We do things differently
Culture and National Well-Being: Should Societies Emphasize Freedom or Constraint?
Jesse Harrington, Pawel Boski & Michele Gelfand
PLoS ONE, June 2015
Abstract:
Throughout history and within numerous disciplines, there exists a perennial debate about how societies should best be organized. Should they emphasize individual freedom and autonomy or security and constraint? Contrary to proponents who tout the benefits of one over the other, we demonstrate across 32 nations that both freedom and constraint exhibit a curvilinear relationship with many indicators of societal well-being. Relative to moderate nations, very permissive and very constrained nations exhibit worse psychosocial outcomes (lower happiness, greater dysthymia, higher suicide rates), worse health outcomes (lower life expectancy, greater mortality rates from cardiovascular disease and diabetes) and poorer economic and political outcomes (lower gross domestic product per capita, greater risk for political instability). This supports the notion that a balance between freedom and constraint results in the best national outcomes. Accordingly, it is time to shift the debate away from either constraint or freedom and focus on both in moderation.
---------------------
Recent evolution of learnability in American English from 1800 to 2000
Thomas Hills & James Adelman
Cognition, October 2015, Pages 87–92
Abstract:
Concreteness — the psycholinguistic property of referring to a perceptible entity — enhances processing speed, comprehension, and memory. These represent selective filters for cognition likely to influence language evolution in competitive language environments. Taking a culturomics approach, we use multiple language corpora representing more than 350 billion words combined with concreteness norms for over 40,000 English words and demonstrate a systematic rise in concrete language in American English over the last 200 years, both within and across word classes (nouns, verbs, and prepositions). Comparisons between new and old concreteness norms indicate this is not explained by semantic bleaching, but we find some evidence that the rise is related to changes in population demographics and may be associated with increasing numbers of second language learners or attention economics in response to crowding in the language market. We also examine the influence of gender and literacy. In sum, we demonstrate evolution in the psycholinguistic structure of American English, with a well-established impact on cognitive processing, which is likely to permeate modern language use.
---------------------
African polygamy: Past and present
James Fenske
Journal of Development Economics, forthcoming
Abstract:
I evaluate the impact of education on polygamy in Africa. Districts of French West Africa that received more colonial teachers and parts of sub-Saharan Africa that received Protestant or Catholic missions have lower polygamy rates in the present. I find no evidence of a causal effect of modern education on polygamy. Natural experiments that have expanded education in Nigeria, Zimbabwe, Sierra Leone and Kenya have not reduced polygamy. Colonial and missionary education, then, have been more powerful sources of cultural change than the cases of modern schooling I consider.
---------------------
Marie Schäfer, Daniel Haun & Michael Tomasello
Psychological Science, forthcoming
Abstract:
Distributing the spoils of a joint enterprise on the basis of work contribution or relative productivity seems natural to the modern Western mind. But such notions of merit-based distributive justice may be culturally constructed norms that vary with the social and economic structure of a group. In the present research, we showed that children from three different cultures have very different ideas about distributive justice. Whereas children from a modern Western society distributed the spoils of a joint enterprise precisely in proportion to productivity, children from a gerontocratic pastoralist society in Africa did not take merit into account at all. Children from a partially hunter-gatherer, egalitarian African culture distributed the spoils more equally than did the other two cultures, with merit playing only a limited role. This pattern of results suggests that some basic notions of distributive justice are not universal intuitions of the human species but rather culturally constructed behavioral norms.
---------------------
Sarah Mathew & Charles Perreault
Proceedings of the Royal Society: Biological Sciences, 7 July 2015
Abstract:
The behavioural variation among human societies is vast and unmatched in the animal world. It is unclear whether this variation is due to variation in the ecological environment or to differences in cultural traditions. Underlying this debate is a more fundamental question: is the richness of humans’ behavioural repertoire due to non-cultural mechanisms, such as causal reasoning, inventiveness, reaction norms, trial-and-error learning and evoked culture, or is it due to the population-level dynamics of cultural transmission? Here, we measure the relative contribution of environment and cultural history in explaining the behavioural variation of 172 Native American tribes at the time of European contact. We find that the effect of cultural history is typically larger than that of environment. Behaviours also persist over millennia within cultural lineages. This indicates that human behaviour is not predominantly determined by single-generation adaptive responses, contra theories that emphasize non-cultural mechanisms as determinants of human behaviour. Rather, the main mode of human adaptation is social learning mechanisms that operate over multiple generations.
