World of differences
Cut From the Same Cloth: Similarly Dishonest Individuals Across Countries
Heather Mann et al.
Journal of Cross-Cultural Psychology, forthcoming
Abstract:
Norms for dishonest behaviors vary across societies, but whether this variation is related to differences in individuals’ core tendencies toward dishonesty is unknown. We compare individual dishonesty on a novel task across 10 participant samples from five countries varying in corruption and cultural values. In each country, a die-rolling task was administered to students at major public universities and the general public in coffee shops. A separate group of participants in each country predicted that dishonesty would vary across countries and demonstrated a home country dishonesty bias. In contrast to predictions from independent samples, observed dishonesty was limited in magnitude and similar across countries. We found no meaningful relationships between dishonesty on our task and macro-level indicators, including corruption ratings and cultural values. These findings suggest that individuals around the world are similarly dishonest at their core.
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Shared Cultural History as a Predictor of Political and Economic Changes among Nation States
Luke Matthews et al.
PLoS ONE, April 2016
Abstract:
Political and economic risks arise from social phenomena that spread within and across countries. Regime changes, protest movements, and stock market and default shocks can have ramifications across the globe. Quantitative models have made great strides at predicting these events in recent decades but incorporate few explicitly measured cultural variables. However, in recent years cultural evolutionary theory has emerged as a major paradigm to understand the inheritance and diffusion of human cultural variation. Here, we combine these two strands of research by proposing that measures of socio-linguistic affiliation derived from language phylogenies track variation in cultural norms that influence how political and economic changes diffuse across the globe. First, we show that changes over time in a country’s democratic or autocratic character correlate with simultaneous changes among their socio-linguistic affiliations more than with changes of spatially proximate countries. Second, we find that models of changes in sovereign default status favor including socio-linguistic affiliations in addition to spatial data. These findings suggest that better measurement of cultural networks could be profoundly useful to policy makers who wish to diversify commercial, social, and other forms of investment across political and economic risks on an international scale.
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Stacey Doan et al.
Developmental Science, forthcoming
Abstract:
Parenting strategies involving psychological control are associated with increased adjustment problems in children. However, no research has examined the extent to which culture and psychological control predict children's stress physiology. We examine cultural differences in maternal psychological control and its associations with children's cortisol. Chinese (N = 59) and American (N = 45) mother-child dyads participated in the study. Mothers reported on psychological control. Children's cortisol was collected during a stressor and two indices of Area Under the Curve (AUC) were computed: AUCg which accounts for total output, and AUCi, which captures reactivity. Results indicate that Chinese mothers reported higher levels of psychological control and Chinese children had higher levels of AUCg than their American counterparts. Across both cultures, psychological control was significantly associated with increased cortisol levels as indexed by AUCg. There were no associations for AUCi. Finally, mediation analyses demonstrated that psychological control fully explained cultural differences in children's cortisol stress response as indexed by AUCg.
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The Impact of Culture on Well-Being: Evidence from a Natural Experiment
Gábor Hajdu & Tamás Hajdu
Journal of Happiness Studies, June 2016, Pages 1089-1110
Abstract:
This paper examines the effect of culture on subjective well-being. By exploiting the natural experiment of migration we are able to separate the effect of culture (intrinsic cultural disposition, values, beliefs, norms) from other extrinsic institutional, economic and social factors. Using data from five rounds of the European Social Survey we find that holding constant the external environment (living in the same residence country) and controlling for the important socio-demographic attributes, immigrants from countries with high levels of life satisfaction report higher life satisfaction than immigrants from countries with low levels of life satisfaction. The effect of satisfaction in the birth country lasts across generations and is stronger for immigrants who are more attached to the culture of their birth country. Since any observed differences among the immigrants is their cultural background (their birth countries), the results can be interpreted as the effect of culture on life satisfaction. Our results suggest that besides economic and social variables, institutions and personal characteristics, cultural factors play an important role in satisfaction.
