Surroundings
Culture Shapes Whether the Pursuit of Happiness Predicts Higher or Lower Well-Being
Brett Ford et al.
Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, forthcoming
Abstract:
Pursuing happiness can paradoxically impair well-being. Here, the authors propose the potential downsides to pursuing happiness may be specific to individualistic cultures. In collectivistic (vs. individualistic) cultures, pursuing happiness may be more successful because happiness is viewed — and thus pursued — in relatively socially engaged ways. In 4 geographical regions that vary in level of collectivism (United States, Germany, Russia, East Asia), we assessed participants’ well-being, motivation to pursue happiness, and to what extent they pursued happiness in socially engaged ways. Motivation to pursue happiness predicted lower well-being in the United States, did not predict well-being in Germany, and predicted higher well-being in Russia and in East Asia. These cultural differences in the link between motivation to pursue happiness and well-being were explained by cultural differences in the socially engaged pursuit of happiness. These findings suggest that culture shapes whether the pursuit of happiness is linked with better or worse well-being, perhaps via how people pursue happiness.
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Narcissism and United States’ Culture: The View From Home and Around the World
Joshua Miller et al.
Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, forthcoming
Abstract:
The issue of Americans’ levels of narcissism is subject to lively debate. The focus of the present research is on the perception of national character (PNC) of Americans as a group. In Study 1, American adults (N = 100) rated Americans as significantly more narcissistic than they perceived themselves and acquaintances. In Study 2, this finding was replicated with American college students (N = 322). PNC ratings of personality traits and externalizing behaviors revealed that Americans were perceived as disagreeable and antisocial as well. In Study 3, we examined the broader characteristics associated with PNC ratings (N = 183). Americans rated the typical American as average on a variety of characteristics (e.g., wealth, education, health, likability) and PNC ratings of narcissism were largely unrelated to these ratings. In Study 4 (N = 1202) Americans rated PNCs for different prespecified groups of Americans; as expected, PNC ratings of narcissism differed by gender, age, and occupational status such that American males, younger Americans, and Americans working in high-visibility and status occupations were seen as more narcissistic. In Study 5 (N = 733), citizens of 4 other world regions (Basque Country, China, England, Turkey) rated members of their own region as more narcissistic than they perceived themselves, but the effect sizes were smaller than those found in the case of Americans’ perceptions of Americans. Additionally, members of these other regions rated Americans as more narcissistic than members of their own region. Finally, in Study 6, participants from around the world (N = 377) rated Americans as more narcissistic, extraverted, and antagonistic than members of their own countries. We discuss the role that America’s position as a global economic and military power, paired with a culture that creates and reifies celebrity figures, may play in leading to perceptions of Americans as considerably narcissistic.
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Socioeconomic Status and Parenting Priorities: Child Independence and Obedience Around the World
Heejung Park & Anna Lau
Journal of Marriage and Family, forthcoming
Abstract:
This study investigates the extent to which both national and personal socioeconomic status shape national norms and parenting priorities concerning child socialization. Data came from the European Values Survey, the World Values Survey, and the World Bank Data Catalog, resulting in 227,431 parents from 90 nations across fives study waves (1981–2008). Child independence was more popular in nations with greater wealth and more highly educated populations; obedience was more popular in nations with less wealth and lower percentages of educated and urban populations. Personal socioeconomic status predicted individual parents' prioritization of child independence and obedience; higher social class predicted a greater likelihood of endorsing independence and not endorsing obedience. Time-slope estimation across study waves revealed that parents' prioritization of independence and obedience may rise over time in developing nations. Results provide implications for education, practice, and policy on cultural variations in parenting.
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Men as cultural ideals: Cultural values moderate gender stereotype content
Amy Cuddy et al.
Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, October 2015, Pages 622-635
Abstract:
Four studies tested whether cultural values moderate the content of gender stereotypes, such that male stereotypes more closely align with core cultural values (specifically, individualism vs. collectivism) than do female stereotypes. In Studies 1 and 2, using different measures, Americans rated men as less collectivistic than women, whereas Koreans rated men as more collectivistic than women. In Study 3, bicultural Korean Americans who completed a survey in English about American targets rated men as less collectivistic than women, whereas those who completed the survey in Korean about Korean targets did not, demonstrating how cultural frames influence gender stereotype content. Study 4 established generalizability by reanalyzing Williams and Best’s (1990) cross-national gender stereotype data across 26 nations. National individualism–collectivism scores predicted viewing collectivistic traits as more —and individualistic traits as less — stereotypically masculine. Taken together, these data offer support for the cultural moderation of gender stereotypes hypothesis, qualifying past conclusions about the universality of gender stereotype content.