---------------------
Auspicious Birth Dates among Chinese in California
Douglas Almond et al.
Economics & Human Biology, July 2015, Pages 153–159
Abstract:
The number eight is considered lucky in Chinese culture, e.g. the Beijing Olympics began at 8:08 pm on 8/8/2008. Given the potential for discretion in selecting particular dates of labor induction or scheduled Cesarean section (C-section), we consider whether Chinese-American births in California occur disproportionately on the 8th, 18th, or 28th day of the month. We find 2.3% “too many” Chinese births on these auspicious birth dates, whereas Whites show no corresponding increase. The increase in Chinese births is driven by higher parity C-sections: the number of repeat C-sections is 6% “too high” on auspicious birth dates. Sons born to Chinese parents account for the entire increase; daughter deliveries do not seem to be timed to achieve “lucky” birth dates. We also find avoidance of repeat C-section deliveries on the 4th, 14th, and 24th of the month, considered unlucky in Chinese culture. Finally, we replicate earlier work finding that Friday the 13th delivery dates are avoided and document a particularly large decrease among Chinese. For Whites and Chinese in California, mothers with higher levels of education are particularly likely to avoid delivering on the 13th.
---------------------
Ella Miron-Spektor, Susannah Paletz & Chun-Chi Lin
Journal of Organizational Behavior, forthcoming
Abstract:
Creativity is universally valued and desired. Yet, people are often reluctant to engage in creativity out of fear of being dismissed by others and losing face — the positive social image that individuals want to maintain in the presence of others. This paper investigates the effect of face logic endorsement on creativity and proposes face as a possible new explanation for cross-cultural differences in creativity. In three studies using different creativity tasks and with participants from Japan, Israel, and the United States, participants who endorsed the cultural logic of face were less creative than those less endorsing this logic. Face logic endorsement mediated the effect of culture on the novelty and fluency dimensions of creativity (Study 1). Furthermore, social-image affirmation moderated the effects of culture and face logic endorsement on creativity. When individuals' social image was affirmed, cultural differences in creativity were weakened (Study 2), and the within-culture association between face logic endorsement and creativity disappeared (Study 3). We discuss the theoretical and practical implications for fostering creativity in different cultures and in multicultural settings.
---------------------
Tamara Sims et al.
Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, forthcoming
Abstract:
Previous studies have demonstrated that European Americans have fewer mixed affective experiences (i.e., are less likely to experience the bad with the good) compared with Chinese. In this article, we argue that these cultural differences are due to “ideal affect,” or how people ideally want to feel. Specifically, we predict that people from individualistic cultures want to maximize positive and minimize negative affect more than people from collectivistic cultures, and as a result, they are less likely to actually experience mixed emotions (reflected by a more negative within-person correlation between actual positive and negative affect). We find support for this prediction in 2 experience sampling studies conducted in the United States and China (Studies 1 and 2). In addition, we demonstrate that ideal affect is a distinct construct from dialectical view of the self, which has also been related to mixed affective experience (Study 3). Finally, in Study 4, we demonstrate that experimentally manipulating the desire to maximize the positive and minimize the negative alters participants’ actual experience of mixed emotions during a pleasant (but not unpleasant or combined pleasant and unpleasant) TV clip in the United States and Hong Kong. Together, these findings suggest that across cultures, how people want to feel shapes how they actually feel, particularly people’s experiences of mixed affect.
---------------------
Michele Gelfand et al.
Journal of Organizational Behavior, forthcoming
Abstract:
We complement the dominant rational model of negotiation found in the West with a new honor model of negotiation found in many Arabic-speaking populations and illustrate the linguistic processes that facilitate creativity in negotiation agreements in the United States and Egypt. Community samples (N = 136) were recruited in the United States and Egypt and negotiated an integrative bargaining task, Discount Marketplace. Analyses of categories of the Linguistic Inquiry and Word Count (LIWC) and our own newly developed honor dictionary illustrate that the same language that predicts integrative agreements in the United States, namely, that which is rational and logical (cognitive mechanisms, LIWC), actually backfires and hinders agreements in Egypt. Creativity in Egypt, by contrast, reflects an honor model of negotiating with language that promotes honor gain (i.e., moral integrity) and honor protection (i.e., image and strength). Theoretical and practical implications are discussed.
---------------------
Maria Bigoni et al.