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The Biogeographic Origins of Novelty-Seeking Traits
Erkan Gören
Evolution and Human Behavior, forthcoming
Abstract:
This paper empirically investigates the evolutionary drivers of between-population variation of the human DRD4 exon III locus, a particular gene associated with the human personality trait of novelty-seeking behavior. Providing a novel compilation of worldwide DRD4 exon III allele frequencies in a large sample of indigenous populations around the world, this study employs population-specific biogeographic indicators to test the hypothesis of natural selection acting on the set of DRD4 exon III allele variants. The estimates suggest that migratory distance from East Africa and various population-specific biogeographic indicators, such as latitude, land suitability for agriculture, pasture land, and terrain ruggedness, contributed significantly to overall between-population DRD4 exon III polymorphism.
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Does Causality Matter More Now? Increase in the Proportion of Causal Language in English Texts
Rumen Iliev & Robert Axelrod
Psychological Science, May 2016, Pages 635-643
Abstract:
The vast majority of the work on culture and cognition has focused on cross-cultural comparisons, largely ignoring the dynamic aspects of culture. In this article, we provide a diachronic analysis of causal cognition over time. We hypothesized that the increased role of education, science, and technology in Western societies should be accompanied by greater attention to causal connections. To test this hypothesis, we compared word frequencies in English texts from different time periods and found an increase in the use of causal language of about 40% over the past two centuries. The observed increase was not attributable to general language effects or to changing semantics of causal words. We also found that there was a consistent difference between the 19th and the 20th centuries, and that the increase happened mainly in the 20th century.
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Nastiness, Morality and Religiosity in 33 nations
Lazar Stankov & Jihyun Lee
Personality and Individual Differences, September 2016, Pages 56–66
Abstract:
This study aimed to identify the main dimensions of social attitudes across 33 countries. Altogether, 20 social attitude scales were administered, mostly to university students (N = 6938). A series of factor analyses showed that three factors exist at the pancultural level: Morality, Nastiness and Religiosity. Furthermore, Morality and Nastiness did not correlate with each other, but Religiosity correlated with both Morality and Nastiness. This suggests that one can be religious and both moral or nasty. Only one factor – Conservatism – emerged at the ecological level (i.e., between-countries analysis). The largest cross-cultural differences were found on the dimension of Religiosity, followed by Nastiness and then by Morality. The clear distinction emerged between South East Asia, South Asia and Sub-Saharan Africa on one hand, scoring high on all three factors, and Western Europe, Eastern Europe and Anglo regions on the other, scoring low on all three factors.
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Managers’ cultural background and disclosure attributes
Francois Brochet et al.
Harvard Working Paper, February 2016
Abstract:
We examine how cultural background, inferred from a manager’s ethnicity, affects managers’ communication with investors. Using a sample of earnings conference calls transcripts with 26,430 executives from 42 countries, we find that managers from ethnic groups that have a more individualistic culture (i) use a more optimistic tone, (ii) exhibit greater self-reference, and (iii) make fewer apologies in their disclosure narratives. Managers’ ethnic culture has a lasting effect on their narratives — the effects persist even for executives who are later exposed to different ethnic cultures through work experience. We find that the capital market responds positively to optimistic tone yet does not distinguish between the optimism in tone of managers from different ethnic backgrounds. The findings suggest that managers’ ethnic backgrounds have a significant effect on how they communicate with the capital markets and how the markets respond to the disclosure event.
