Local yokels
Social Status and Anger Expression: The Cultural Moderation Hypothesis
Jiyoung Park et al.
Emotion, forthcoming
Abstract:
Individuals with lower social status have been reported to express more anger, but this evidence comes mostly from Western cultures. Here, we used representative samples of American and Japanese adults and tested the hypothesis that the association between social status and anger expression depends on whether anger serves primarily to vent frustration, as in the United States, or to display authority, as in Japan. Consistent with the assumption that lower social standing is associated with greater frustration stemming from life adversities and blocked goals, Americans with lower social status expressed more anger, with the relationship mediated by the extent of frustration. In contrast, consistent with the assumption that higher social standing affords a privilege to display anger, Japanese with higher social status expressed more anger, with the relationship mediated by decision-making authority. As expected, anger expression was predicted by subjective social status among Americans and by objective social status among Japanese. Implications for the dynamic construction of anger and anger expression are discussed.
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Naming Patterns Reveal Cultural Values: Patronyms, Matronyms, and the U.S. Culture of Honor
Ryan Brown, Mauricio Carvallo & Mikiko Imura
Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, forthcoming
Abstract:
Four studies examined the hypothesis that honor norms would be associated with a pronounced use of patronyms, but not matronyms, for naming children. Study 1 shows that men who endorse honor values expressed a stronger desire to use patronyms (but not matronyms) for future children, an association that was mediated by patriarchal attitudes. Study 2 presents an indirect method for assessing state patronym and matronym levels. As expected, patronym scores were significantly higher in honor states and were associated with a wide range of variables linked previously to honor-related dynamics. Study 3a shows that following the terrorist attacks of 9/11, patronyms increased in honor states, but not in non-honor states. Likewise, priming men with a fictitious terrorist attack (Study 3b) increased the association between honor ideology and patronym preferences. Together, these studies reveal a subtle social signal that reflects the masculine values of an honor culture.
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Richard Lalonde et al.
Canadian Journal of Behavioural Science, October 2013, Pages 296-304
Abstract:
When conducting cross-cultural studies, researchers often rely on generalised categorisations (e.g., East–West), frequently assuming homogeneity within each of the cultural groups being compared. We argue that such broad categorisations may be misleading and that careful demarcation of cultural groups that takes into consideration their specific sociohistorical realities is necessary to produce knowledge that is both meaningful and realistic. We illustrate this contention by examining preferred mate attributes among four different cultural groups in Canada. In line with predictions, we found that Italians, who are ordinarily considered Western European, demonstrated preferences for status and traditional characteristics in a mate that differed from those preferred by the rest of the Western Europeans (not including Italians). Instead, Italians were similar to the more “Eastern” South Asians and Chinese in their preferences for status traits and to South Asians in their preferences for traditional traits. Importantly, the pattern of cultural differences changed when Italians were included in the Western European category. Lastly, we showed that the influence of culture on preferences for traditional and status traits was differentially transmitted through family connectedness and identification with mainstream Canadian culture. Implications for cross-cultural research are discussed.
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Mark Dingemanse, Francisco Torreira & N.J. Enfield
PLoS ONE, November 2013
Abstract:
A word like Huh? – used as a repair initiator when, for example, one has not clearly heard what someone just said – is found in roughly the same form and function in spoken languages across the globe. We investigate it in naturally occurring conversations in ten languages and present evidence and arguments for two distinct claims: that Huh? is universal, and that it is a word. In support of the first, we show that the similarities in form and function of this interjection across languages are much greater than expected by chance. In support of the second claim we show that it is a lexical, conventionalised form that has to be learnt, unlike grunts or emotional cries. We discuss possible reasons for the cross-linguistic similarity and propose an account in terms of convergent evolution. Huh? is a universal word not because it is innate but because it is shaped by selective pressures in an interactional environment that all languages share: that of other-initiated repair. Our proposal enhances evolutionary models of language change by suggesting that conversational infrastructure can drive the convergent cultural evolution of linguistic items.
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Economic interactions and social tolerance: A dynamic perspective
Roy Cerqueti, Luca Correani & Giuseppe Garofalo
Economics Letters, September 2013, Pages 458–463
Abstract:
We propose an evolutionary game to analyse the dynamics of tolerance among heterogeneous economic agents. We show that: (i) intolerance is much more persistent than tolerance; (ii) a fully tolerant society assures prosperity; (iii) cultural integration should precede economic integration.
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National Differences in Personality and Predictability of Gender From Personal Names
Herbert Barry & Aylene Harper
Cross-Cultural Research, November 2013, Pages 363-371
Abstract:
This article reports a test of the hypothesis that national differences in personality traits are expressed by national differences in how accurately the final letter of the personal name designates the female or male gender. The names were obtained from lists of more than 80 popular names in each nation, separately for females and males. Gender designation was more accurate for female than male names. In nations with more accurate gender designation of the final letter of first names, four personality traits self-reported more often by inhabitants are high uncertainty avoidance (UA), high power distance (PD), low individualism (Ind), thereby high collectivism, and a low proportion who are very happy (VH).