Economic Journal, forthcoming
Abstract:
We present the first lab-in-the field experiment on the Italian North-South divide. Using a representative sample of the population, we measure whether regional disparities in ability to cooperate emerge even if differences in geography, institutions, and criminal intrusion are silenced. We report that a behavioural gap in cooperation exists: Northern and Southern citizens react differently to the same incentives. Moreover, this gap cannot be accounted for by tolerance for risk, proxies of social capital, and ’amoral familism.’ At least a share of North-South disparities is likely to derive from persistent differences in social norms.
---------------------
Why Work More? The Impact of Taxes, and Culture of Leisure on Labor Supply in Europe
Naci Mocan & Luiza Pogorelova
NBER Working Paper, June 2015
Abstract:
We use micro data from the European Social Survey to investigate the impact of “culture of leisure” and taxes on labor force participation and hours worked of second-generation immigrants who reside in 26 European countries. These individuals are born in Europe, and they have been exposed to institutional, legal and labor market structures of their countries, including the tax rates. Fathers of these individuals are first-generation immigrants who migrated from 81 different countries. We construct measures of “taste for leisure” in the country of origin of each immigrant father. We employ average and marginal taxes for each country of residence, and control for a large set of individual characteristics, in addition to attributes of the country of residence and country of ancestry. The results show that for women, both taxes and culture of leisure impact participation and hours worked. For men, taxes influence labor supply both at the intensive and the extensive margins, but culture of leisure has no impact.
---------------------
Ceren Günsoy et al.
Journal of Cross-Cultural Psychology, forthcoming
Abstract:
We investigated how responses to interpersonal conflict differed across Ghana, Turkey, and the northern United States. Due to low levels of interpersonal embeddedness, people from individualistic cultures (northern United States) have more freedom to prioritize individual goals and to choose competitive and confrontational responses to conflict compared with people from collectivistic cultures (Turkey, Ghana). Consistent with this idea, we found that northern American participants were less willing to avoid instigators but more willing to retaliate against them compared with other cultural groups. Moreover, in honor cultures like Turkey, there is strong concern for other people’s opinions, and insults are more threatening to personal and family reputation compared with non-honor cultures. Therefore, Turkish participants were less willing to engage in submissive behaviors such as yielding to the instigator. Finally, in Ghana, relationships are more obligatory and enemies are more prominent compared with other cultures. Consistent with our predictions, Ghanaian participants were less willing than Turkish or northern American participants to choose retaliation but more willing to yield to the instigator. Differences in response styles were consistent with dominant cultural values and the cultural nature of interpersonal relationships.
---------------------
The Effect of Cultural Distance on Contracting Decisions: The Case of Executive Compensation
Stephen Bryan, Robert Nash & Ajay Patel
Journal of Corporate Finance, forthcoming
Abstract:
This paper focuses on how differences in national culture may relate to cross-country differences in the structure of executive compensation contracts. We know that firms design executive compensation contracts to reduce conflicts of interest between owners and managers. We contend that cultural context affects these conflicts of interest and hypothesize that firms from cultures that are similar (different) should design compensation contracts that are similar (different). To specify cultural context, we calculate cultural distance using value dimensions from Hofstede (1980) and test for a relation between culture and contracting using compensation data for 39 countries from 1996-2009. Our findings indicate that culture is a significant determinant of cross-sectional differences in compensation structures. These results are robust to our use of instrumental variables methodologies (to mitigate concerns of potential omitted variables and reverse causation). By exploring the relatively unexplored impact of national culture on compensation structure, we hope to contribute to a better overall understanding of contracting decisions.
---------------------
Jinguang Zhang, Scott Reid & Jing Xu
PLoS ONE, June 2015
Abstract:
National surveys reveal notable individual differences in U.S. citizens’ attitudes toward freedom of expression, including freedom of the press and speech. Recent theoretical developments and empirical findings suggest that ecological factors impact censorship attitudes in addition to individual difference variables (e.g., education, conservatism), but no research has compared the explanatory power of prominent ecological theories. This study tested climato-economic, parasite stress, and life history theories using four measures of attitudes toward censoring the press and offensive speech obtained from two national surveys in the U.S.A. Neither climate demands nor its interaction with state wealth — two key variables for climato-economic theory — predicted any of the four outcome measures. Interstate parasite stress significantly predicted two, with a marginally significant effect on the third, but the effects became non-significant when the analyses were stratified for race (as a control for extrinsic risks). Teenage birth rates (a proxy of human life history) significantly predicted attitudes toward press freedom during wartime, but the effect was the opposite of what life history theory predicted. While none of the three theories provided a fully successful explanation of individual differences in attitudes toward freedom of expression, parasite stress and life history theories do show potentials. Future research should continue examining the impact of these ecological factors on human psychology by further specifying the mechanisms and developing better measures for those theories.