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Cultural Tightness–Looseness and Perceptions of Effective Leadership
Mert Aktas, Michele Gelfand & Paul Hanges
Journal of Cross-Cultural Psychology, forthcoming
Abstract:
Previous research has investigated the relationship between cultural values and leadership. This research expands on this tradition and examines how the strength of social norms — or tightness–looseness — influences perceptions of effective leadership. Data from Gelfand, Raver, et al. were integrated with GLOBE’s leadership research to examine the attributes of leaders seen as leading to effectiveness in tight and loose cultures. Analyses of data across 29 samples show that cultural tightness is positively related to the endorsement of autonomous leadership and negatively related to the endorsement of charismatic and team leadership, even controlling for in-group collectivism, power distance, and future orientation at the societal and organizational level of analysis. Theoretical and practical implications are discussed.
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Intelligence and gender (in)equality: Empirical evidence from developing countries
Raufhon Salahodjaev & Sardor Azam
Intelligence, September–October 2015, Pages 97–103
Abstract:
This paper makes an attempt to explore whether intelligence of nations is related to gender inequality, measured by Social Institutions and Gender Index (SIGI), in developing countries. Related literature robustly links intelligence to economic development, poverty, quality of institutions and informal economic activity. Controlling for conventional antecedents of gender inequality (i.e. religion, political regime, legal origins and trade openness), this paper finds that, on average, a 10-point increase in national IQ scores in the developing world is associated with an 8.2 point reduction in SIGI, ceteris paribus. To test the robustness of our findings we apply instrumental variables (IV) and robust regression methods. We also test whether our results are sensitive to the choice of control variables and heterogeneity of nations in our sample. The negative association of intelligence with gender inequality remains statistically significant and intact in all cases.
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Language and (the estimates of) the gender wage gap
Lucas van der Velde, Joanna Tyrowicz & Joanna Siwinska
Economics Letters, forthcoming
Abstract:
In this paper we link the estimates of the gender wage gap with the gender sensitivity of the language spoken in a given country. We find that nations with more gender neutral languages tend to be characterized by lower estimates of GWG. The results are robust to a number of sensitivity checks.
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Liman Man Wai Li & Takahiko Masuda
Journal of Cross-Cultural Psychology, forthcoming
Abstract:
Past cross-cultural research studies in regulatory focus have showed that East Asians in general tend to be prevention-focused, whereas Westerners tend to be promotion-focused. Three studies extend these findings by investigating the role of regulatory focus on people’s experiences in enemyship — how people deal with their personal enemies. Study 1 demonstrated that Hong Kong Chinese, as one of representative prevention-focused East Asian groups, showed greater concern about their enemies in terms of perceived threats from their enemies, subjective awareness of enemies, and negative emotional experiences in enemyship, compared with European Canadians as one of representative promotion-focused Western groups. In addition, Study 2 demonstrated that Hong Kong Chinese memorized more pieces of information about a hypothetical enemy than did their Canadian counterparts, which demonstrated a greater concern about enemies among Hong Kong Chinese. Finally, while replicating Study 1, Study 3 demonstrated that participants’ regulatory focus explained the cultural differences in enemyship experiences. Implications for regulatory focus, cross-cultural research, and interpersonal relationship research are discussed.
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Danika Hiew et al.
Journal of Family Psychology, forthcoming
Abstract:
The current study compared Chinese, Western, and intercultural Chinese–Western couples’ communication and examined how culture moderates the association of communication with relationship satisfaction. We coded the communication of 33 Western couples, 36 Chinese couples, and 54 intercultural Chinese–Western couples when discussing a relationship problem and when reminiscing about positive relationship events. Couples with Chinese female partners showed fewer positive behaviors and more negative behaviors (as classified in existing Western coding systems) than couples with Western female partners. The male partner’s culture had few associations with couples’ rates of communication behavior. Relationship satisfaction was associated with low rates of negative behaviors and high rates of most of the positive behaviors across cultural groups, and these associations were more evident in problem discussions than positive reminiscences.
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Cultural Differences in Support Provision: The Importance of Relationship Quality
Jacqueline Chen et al.
Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, forthcoming
Abstract:
Emotional expression is highly valued in individualistic cultures, whereas emotional restraint is prioritized in collectivistic cultures. We hypothesized that high-quality relationships in these cultures would exhibit the forms of support provision congruent with their respective expectations. Study 1 examined support transactions among friends in response to a laboratory stressor and found that objectively judged relationship quality (RQ) more strongly positively predicted emotion-focused support provision behaviors by European Americans than by Asian Americans. Study 2, a questionnaire study, found that self-reported RQ predicted emotion-focused support provision more strongly among European Americans than among Japanese. Study 3 investigated more indirect forms of support and found that RQ more strongly predicted worrying about and monitoring close others enduring stressors and spending time with them without talking about the stressor among Asian Americans compared with European Americans. These findings suggest that RQ is expressed in terms of support provision in culturally normative ways.
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Dejun Tony Kong
Personality and Individual Differences, December 2015, Pages 278–281
Abstract:
Adopting a gene–environment interaction view, the current research investigated the 5-HTTLPR S-allele prevalence as a moderator for the linkage between democracy and social trust at the societal level. The empirical analysis of 58 societies reveals that the interaction of democracy and the 5-HTTLPR S-allele prevalence is negatively related to social trust, even when a climatoeconomic (climatic demands × wealth) model of social trust is accounted for. The positive relationship between democracy and social trust exists only in societies with a lower level of the 5-HTTLPR S-allele prevalence and is absent in societies with a higher level of the 5-HTTLPR S-allele prevalence. The current findings not only provide important implications for research on social trust across cultures but also add to the emerging literature on gene–environment interactions.
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Country-Specific Preferences and Employment Rates in Europe
Simone Moriconi & Giovanni Peri
NBER Working Paper, September 2015
Abstract:
European countries exhibit significant differences in employment rates of adult males. Differences in labor-leisure preferences, partly determined by cultural values that vary across countries, can be responsible for part of these differences. However, differences in labor market institutions, productivity, and skills of the labor force are also crucial factors and likely correlated with preferences. In this paper we use variation among first- and second-generation cross-country European migrants to isolate the effect of culturally transmitted labor-leisure preferences on individual employment rates. If migrants maintain some of their country of origin labor-leisure preferences as they move to different labor market conditions, we can separate the impact of preferences from the effect of other factors. We find country-specific labor-leisure preferences explain about 24% of the top-bottom variation in employment rates across European countries.
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Norm Conformity across Societies
Moti Michaeli & Daniel Spiro
Journal of Public Economics, forthcoming
Abstract:
This paper studies the aggregate distribution of declared opinions and behavior when heterogeneous individuals make the trade-off between being true to their private opinions and conforming to a social norm. The model sheds light on how various sanctioning regimes induce conformity and by whom, and on phenomena such as societal polarization and unimodal concentration. In strict societies, individuals will tend to either fully conform to the social norm or totally ignore it, while individuals in liberal societies will tend to compromise between these two extremes. Furthermore, the degree of strictness determines whether those who nearly agree with the norm or those who strongly disagree with it will conform. The degree of liberalism similarly determines which individuals will compromise the most. A number of empirical predictions, and several methods of how to test them, are suggested.
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Hohyung Choi et al.
Journal of Cross-Cultural Psychology, forthcoming
Abstract:
The current study examined whether priming interdependent relative to independent self-knowledge would induce different thinking styles among Western participants, and whether this would, in turn, affect the speed of detecting changes in a change-blindness task. Based on predictions from the semantic–procedural interface model, we predicted that participants would attend more to the context following an interdependent self-construal priming manipulation than following an independent self-construal priming manipulation. Sixty individuals were asked to circle the pronouns we/us/our or I/me/my in a paragraph of text. Following this, all participants were shown alternating images in a change-blindness task. Reaction times and accuracy rates at identifying focal and contextual changes were measured. Though our Western participants were faster at identifying changes in focal objects relative to contextual objects, this difference in reaction times was reduced in half for participants who were primed with interdependency (we/us/our pronoun circling) relative to independence (I/me/my pronoun circling). This result is consistent with the claim that interdependent and independent self-construals are stored in a semantic network which is connected to different procedural modes of thinking and that by priming these different views of the self, participants activate a mode of thinking that influences attention.
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Superstitions, Street Traffic, and Subjective Well-Being
Michael Anderson et al.
NBER Working Paper, September 2015
Abstract:
Congestion plays a central role in urban and transportation economics. Existing estimates of congestion costs rely on stated or revealed preferences studies. We explore a complementary measure of congestion costs based on self-reported happiness. Exploiting quasi-random variation in daily congestion in Beijing that arises because of superstitions about the number four, we estimate a strong effect of daily congestion on self-reported happiness. When benchmarking this effect against the relationship between income and self-reported happiness we compute implied congestion costs that are several times larger than conventional estimates. Several factors, including the value of reliability and externalities on non-travelers, can reconcile our alternative estimates with the existing literature.