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Gender bias in nineteenth-century England: Evidence from factory children
Sara Horrell & Deborah Oxley
Economics & Human Biology, September 2016, Pages 47–64
Abstract:
Gender bias against girls in nineteenth-century England has received much interest but establishing its existence has proved difficult. We utilise data on heights of 16,402 children working in northern textile factories in 1837 to examine whether gender bias was evident. Current interpretations argue against any difference. Here our comparisons with modern height standards reveal greater deprivation for girls than for boys. Discrimination is measured in girls’ height-for-age score (HAZ) falling eight standard deviations below boys’ at ages 11, 11.5 and 12 years of age, capturing the very poor performance of factory girls. But this result cannot be taken at face value. We query whether modern standards require adjustment to account for the later timing of puberty in historical populations and develop an alternative. We also test the validity of the age data, considering whether parents were more prone to lie about the ages of their daughters, and question whether the supply of girls was fundamentally different from that of boys. We conclude that neither proposition is justified. Disadvantage to girls remains, although its absence amongst younger children precludes an indictment of culturally-founded gender bias. The height data must remain mute on the source of this discrimination but we utilise additional information to examine some hypotheses: occupational sorting, differential susceptibility to disease, poorer nutrition for girls, disproportionate stunting from the effects of nutritional deprivation, and type and amount of work undertaken. Of these we suggest that girls had to do arduous physical labour in the home alongside their factory work and that girls may possibly have been more likely than boys to be put into factory work below the legal age limit. Both represent forms of gender bias.
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Culture modulates implicit ownership-induced self-bias in memory
Samuel Sparks, Sheila Cunningham & Ada Kritikos
Cognition, August 2016, Pages 89–98
Abstract:
The relation of incoming stimuli to the self implicitly determines the allocation of cognitive resources. Cultural variations in the self-concept shape cognition, but the extent is unclear because the majority of studies sample only Western participants. We report cultural differences (Asian versus Western) in ownership-induced self-bias in recognition memory for objects. In two experiments, participants allocated a series of images depicting household objects to self-owned or other-owned virtual baskets based on colour cues before completing a surprise recognition memory test for the objects. The ‘other’ was either a stranger or a close other. In both experiments, Western participants showed greater recognition memory accuracy for self-owned compared with other-owned objects, consistent with an independent self-construal. In Experiment 1, which required minimal attention to the owned objects, Asian participants showed no such ownership-related bias in recognition accuracy. In Experiment 2, which required attention to owned objects to move them along the screen, Asian participants again showed no overall memory advantage for self-owned items and actually exhibited higher recognition accuracy for mother-owned than self-owned objects, reversing the pattern observed for Westerners. This is consistent with an interdependent self-construal which is sensitive to the particular relationship between the self and other. Overall, our results suggest that the self acts as an organising principle for allocating cognitive resources, but that the way it is constructed depends upon cultural experience. Additionally, the manifestation of these cultural differences in self-representation depends on the allocation of attentional resources to self- and other-associated stimuli.
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Cultural differences in visual object recognition in 3-year-old children
Megumi Kuwabara & Linda Smith
Journal of Experimental Child Psychology, July 2016, Pages 22–38
Abstract:
Recent research indicates that culture penetrates fundamental processes of perception and cognition. Here, we provide evidence that these influences begin early and influence how preschool children recognize common objects. The three tasks (N = 128) examined the degree to which nonface object recognition by 3-year-olds was based on individual diagnostic features versus more configural and holistic processing. Task 1 used a 6-alternative forced choice task in which children were asked to find a named category in arrays of masked objects where only three diagnostic features were visible for each object. U.S. children outperformed age-matched Japanese children. Task 2 presented pictures of objects to children piece by piece. U.S. children recognized the objects given fewer pieces than Japanese children, and the likelihood of recognition increased for U.S. children, but not Japanese children, when the piece added was rated by both U.S. and Japanese adults as highly defining. Task 3 used a standard measure of configural progressing, asking the degree to which recognition of matching pictures was disrupted by the rotation of one picture. Japanese children’s recognition was more disrupted by inversion than was that of U.S. children, indicating more configural processing by Japanese than U.S. children. The pattern suggests early cross-cultural differences in visual processing; findings that raise important questions about how visual experiences differ across cultures and about universal patterns of cognitive development.