Places and times
Niclas Berggren & Therese Nilsson
European Journal of Political Economy, forthcoming
Abstract:
Tolerance is a distinguishing feature of Western culture. Still, it varies between and within countries, as well as over time, and irrespective of whether one values it for its own sake or for its beneficial consequences, it becomes important to identify its determinants. In this study, we investigate whether the character of economic policy plays a role, by looking at the effect of changes in economic freedom (i.e., lower government expenditures, lower and more general taxes and more modest regulation) on tolerance in one of the most market-oriented countries, the United States. In comparing U.S. states, we find that an increase in the willingness to let atheists, homosexuals and communists speak, keep books in libraries and teach college students is, overall, positively related to preceding increases in economic freedom, more specifically in the form of more general taxes. We suggest, as one explanation, that a discriminatory tax system, which is susceptible to the influence of special interests and which treats people differently, gives rise to feelings of tension and conflict. In contrast, the positive association for tolerance towards racists only applies to speech and books, not to teaching, which may indicate that when it comes to educating the young, (in)tolerant attitudes towards racists are more fixed.
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Peter Vandor & Nikolaus Franke
Journal of Business Venturing, July 2016, Pages 388-407
Abstract:
Internationally mobile individuals such as migrants and expatriates exhibit a higher level of entrepreneurial activity than people without cross-cultural experience. Current research suggests that this pattern is rooted in specific resources and institutional arrangements that increase the attractiveness of exploiting entrepreneurial opportunities. In this study, we provide an additional explanation: We argue that cross-cultural experience increases the ability to recognize entrepreneurial opportunities. This argument is supported by two complementary studies - a longitudinal quasi-experiment and a priming experiment. We find convergent evidence that cross-cultural experience increases a person's capabilities to recognize particularly profitable types of opportunities by facilitating the application of cross-cultural knowledge for the discovery of arbitrage opportunities and creative recombination.
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Long-run cultural divergence: Evidence from the Neolithic revolution
Ola Olsson & Christopher Paik
Journal of Development Economics, September 2016, Pages 197-213
Abstract:
This paper investigates the long-run influence of the Neolithic Revolution on contemporary cultural norms as reflected in the dimension of collectivism-individualism. We present a theory of agricultural origins of cultural divergence, where we claim that the advent of farming in a core region was characterized by collectivist values and eventually triggered the out-migration of individualistic farmers towards more and more peripheral areas. This migration pattern caused the initial cultural divergence, which remained persistent over generations. Using detailed data on the date of adoption of Neolithic agriculture among Western regions and countries, the empirical findings show that the regions which adopted agriculture early also value obedience more and feel less in control of their lives. The findings add to the literature by suggesting the possibility of extremely long lasting norms and beliefs influencing today's socioeconomic outcomes.
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The longevity of national identity and national pride: Evidence from wider Europe
Valentina Dimitrova-Grajzl, Jonathan Eastwood & Peter Grajzl
Research & Politics, June 2016
Abstract:
National pride predicts a wide range of politico-economic outcomes, yet what makes individuals proud of their nation is not completely understood. We propose and test a theory that an important but thus far unexplored determinant of contemporary national pride is the longevity of national identity. To measure the longevity of national identity, we construct an index based on responses from an original expert survey designed to trace the emergence of national identity across the polities of Europe and the former Soviet Union. We find that our National Identity Longevity Index is statistically significantly positively associated with the extent of national pride. The implied effect is robust and noteworthy in magnitude. Our results suggest that contemporary national pride inter alia reflects deep, historically rooted societal conventions which take time to emerge.
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Cultural Modes of Expressing Emotions Influence How Emotions Are Experienced
May Helen Immordino-Yang, Xiao-Fei Yang & Hanna Damasio
Emotion, forthcoming
Abstract:
The brain's mapping of bodily responses during emotion contributes to emotional experiences, or feelings. Culture influences emotional expressiveness, that is, the magnitude of individuals' bodily responses during emotion. So, are cultural influences on behavioral expressiveness associated with differences in how individuals experience emotion? Chinese and American young adults reported how strongly admiration- and compassion-inducing stories made them feel, first in a private interview and then during functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI). As expected, Americans were more expressive in the interview. Although expressiveness did not predict stronger reported feelings or neural responses during fMRI, in both cultural groups more-expressive people showed tighter trial-by-trial correlations between their experienced strength of emotion and activations in visceral-somatosensory cortex, even after controlling for individuals' overall strength of reactions (neural and felt). Moreover, expressiveness mediated a previously described cultural effect in which activations in visceral-somatosensory cortex correlated with feeling strength among Americans but not among Chinese. Post hoc supplementary analyses revealed that more-expressive individuals reached peak activation of visceral-somatosensory cortex later in the emotion process and took longer to decide how strongly they felt. The results together suggest that differences in expressiveness correspond to differences in how somatosensory mechanisms contribute to constructing conscious feelings. By influencing expressiveness, culture may therefore influence how individuals know how strongly they feel, what conscious feelings are based on, or possibly what strong versus weak emotions "feel like."