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Work Values Ethic, GNP Per Capita and Country of Birth Relationships
Adela McMurray & Don Scott
Journal of Business Ethics, September 2013, Pages 655-666
Abstract:
Workplaces around the world have experienced extraordinary changes to the composition of their workforces and the nature of work. Few studies have explored workers from multiple countries of birth, with multiple religious orientations, working together within a single country of residence. Building on and extending the Work Values Ethic (WVE) literature, we examine 1,382 responses from employees working in three manufacturing companies. Differences were found in the mean WVE scores of groups of respondents from 42 countries of birth. Their WVE scores were strongly associated with their birth countries’ per capita Gross National Product (GNP), and the means of these scores did not change with variations in the respondents’ length of residence in a different country. These results have implications for developing cross-cultural management practices and for improving relationships with employees, with opportunities for increased commitment and, potentially, productivity.
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Keiko Ishii et al.
Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, forthcoming
Abstract:
We examined how cultural values of harmony and uniqueness are represented and maintained through physical media (i.e., colorings of geometric patterns) and how individuals play an active role in selecting and maintaining such cultural values. We found that colorings produced by European American adults and children were judged as more unique, whereas colorings produced by Japanese adults and children were judged as more harmonious, reflecting cultural differences in values. Harmony undergirded Japanese participants’ preferences for colorings, whereas uniqueness undergirded European American participants’ preferences for colorings. These cultural differences led participants to prefer own-culture colorings over other-culture colorings. Moreover, bicultural participants’ preferences acculturated according to their identification with their host culture. Furthermore, child rearers in Japan and Canada gave feedback about the children’s colorings that were consistent with their culture’s values. These findings suggest that simple geometric patterns can embody cultural values that are socialized and reinforced from an early age.
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Confucianism and Preferences: Evidence from Lab Experiments in Taiwan and China
Elaine Liu, Juanjuan Meng & Joseph Tao-yi Wang
NBER Working Paper, November 2013
Abstract:
This paper investigates how Confucianism affects individual decision making in Taiwan and in China. We found that Chinese subjects in our experiments became less accepting of Confucian values, such that they became significantly more risk loving, less loss averse, and more impatient after being primed with Confucianism, whereas Taiwanese subjects became significantly less present-based and were inclined to be more trustworthy after being primed by Confucianism. Combining the evidence from the incentivized laboratory experiments and subjective survey measures, we found evidence that Chinese subjects and Taiwanese subjects reacted differently to Confucianism.
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Superstition and “Lucky” Apartments: Evidence from Transaction-level Data
Matthew Shum, Wei Sun & Guangliang Ye
Journal of Comparative Economics, forthcoming
Abstract:
Using a sample of apartment transactions during 2004-2006 in Chengdu, China, we investigate the impact of superstitions in the Chinese real estate market. Numerology forms an important component of Chinese superstitious lore, with the numbers 8 and 6 signifying good luck, and the number 4 bad luck. We find that secondhand apartments located on floors ending with “8” fetch, on average, a 235 RMB higher price (per square meter) than on other floors. For newly constructed apartments, this price premium disappears due to uniform pricing of new housing units, but apartments on floors ending in an “8” are sold, on average, 6.9 days faster than on other floors. Buyers who have a phone number containing more “8”’s are more likely to purchase apartments in a floor ending with “8”; this suggests that at least part of the price premium for “lucky” apartments arises from the buyers’ superstitious beliefs.
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M. Fernandez et al.
Brain and Cognition, December 2013, Pages 330–336
Abstract:
Successful interaction with the environment depends on flexible behaviors which require shifting attention, inhibiting primed responses, ignoring distracting information, and withholding motor responses. These abilities, termed executive function (EF), are believed to be mediated by inhibitory processes in the frontal lobes. Superior performance on EF tests (i.e., faster reaction times (RT), and fewer errors) has been shown in bilinguals compared to monolingual speakers. However, findings are inconsistent, and no study has directly linked this bilingual advantage to frontal lobe inhibitory processes. To clarify this uncertainty, we concomitantly tested neural inhibitory processes and behavioral responses on an EF test in bilinguals and monolinguals. Specifically, we compared English monolinguals (N = 15) to Spanish/English bilinguals (N = 13) on event-related brain potentials (ERP) during a non-linguistic, auditory Go/NoGo task, a task linked to non-motor, cognitive inhibition in monolinguals. Participants responded with a button press on trials in which target tone-pairs (Go trials) were presented and withheld their responses on non-target trials (NoGo trials). Results revealed significantly greater inhibition (i.e., greater mean N2 amplitude) in bilinguals compared to monolinguals during NoGo trials even though both groups performed the task equally well (i.e., withheld a motor response). On Go trials where participants pressed a response button, neither ERPs nor RT distinguished the groups. Additionally, scores on a second language proficiency test (i.e., English in our bilingual group) were positively correlated with N2 amplitude. These findings are the first to directly link this bilingual advantage to a neural correlate of inhibition and to reveal that inhibition in bilinguals is moderated by second language proficiency. Results are discussed in the context of plasticity, and we propose that evaluating bilinguals at varying levels of second-language proficiency may serve as a model of human neuroplasticity.
