It's different there
The dark side of going abroad: How broad foreign experiences increase immoral behavior
Jackson Lu et al.
Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, January 2017, Pages 1-16
Abstract:
Because of the unprecedented pace of globalization, foreign experiences are increasingly common and valued. Past research has focused on the benefits of foreign experiences, including enhanced creativity and reduced intergroup bias. In contrast, the present work uncovers a potential dark side of foreign experiences: increased immoral behavior. We propose that broad foreign experiences (i.e., experiences in multiple foreign countries) foster not only cognitive flexibility but also moral flexibility. Using multiple methods (longitudinal, correlational, and experimental), 8 studies (N > 2,200) establish that broad foreign experiences can lead to immoral behavior by increasing moral relativism — the belief that morality is relative rather than absolute. The relationship between broad foreign experiences and immoral behavior was robust across a variety of cultural populations (anglophone, francophone), life stages (high school students, university students, MBA students, middle-aged adults), and 7 different measures of immorality. As individuals are exposed to diverse cultures, their moral compass may lose some of its precision.
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When Time is Not Money: Why Americans May Lose Out at the Negotiation Table
Elizabeth Salmon et al.
Academy of Management Discoveries, December 2016, Pages 349-367
Abstract:
Although previous research has linked hyperbolic discounting, an economic model of impatience, to negative outcomes such as smoking, problem drinking, lowered academic achievement, and ineffective career search decisions, there is little research that addresses how impatience may impact performance at the bargaining table and whether Americans have a disadvantage in negotiations as compared to other cultural groups as a result. Using the subjective line task, we replicate previous research showing that subjective time perceptions underpin hyperbolic discounting (Study 1a, n = 101) and are related to estimations and perceptions of durations in a timed experiment and impatience in recalled negotiations (Study 1b, n = 202). Further, in a study of negotiation (Study 2, n = 132), Americans viewed time as relatively more condensed and achieved lower negotiation outcomes as compared to Lebanese participants, and moreover, subjective time perceptions mediated the relationship between culture and negotiation outcomes. This research has significant consequences for real-world negotiations, as cultural differences in time perception can be used as an exploitable weakness and may hinder negotiation outcomes.
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Ambivalent stereotypes link to peace, conflict, and inequality across 38 nations
Federica Durante et al.
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 24 January 2017, Pages 669–674
Abstract:
A cross-national study, 49 samples in 38 nations (n = 4,344), investigates whether national peace and conflict reflect ambivalent warmth and competence stereotypes: High-conflict societies (Pakistan) may need clearcut, unambivalent group images distinguishing friends from foes. Highly peaceful countries (Denmark) also may need less ambivalence because most groups occupy the shared national identity, with only a few outcasts. Finally, nations with intermediate conflict (United States) may need ambivalence to justify more complex intergroup-system stability. Using the Global Peace Index to measure conflict, a curvilinear (quadratic) relationship between ambivalence and conflict highlights how both extremely peaceful and extremely conflictual countries display lower stereotype ambivalence, whereas countries intermediate on peace-conflict present higher ambivalence. These data also replicated a linear inequality–ambivalence relationship.
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Cross-National and Longitudinal Variations in the Criminal Regulation of Sex, 1965 to 2005
David John Frank & Dana Moss
Social Forces, forthcoming
Abstract:
This paper analyzes cross-national and longitudinal variations in criminal laws regulating sexual activities. We blend historical and sociological institutionalisms to argue that criminal sex laws embody exogenous models, supplied by colonial and imperial powers and evolving world society. To test our ideas, we apply logit-panel and pooled-time-series models to original data from more than 150 countries on four aspects of sex laws, 1965 to 2005: (1) maximum prison terms for rape, (2) ages of sexual consent, (3) the existence of sodomy prohibitions, and (4) gender neutrality in adultery regulations. Our analyses confirm the importance of exogenous factors and show that endogenous factors — including the dominance of Islam and the status of women in society — play lesser roles in explaining formal content differences. In supplementary analyses, we explore counterpoint variations, that is, sex-law reforms that flout global standards, illustrated here by sodomy-law expansions during the period. We find exogenous imprints even in these cases.