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Taking Turns or Not? Children's Approach to Limited Resource Problems in Three Different Cultures
Henriette Zeidler et al.
Child Development, May/June 2016, Pages 677-688
Abstract:
Some problems of resource distribution can be solved on equal terms only by taking turns. We presented such a problem to 168 pairs of 5- to 10-year-old children from one Western and two non-Western societies (German, Samburu, Kikuyu). Almost all German pairs solved the problem by taking turns immediately, resulting in an equal distribution of resources throughout the game. In the other groups, one child usually monopolized the resource in Trial 1 and sometimes let the partner monopolize it in Trial 2, resulting in an equal distribution in only half the dyads. These results suggest that turn-taking is not a natural strategy uniformly across human cultures, but rather that different cultures use it to different degrees and in different contexts.
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Culture, Fixed-World Beliefs, Relationships, and Perceptions of Identity Change
Franki Kung, Richard Eibach & Igor Grossmann
Social Psychological and Personality Science, forthcoming
Abstract:
Personal identity continuity has been a focus of much philosophical inquiry, yet lay perceptions of identity continuity and their psychological bases are not well understood. We hypothesize that cultural differences in lay beliefs about the fixedness of the world promote different intuitions about identity continuity: People from a society with rigid social systems should perceive more identity discontinuity when a person's social relationships (vs. internal traits) change, whereas those from a society with more flexible social systems should perceive the reverse. We tested this hypothesis by comparing fixed-world beliefs and perceptions of identity discontinuity in India and the United States. Results of two studies (N = 863) showed that Indians perceived more identity discontinuity than Americans when relationships (vs. internal traits) changed, which was explained by Indians' stronger fixed-world beliefs. Moreover, in Study 2, cultural differences in perceived identity discontinuity mediated cultural differences in trust when a target's relationships (vs. internal traits) changed.
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Children's Play and Culture Learning in an Egalitarian Foraging Society
Adam Boyette
Child Development, May/June 2016, Pages 759-769
Abstract:
Few systematic studies of play in foragers exist despite their significance for understanding the breadth of contexts for human development and the ontogeny of cultural learning. Forager societies lack complex social hierarchies, avenues for prestige or wealth accumulation, and formal educational institutions, and thereby represent a contrast to the contexts of most play research. Analysis of systematic observations of children's play among Aka forest foragers (n = 50, ages 4-16, M = 9.5) and Ngandu subsistence farmers (n = 48, ages 4-16, M = 9.1) collected in 2010 illustrates that while play and work trade off during development in both groups, and consistent patterns in sex-role development are evident, Aka children engage in significantly less rough-and-tumble play and competitive games than children among their socially stratified farming neighbors.
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Cristina Moya & Robert Boyd
Current Anthropology, June 2016, Pages S131-S144
Abstract:
Social scientists have long argued about the relationship between ethnic phenomena, symbolic markers, and cultural traits. In this paper, we illustrate the potential of functionalist cultural and genetic evolutionary models to reconcile these debates. Specifically, we argue that we must take seriously the role of cultural similarity in delineating certain category boundaries if we are to understand the origins and development of ethnic stereotyping. We examine whether symbolic markers - namely, sartorial ones - are privileged in the development of social stereotypes by comparing how children and adults in the urban United States and rural highland Peru perform a categorization task. We find that arbitrary sartorial markers motivate generalizations about novel traits in all samples except among US children, even when they crosscut body morphology, emotional expression, and socioeconomic cues. Unlike children in the United States, children in the Peruvian sample demonstrate an even stronger reliance on sartorial and work site cues than do adults of the same community. This suggests a role for early-developing evolved biases that guide learning and require appropriate cultural inputs or different niches for adults and children. We document further cross-cultural variation, in that US participants privilege socioeconomic cues to occupational status more than other cues, whereas Peruvian participants rely on sartorial cues more than other cues, indicating the importance of cognitive rules for learning locally relevant social taxonomies.