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Face Color and Sexual Attractiveness: Preferences of Yali People of Papua
Piotr Sorokowski, Agnieszka Sorokowska & Dominika Kras
Cross-Cultural Research, November 2013, Pages 415-427
Abstract:
Skin color is one of the first features that we notice in another person and, therefore, it plays a significant role in the mate selection process as well as in the assessments of attractiveness of others. However, almost all modern research showing a preference for lighter skin tone (particularly in women) was conducted within populations of relatively light skin color. The current study was conducted among the Yali people, who are dark-skinned and native to the isolated highlands of West Papua. We found that for both males (n = 53) and females (n = 53) preferred skin tone was either average or slightly lighter than the average. At the same time, we found that the male preference for lighter skin tone in females was correlated with contact with other cultures. We discuss our results in the context of social and biological theories explaining skin tone preferences.
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András Kornai
PLoS ONE, October 2013
Abstract:
Of the approximately 7,000 languages spoken today, some 2,500 are generally considered endangered. Here we argue that this consensus figure vastly underestimates the danger of digital language death, in that less than 5% of all languages can still ascend to the digital realm. We present evidence of a massive die-off caused by the digital divide.
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Population Redistribution and Language Spread in the Medieval Muslim World
Ghada Osman
British Journal of Middle Eastern Studies, forthcoming
Abstract:
Between the seventh and eighth centuries, a remarkable linguistic phenomenon took place: the Arabic language, which had been mainly the tongue of a few isolated tribes in Western Arabia, became the spoken and written language of a vast region that spanned from the Oxus River in the east to the Atlantic Ocean in the west. Virtually overnight, speakers of other languages had to become conversant and literate in Arabic in order to maintain their positions throughout the Arabic-speaking Muslim Empire. This article explores one factor that enabled the spread of Arabic in such an unprecedented manner: the mass population movement of Arabic speakers and others that occurred as a result of the expansion of the Muslim Empire. The article traces and analyses three categories of movement: initial settlement by the conquest armies; later voluntary movement due to scholarship, alliance building and intermarriage; and ruler-instigated population movement.
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Emma Buchtel
International Journal of Intercultural Relations, forthcoming
Abstract:
Cultural psychology ultimately aims to increase intercultural understanding, but it has also been accused of reifying stereotypes. Can learning about cultural psychology research cause students to increase their cultural sensitivity, or does it increase stereotyped and rigid thinking about cultural others? Students in an undergraduate cultural psychology course (N = 34) were compared to students in control psychology courses (N = 20) in pre- and post-course measures of cultural awareness, cultural intelligence, essentialistic thinking, prejudice, moral relativism, and endorsement of stereotypes and sociotypes. Compared to students in the control courses, cultural psychology students increased in cultural awareness, moral relativism, and meta-cognitive cultural intelligence, but students who received lower grades in the course also increased their endorsement of stereotypes that were not endorsed by cultural psychology research. Implications for intercultural training and the communication of research on cultural differences are discussed.
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Yves Guillaume, Daan van Knippenberg & Felix Brodbeck
Academy of Management Journal, forthcoming
Abstract:
Addressing inconsistencies in relational demography research, we examine the relationship between cultural dissimilarity and individual performance through the lens of social self-regulation theory, which extends the social identity perspective in relational demography with the analysis of social self-regulation. We propose that social self-regulation in culturally diverse teams manifests itself as performance monitoring (i.e., individuals' actions to meet team performance standards and peer expectations). Contingent on the status associated with individuals' cultural background, performance monitoring is proposed to have a curvilinear relationship with individual performance and to mediate between cultural dissimilarity and performance. Multilevel moderated mediation analyses of time-lagged data from 316 members of 69 teams confirmed these hypotheses. Cultural dissimilarity had a negative relationship with performance monitoring for high cultural status members, and a positive relationship for low cultural status members. Performance monitoring had a curvilinear relationship with individual performance that became decreasingly positive. Cultural dissimilarity thus was increasingly negatively associated with performance for high cultural status members, and decreasingly positively for low cultural status members. These findings suggest that cultural dissimilarity to the team is not unconditionally negative for the individual but in moderation may in fact have positive motivational effects.