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Boris Nikolaev & Raufhon Salahodjaev
Kyklos, February 2017, Pages 97–128
Abstract:
It is widely believed that economic institutions such as competitive markets, the banking system, and the structure of property rights are essential for economic development. But why economic institutions vary across countries and what are their deep origins is still a question that is widely debated in the developmental economics literature. In this study, we provide an empirical test for the provocative hypothesis that the prevalence of infectious diseases influenced the formation of personality traits, cultural values, and even morality at the regional level (the so called Parasite-Stress Theory of Values and Sociality), which then shaped economic institutions across countries. Using the prevalence of pathogens as an instrument for cultural traits such as individualism, we show in a two-stage least squares analysis that various economic institutions, measured by different areas of the index of Economic Freedom by the Heritage Foundation, have their deep origins in the historical prevalence of infectious diseases across countries. Our causal identification strategy suggests that cultural values affect economic institutions even after controlling for a number of confounding variables, geographic controls, and for different sub-samples of countries. We further show that the results are robust to four alternative measures of economic and political institutions.
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The Persistent Effects of Novelty-Seeking Traits on Comparative Economic Development
Erkan Gören
Journal of Development Economics, forthcoming
Abstract:
The issue of novelty-seeking traits have been related to important economic attitudes such as risk-taking, entrepreneurial, and explorative behaviors that foster technological progress and, thus, economic development. However, numerous molecular genetic studies have shown that novelty-seeking bearing individuals are prone to certain psychological “disadvantages” such as Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD), leading to occupational and educational difficulties in modern societies. Using a recent compilation of DRD4 exon III allele frequencies – a particular gene variant that population geneticists have found to be sometimes associated with the human phenotype of novelty-seeking behavior – this paper advances a new country-level measure on the prevalence of novelty-seeking traits for a large number of countries worldwide. The results suggest a stable non-monotonic inverted U-shaped relationship between the country-level DRD4 exon III allele frequency measure and economic development. This finding is suggestive of the potential “benefits” and “costs” of novelty-seeking traits for the aggregate economy.
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Birth of the cool: A two-centuries decline in emotional expression in Anglophone fiction
Olivier Morin & Alberto Acerbi
Cognition and Emotion, forthcoming
Abstract:
The presence of emotional words and content in stories has been shown to enhance a story’s memorability, and its cultural success. Yet, recent cultural trends run in the opposite direction. Using the Google Books corpus, coupled with two metadata-rich corpora of Anglophone fiction books, we show a decrease in emotionality in English-speaking literature starting plausibly in the nineteenth century. We show that this decrease cannot be explained by changes unrelated to emotionality (such as demographic dynamics concerning age or gender balance, changes in vocabulary richness, or changes in the prevalence of literary genres), and that, in our three corpora, the decrease is driven almost entirely by a decline in the proportion of positive emotion-related words, while the frequency of negative emotion-related words shows little if any decline. Consistently with previous studies, we also find a link between ageing and negative emotionality at the individual level.
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Xinyin Chen et al.
Developmental Science, forthcoming
Abstract:
This study examined children's judgments of damage to public versus private property in China at two historical times. Participants were two cohorts (1980 and 2012) of elementary school children at ages 7, 9, and 11 years. The children were administered paired stories that described a protagonist who damaged public or private property with a good or bad intention. The results showed that children in the 2012 cohort were less likely than their counterparts in the 1980 cohort to judge damage to public property as more culpable than damage to private property. The cohort differences were more evident in older children than in younger children. The results suggest that macro-level contexts may play an important role in shaping children's judgments.
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Societal Conditions and the Gender Difference in Well-Being: Testing a Three-Stage Model
Miron Zuckerman, Chen Li & Edward Diener
Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, forthcoming
Abstract:
Findings from a meta-analysis on gender differences in self-esteem (Zuckerman et al., 2016) suggest that the relation between the degree to which societal conditions are favorable to women and gender difference in self-esteem might be quadratic; when conditions improve, women’s self-esteem (relative to that of men) trends downward but when conditions continue to improve, women’s self-esteem begins to trend upward. Testing whether these relations generalize to subjective well-being, the present study found a quadratic relation between improving societal conditions and the gender difference in life satisfaction and positive affect (women are lower than men when societal conditions are moderately favorable compared to when they are at their worst and at their best); the relation was linear for negative emotion (women report more negative emotions than men when societal conditions are better). Directions for future research that will address potential explanations for these results are proposed.