voting, discriminating against some participants and thus inducing bias in the final results. In this paper we investigate the presence of positive or negative bias (which may roughly indicate favouritisms or discrimination) in the votes based on geographical proximity, migration and cultural characteristics of the participating countries through a Bayesian hierarchical model. Our analysis found no evidence of negative bias, although mild positive bias does seem to emerge systematically, linking voters to performers.
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Nina Hansen et al.
Journal of Cross-Cultural Psychology, forthcoming
Abstract:
This research examines how technology usage can instigate social change in a developing country. We expected that technology usage leads to changes in modern cultural values and attitudes toward gender equality while traditional values persist. This was tested in an information and communication technology (ICT) for Development Aid project among Ethiopian children who had received a laptop. A longitudinal field experiment compared children who received a laptop (n = 573) with a matched control group without a laptop (n = 485). Measures were taken before laptop introduction and 6 months later. Laptops had medium to strong effects on value and attitude change, particularly in rural areas. Children with laptops endorsed modern values more strongly, but traditional values were bolstered as well. Modern value change mediated the effect of laptop usage on the endorsement of gender equality. Theoretical and practical implications for cultural changes related to gender equality are discussed.
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Ownership reasoning in children across cultures
Philippe Rochat et al.
Cognition, September 2014, Pages 471–484
Abstract:
To what extent do early intuitions about ownership depend on cultural and socio-economic circumstances? We investigated the question by testing reasoning about third party ownership conflicts in various groups of three- and five-year-old children (N = 176), growing up in seven highly contrasted social, economic, and cultural circumstances (urban rich, poor, very poor, rural poor, and traditional) spanning three continents. Each child was presented with a series of scripts involving two identical dolls fighting over an object of possession. The child had to decide who of the two dolls should own the object. Each script enacted various potential reasons for attributing ownership: creation, familiarity, first contact, equity, plus a control/neutral condition with no suggested reasons. Results show that across cultures, children are significantly more consistent and decisive in attributing ownership when one of the protagonists created the object. Development between three and five years is more or less pronounced depending on culture. The propensity to split the object in equal halves whenever possible was generally higher at certain locations (i.e., China) and quasi-inexistent in others (i.e., Vanuatu and street children of Recife). Overall, creation reasons appear to be more primordial and stable across cultures than familiarity, relative wealth or first contact. This trend does not correlate with the passing of false belief theory of mind.
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Long-term consequences of birth in an ‘unlucky’ year: Evidence from Japanese women born in 1966
Satoshi Shimizutani & Hiroyuki Yamada
Applied Economics Letters, forthcoming
Abstract:
This article explores the long-term consequence of a prevailing superstition regarding women who were born in 1966, a year of the fire horse, who were around 44 years of age in 2010. The findings indicate that ‘fire horse women’ are disadvantaged in some aspects such as divorce rates, educational attainment and their own and household level income, suggesting discrimination against fire horse women as a result of the superstition.
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Standing out as a signal to selfishness: Culture and devaluation of non-normative characteristics
Zoe Kinias et al.
Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes, July 2014, Pages 190–203
Abstract:
This article proposes and tests a theoretical model articulating when and why differences in devaluation and avoidance of individuals with non-normative characteristics emerge between East Asian and Western cultural contexts. Four main studies examined this theoretical model. In a pilot study, relative to Americans, Koreans devalued a target individual with a non-normative characteristic, and in Study 1 the target’s efforts to forestall disruption of group processes eliminated the devaluation in Korea, with perceived selfishness mediating this process. In Study 2, Koreans, relative to Americans, devalued and avoided coworkers with non-normative characteristics, particularly when the non-normative characteristic was controllable. Study 3 further showed that perceived selfishness mediates this effect with a behavioral dependent variable. Study 4 tested the generalizability to positively valenced characteristics and found that Koreans (relative to Americans) also devalue individuals with positive characteristics at non-normative levels. Implications for individuals with non-normative characteristics, organizational diversity, and cross-cultural interaction are discussed.
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A cross-culture, cross-gender comparison of perspective taking mechanisms
Klaus Kessler et al.
Proceedings of the Royal Society: Biological Sciences, 22 June 2014
Abstract:
Being able to judge another person's visuo-spatial perspective is an essential social skill, hence we investigated the generalizability of the involved mechanisms across cultures and genders. Developmental, cross-species, and our own previous research suggest that two different forms of perspective taking can be distinguished, which are subserved by two distinct mechanisms. The simpler form relies on inferring another's line-of-sight, whereas the more complex form depends on embodied transformation into the other's orientation in form of a simulated body rotation. Our current results suggest that, in principle, the same basic mechanisms are employed by males and females in both, East-Asian (EA; Chinese) and Western culture. However, we also confirmed the hypothesis that Westerners show an egocentric bias, whereas EAs reveal an other-oriented bias. Furthermore, Westerners were slower overall than EAs and showed stronger gender differences in speed and depth of embodied processing. Our findings substantiate differences and communalities in social cognition mechanisms across genders and two cultures and suggest that cultural evolution or transmission should take gender as a modulating variable into account.
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Returns to Dialect: Identity Exposure through Language in the Chinese Labor Market
Zhao Chen, Ming Lu & Le Xu
China Economic Review, September 2014, Pages 27–43
Abstract:
Though Mandarin is China's common language, each region/city has its own dialect. Using a unique self-collected data set, this paper estimates returns to dialect familiarity in China’s largest and most developed city, Shanghai. We evaluate migrant workers’ comprehension and fluency of the Shanghai dialect, and instrument their dialect fluency by determining whether the workers' hometowns were located in the Wu dialect region and the distance between those hometowns and Shanghai. We determined that in OLS regressions, the returns to dialect are a consequence of endogeneity bias. After using IV (instrumental variable), dialect fluency was shown to significantly impact one’s income in the service industry, in particular affecting sales jobs. In manufacturing and construction jobs, migrants with higher dialect fluency tended to be self-employed in order to earn more income. By distinguishing between listening and speaking abilities, we found that auditory comprehension does not significantly increase one’s earning, while oral fluency does. Since local residents in Shanghai can understand Mandarin, migrants who can understand Shanghainese won’t have difficulty in the information exchange. Therefore, our results confirm that dialect is a channel through which people expose their identity. Speaking the local dialect is a way for migrant workers to integrate into the local society and also to reduce transaction costs in the labor market.