Natural Culture
The Global Network of Liberty: Toward a New Framework for Understanding the History of Political Concepts
Shoufu Yin
American Political Science Review, forthcoming
Abstract:
This article contends that liberty was already a globally connected concept during the late Middle Ages, and the Euro-American Enlightenment conception of liberty was only one of the many products of the global medieval legacies. Developing a network approach to concepts and applying it to primary sources in ten languages across Afro-Eurasia, I map how thinkers from different parts of the world contributed to the formation of the network. Recognizing this global network of liberty allows researchers to rediscover overlooked conceptualizations of liberty -- as evidenced by examples of the Mongol Empire and its translingual politics with/in Europe, Persia, and China. Once innovations in specific contexts are placed back into the global network, revealed are global patterns of valorizing liberty, considering it either essential to possess or warranting caution. Both the findings and methodologies presented here prompt scholars to revisit the foundations of modern political thought from a global standpoint.
The ecology of relatedness: How living around family (or not) matters
Oliver Sng, Minyoung Choi & Joshua Ackerman
Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, forthcoming
Abstract:
How does living in an environment with many or few family relatives shape our psychology? Here, we draw upon ideas from behavioral ecology to explore the psychological effects of ecological relatedness -- the prevalence of family relatives in one's environment. We present six studies, both correlational and experimental, that examine this. In general, people and populations that live in ecologies with more family relatives (Studies 1-4b), or who imagine themselves to be living in such ecologies (Studies 2/3a/3b/4b), engage in more extreme pro-group behavior (e.g., being willing to go to war for their country), hold more interdependent self-concepts, are more punishing of antisocial behaviors (e.g., support the death penalty for murder), identify themselves as more connected to and trust nearby groups (e.g., their community and neighbors) but less so distant groups (e.g., foreigners, the world), and also judge sibling incest as more morally wrong. These effects are examined across three countries (the United States, Ghana, the Philippines) and are robust to a range of controls and alternative explanations (e.g., ingroup preferences, familiarity effects, kinship intensity). The current work highlights the psychological effects of an underexamined dimension of our social ecology, provides a set of methods for studying it, and holds implications for understanding the ecological origins of a range of social behaviors and cultural differences.
Cultural tightness and resilience against environmental shocks in nonindustrial societies
Denis Tverskoi et al.
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 3 December 2024
Abstract:
With climate change intensifying, building resilience against climate-related shocks is now a global imperative. Historically, many societies have faced natural hazards, with some adapting through specific social and cultural practices. Understanding these responses is key to developing modern sustainability strategies. Here, we address this issue by developing a mathematical model explicitly accounting for various environmental shock dimensions, cooperative activities common in nonindustrial societies, and decision-making based on material factors as well as personal values and social norms. Our results suggest that cultural looseness can be vital for effectively responding to mild, slow-onset shocks, leading to moderate cooperation and minimal cultural change. Conversely, coping with severe shocks requires an intermediate level of cultural tightness, fostering significant cultural transformation and high cooperation. While tight societies struggle with new shocks, they may handle regular, severe, fast-onset shocks better than do loose societies. Our research enhances understanding of environmental impacts on cooperation, cultural tightness, and social resilience, and highlights cultural adaptations useful in addressing current environmental challenges like global warming, floods, tornadoes, and soil degradation.
Strategic uniqueness seeking: A cultural perspective
Gaoyuan Zhu, John Angus Hildreth & Ya-Ru Chen
Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, forthcoming
Abstract:
Building on the perspectives reflected in the Western intellectual tradition of the psychology of identity and the self, current research in cultural psychology tends to conceptualize uniqueness preferences as reflecting an identity-based motive and argues that people in Western cultures value uniqueness because it is viewed as inherently important to their identity and individuality. In this research, we introduce a complementary Eastern perspective to understand uniqueness preferences and argue that uniqueness preferences can also reflect a strategic motive where people in East Asian cultures may also value uniqueness because of the instrumental material and social benefits they believe uniqueness may confer. We tested our propositions in nine preregistered studies contrasting the decision making of people in the United States with those in China. We found that compared to participants from the United States, those from China were more likely to pursue uniqueness or believe others would pursue uniqueness in situations where being unique could potentially confer material and social benefits (Studies 1a-1c, 2, 4, 5), and this behavioral tendency could be explained in part by participants from China exhibiting a greater strategic motive for uniqueness seeking (Studies 3-5). Further, correlational and experimental studies provided some evidence for the roles of the need for power, power distance orientation, trait competitiveness, and upward social comparison as psychological antecedents to the strategic motive for uniqueness seeking (Studies 5-7). Overall, this research provides an alternative Eastern cultural perspective to balance the prevailing Western cultural perspective for understanding uniqueness preferences.
Acceptance of Inequality Between Children: Large-Scale Experimental Evidence from China and Norway
Alexander Cappelen et al.
Economic Journal, forthcoming
Abstract:
In a novel large-scale experiment, we study how adults in two societies, Shanghai (China) and Norway, make real distributive decisions involving children. We find that acceptance of inequality between children increases with the age of the children, is affected by the source of inequality and the cost of redistribution, and is lower than acceptance of inequality between adults. We document a large cross-societal difference in inequality acceptance: adults in Shanghai implement twice as much inequality between children compared with adults in Norway. Finally, we show that the willingness to accept inequality between children is predictive of attitudes to child policies.
Patterns of linguistic simplification on social media platforms over time
Di Marco et al.
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 10 December 2024
Abstract:
Understanding the impact of digital platforms on user behavior presents foundational challenges, including issues related to polarization, misinformation dynamics, and variation in news consumption. Comparative analyses across platforms and over different years can provide critical insights into these phenomena. This study investigates the linguistic characteristics of user comments over 34 y, focusing on their complexity and temporal shifts. Using a dataset of approximately 300 million English comments from eight diverse platforms and topics, we examine user communications' vocabulary size and linguistic richness and their evolution over time. Our findings reveal consistent patterns of complexity across social media platforms and topics, characterized by a nearly universal reduction in text length, diminished lexical richness, and decreased repetitiveness. Despite these trends, users consistently introduce new words into their comments at a nearly constant rate. This analysis underscores that platforms only partially influence the complexity of user comments but, instead, it reflects a broader pattern of linguistic change driven by social triggers, suggesting intrinsic tendencies in users' online interactions comparable to historically recognized linguistic hybridization and contamination processes.
"It Requires Privacy": Sharing a House in Thirteenth-Century Paris
Pinchas Roth
Jewish History, November 2024, Pages 1-17
Abstract:
Analysis of a legal ruling by Yehiel of Paris (d. ca. 1260) in a rental dispute between two Jewish men sheds light on aspects of Jewish life in a major medieval European city. Two Jews rented an apartment from a Christian owner, and a dispute arose when one of the tenants left mid-term and his replacement, also a Jewish man, tried to renew the lease directly with the landlord. The original tenant claimed the exclusive right to renew the lease and that he was unwilling to share the apartment with the new tenant as this would impinge on his privacy in use of the lavatory. This article attempts to unravel the legal and cultural dimensions of the dispute and the demographic and architectural realities underpinning it. The article maintains that the disputants' legal arguments drew upon both Jewish legal tradition and the legal norms of the rental market in Paris. The legal and cultural significance of privacy in the medieval urban context also plays an important role in the case.