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Hye Eun Lee et al.
Social Behavior and Personality, September 2013, Pages 1279-1295
Abstract:
We examined how witnessing fat talk on Facebook influenced the body satisfaction and psychological well-being of Korean and U.S. young women. Korean (n = 137) and U.S. (n = 159) women completed an online questionnaire after viewing a randomly assigned mock-up Facebook page where body size of the profile owner and the messages from her peers were manipulated. Findings showed that (a) Koreans witnessing an underweight peer's fat talk reported lower body satisfaction than did those witnessing an overweight peer's fat talk, but the peer's body size did not affect the U.S. women, and (b) Koreans witnessing messages discouraging weight loss reported greater psychological well-being than did those witnessing messages promoting weight loss, whereas peers' comments did not influence the U.S. women.
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Kenneth Locke, Dianhan Zheng & Juliane Smith
Social Psychological and Personality Science, forthcoming
Abstract:
We predicted that members of Chinese groups would tend to express personality judgments that establish commonalities among members, whereas members of American groups would tend to express judgments that affirm how members differ. We had groups of five acquaintances (23 groups at one U.S. university, 28 groups at three Chinese universities) rate their own and each other’s traits and subjected the round-robin data to social relations model and social accuracy model analyses. As hypothesized, Chinese were more likely to portray their peers as similar to themselves and to each other as indicated by greater perceived self-other similarity and less variance in target ratings; conversely, Americans were more likely to express a shared understanding of what distinguished each group member from others, as indicated by greater distinctive agreement and target variance (consensus). Collectivistic values mediated effects of country on perceived similarity; individualistic values mediated effects of country on consensus and perceived similarity.
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Kathleen Corrigall & Laurel Trainor
Developmental Science, forthcoming
Abstract:
Children learn the structure of the music of their culture similarly to how they learn the language to which they are exposed in their daily environment. Furthermore, as with language, children acquire this musical knowledge without formal instruction. Two critical aspects of musical pitch structure in Western tonal music are key membership (understanding which notes belong in a key and which do not) and harmony (understanding which notes combine to form chords and which notes and chords tend to follow others). The early developmental trajectory of the acquisition of this knowledge remains unclear, in part because of the difficulty of testing young children. In two experiments, we investigated 4- and 5-year-olds' enculturation to Western musical pitch using a novel age-appropriate and engaging behavioral task (Experiment 1) and electroencephalography (EEG; Experiment 2). In Experiment 1 we found behavioral evidence that 5-year-olds were sensitive to key membership but not to harmony, and no evidence that 4-year-olds were sensitive to either. However, in Experiment 2 we found neurophysiological evidence that 4-year-olds were sensitive to both key membership and harmony. Our results suggest that musical enculturation has a long developmental trajectory, and that children may have some knowledge of key membership and harmony before that knowledge can be expressed through explicit behavioral judgments.
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Cultural influences on the neural correlate of moral decision making processes
Hyemin Han, Gary Glover & Changwoo Jeong
Behavioural Brain Research, forthcoming
Abstract:
This study compares the neural substrate of moral decision making processes between Korean and American participants. By comparison with Americans, Korean participants showed increased activity in the right putamen associated with socio-intuitive processes and right superior frontal gyrus associated with cognitive control processes under a moral-personal condition, and in the right postcentral sulcus associated with mental calculation in familiar contexts under a moral-impersonal condition. On the other hand, American participants showed a significantly higher degree of activity in the bilateral anterior cingulate cortex (ACC) associated with conflict resolution under the moral-personal condition, and in the right medial frontal gyrus (MFG) associated with simple cognitive branching in non-familiar contexts under the moral-impersonal condition when a more lenient threshold was applied, than Korean participants. These findings support the ideas of the interactions between the cultural background, education, and brain development, proposed in the field of cultural psychology and educational psychology. The study introduces educational implications relevant to moral psychologists and educators.
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Effects of culture and social cynicism on anxious attachment transference from mother to partner
Yueran Wen, Liu Liu & Chunyong Yuan
Social Behavior and Personality, September 2013, Pages 1253-1265
Abstract:
We examined the role of culture and social cynicism beliefs in the transference of an anxious attachment style from mother to romantic partner among a group of undergraduates from the US (n = 200) and Hong Kong (n = 147). The results showed that anxious attachment to mother and to partner was moderately correlated among both cultural groups. However, social cynicism beliefs were found to moderate the relationship between anxious attachment to mother and attachment to partner among U.S. but not Hong Kong Chinese participants. This observed differential effect of social cynicism beliefs could be explained by differences in self-direction values across the 2 cultural groups. The findings in the study are of theoretical significance as they provide insights for further research on the influences of cultural variables and personal beliefs on attachment transference.