---------------------
Culture Moderates Biases in Search Decisions
Jake Pattaratanakun & Vincent Mak
Psychological Science, forthcoming
Abstract:
Prior studies suggest that people often search insufficiently in sequential-search tasks compared with the predictions of benchmark optimal strategies that maximize expected payoff. However, those studies were mostly conducted in individualist Western cultures; Easterners from collectivist cultures, with their higher susceptibility to escalation of commitment induced by sunk search costs, could exhibit a reversal of this undersearch bias by searching more than optimally, but only when search costs are high. We tested our theory in four experiments. In our pilot experiment, participants generally undersearched when search cost was low, but only Eastern participants oversearched when search cost was high. In Experiments 1 and 2, we obtained evidence for our hypothesized effects via a cultural-priming manipulation on bicultural participants in which we manipulated the language used in the program interface. We obtained further process evidence for our theory in Experiment 3, in which we made sunk costs nonsalient in the search task — as expected, cross-cultural effects were largely mitigated.
---------------------
Expressions of Gratitude in Children and Adolescents: Insights From China and the United States
Dan Wang, Yudan Wang & Jonathan Tudge
Journal of Cross-Cultural Psychology, forthcoming
Abstract:
Gratitude is a socially desirable virtue that is related to well-being at both personal and societal levels. The present study took a developmental perspective to examine changes with age in types of wishes and gratitude in two societies. The samples consisted of 357 children, aged 7 to 14 years, from a medium-sized city in the southeast United States, and 334 children from a metropolitan area in southern China. Results showed that the expression of connective gratitude, which is considered the most sophisticated form of gratitude and theorized to promote personal well-being and social relationships, increased with age, regardless of society. Participants in China, a society considered to emphasize relatedness more than does the United States, were more likely to express connective gratitude than were their counterparts in the United States. Furthermore, an inverse relationship between hedonistic wishes and connective gratitude was revealed in the U.S. sample.
---------------------
The White-Man Effect: How Foreigner Presence Affects Behavior in Experiments
Jacobus Cilliers, Oeindrila Dube & Bilal Siddiqi
Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization, forthcoming
Abstract:
We experimentally vary white foreigner presence in dictator games across 60 villages in Sierra Leone, and find that the simple presence of a white foreigner increases player contributions by 19 percent. To separate the impact of the white foreigner's race and nationality from other characteristics, we test additional predictions. First, the white foreigner's presence may heighten demand effects, prompting players to impress the white foreigner by being more generous. This should make behavior in the game less indicative of true generosity. Consistent with this, we find that game contributions are no longer predicted by real-world public good contributions when the white foreigner is present. Second, those more familiar with aid may perceive the games as a form of means-testing, and therefore give less to signal that they are poor. Consistent with this, in the presence of the white foreigner, players in more aid-exposed villages give less, and are more likely to believe that the games are testing them for aid suitability. Together, these results suggest that players’ giving decisions respond to the white foreigner's race and nationality. Behavioral measures are increasingly used to infer cross-national differences in social preferences or to assess aid effectiveness — our results suggest that we should be cautious in these uses.
---------------------
Generosity and sharing among villagers: Do women give more?
Sosina Bezu & Stein Holden
Journal of Behavioral and Experimental Economics, August 2015, Pages 103–111
Abstract:
This paper explores generosity among anonymous villagers and sharing within families using a dictator game field experiment that was carried out in rural villages in Ethiopia. We find that generosity among anonymous villagers is very low compared with the findings in the dictator game literature. On average, the dictators in our sample allocate only 6% of their endowments to anonymous persons in the village, and 73% of the dictators keep all of their endowments to themselves when paired with anonymous persons. However, we found very high levels of sharing between husband and wife. In terms of gender differences, we find that women are not more generous towards anonymous persons, nor are they more likely to share within their families. In fact, there is some evidence, albeit weak, showing that women allocate less to anonymous persons than do men. Additionally, there is strong evidence that women are less likely to share their resources with their spouse than are men.