Worldly
Ronald Fischer
Journal of Cross-Cultural Psychology, October 2013, Pages 1107-1121
Abstract:
The study tests gene-environment interactions for explaining cross-national differences in social hierarchy values and beliefs. Greater threats are predicted to be associated with stronger endorsement and support of social hierarchies in the presence of population genetic deficiencies in processing threat-related information. Predictions are tested with data from 28 societies, focusing on hierarchical dominance values in teachers and student samples (28 societies) and support for central authority in representative samples (21 societies). The interaction between greater population frequency of short alleles of the 5-HTT serotonin transporter gene and presence of threats was significant in six out of the eight regressions. I discuss the findings in the larger context of interdependencies between biological and cultural processes and the importance of broadening our tool kit for studying cultural differences.
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Does travel inspire? Evidence from the superstars of modern art
Christiane Hellmanzik
Empirical Economics, August 2013, Pages 281-303
Abstract:
This paper investigates whether travel increases the value of paintings produced by modern visual artists. The analysis is based on the 214 most prominent modern visual artists born between 1850 and 1945 and auction records of their paintings over the past 20 years. We find that artworks produced in the year of a journey are 7% more valuable than paintings produced in periods with no travel. We attribute this effect to human capital investments, knowledge spillovers and inspiration from the travel destination itself. There are persistent, but declining benefits to travel over the subsequent 4 years. The analysis shows that the impact of travel is smaller for later periods as modern art becomes more abstract. The effect on the value of paintings differs depending on the purpose of a journey: work-related, recreational and politically motivated journeys have a positive contemporaneous effect on value, whereas educational journeys have a negative effect. In addition, we find that France, Germany and the United States are the most frequently visited destinations for modern artists and also yield considerable benefits during times of strong innovation.
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Taste Endures! The Rankings of Roger de Piles (†1709) and Three Centuries of Art Prices
Kathryn Graddy
Journal of Economic History, September 2013, Pages 766-791
Abstract:
Roger de Piles (1635–1709) was a French art critic who decomposed the style and ability of 58 different artists into areas of composition, drawing, color, and expression, rating each artist on a 20-point scale in each category. Based on evidence from two data sets that together span from the mid-eighteenth century to the present, this article shows that De Piles' overall ratings have withstood the test of a very long period of time, with estimates indicating that the works of his higher-rated artists achieved both greater returns and higher critical acclaim than the works of his lower-rated artists.
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Cultural Resonance and the Diffusion of Suicide Bombings: The Role of Collectivism
Robert Braun & Michael Genkin
Journal of Conflict Resolution, forthcoming
Abstract:
Why do some terrorist organizations, but not others, adopt suicide bombing as a tactic? Dominant accounts focusing on organizational capacity, ideology, and efficacy leave certain elements of the phenomenon unexplained. The authors argue that a key factor that influences whether a terrorist organization does or does not adopt suicide terrorism is cultural resonance. This is the idea that deep and specific cultural logics, which transcend religion and nationalism, enable and constrain the sorts of instrumental behaviors that can be utilized in the pursuit of group goals. The article investigates the role of a well-established cultural orientation of collectivism, which enables the authors to measure culture systematically. Case studies, survey data, and experimental research are used to illustrate that collectivism lowers the cost of adoption by facilitating the recruitment of attackers and reducing societal backlash against self-sacrifice. The authors then test for the relationship between collectivism and suicide-bombing adoption using an event history analysis framework, finding a strong correlation.
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Children’s Questions in Cross-Cultural Perspective: A Four-Culture Study
Mary Gauvain, Robert Munroe & Heidi Beebe
Journal of Cross-Cultural Psychology, October 2013, Pages 1148-1165
Abstract:
This study investigated language data collected in 1978-1979 from ninety-six 3- to 5-year-old children in four different non-Western cultures: Garifuna in Belize, Logoli in Kenya, Newars in Nepal, and Samoans in America Samoa. There were 24 children per culture; half of the children were 3 years of age, and half were 5 years of age. The study examined the use of information-seeking questions in everyday life situations and the proportion of explanation-seeking questions (why-questions) in these communities relative to those reported among Western samples. Results revealed that the number of information-seeking questions does not differ from those of Western samples, but the proportion of explanation-seeking questions was much lower than that reported for Western children. Implications of these findings are discussed.
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Perceived Competition Explains Regional Differences in the Stereotype Content of Immigrant Groups
Steve Binggeli, Franciska Krings & Sabine Sczesny
Social Psychology, forthcoming
Abstract:
This research investigates differences in the stereotype content of immigrant groups between linguistic regions. We expected that immigrant groups who speak the local language of a specific linguistic region would be perceived as more competitive within this region than in another linguistic region. Further, we expected these differences would underlie regional differences in stereotype content, albeit only for the warmth dimension. Predictions were tested in the two largest linguistic regions of Switzerland. As expected, in the German-speaking region, locals perceived German immigrants as more competitive and thus as less warm, whereas in the French-speaking region, locals perceived French immigrants as more competitive and, consequently, as less warm. So, paradoxically, immigrants with strong integration potential are particularly disliked because they are regarded as direct competitors.
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Rasmus Kleis Nielsen
International Journal of Press/Politics, October 2013, Pages 392-412
Abstract:
Several comparative media researchers have hypothesized that the media systems of affluent Western democracies are becoming more and more structurally homogeneous — that they are becoming “Americanized.” This article uses data on newspaper industry revenues, commercial television revenues, Internet use, and funding for public service media from a strategic sample of six countries to test the structural version of the convergence hypothesis, looking at the period from 2000 to 2009. (The countries included are Finland, France, Germany, Italy, the United Kingdom, and the United States.) The analysis demonstrates an “absence of Americanization” as the six media systems have not become structurally more similar over the last decade. Instead, developments are summarized as a combination of (1) parallel displacements, (2) persistent particularities, and (3) the emergence of some new peculiarities. Theoretically, economic and technological forces were expected to drive convergence. The article suggests that the reason these forces have not driven convergence in recent years may be that the interplay between them have changed as part of a broader shift from the mass media, mass production, and mass markets characteristic of twentieth-century Western societies and toward the fragmented media landscapes, tailored production, and niche marketing increasingly characteristic of early-twenty-first century affluent democracies.
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Psychological Traces of China's Socio-Economic Reforms in the Ultimatum and Dictator Games
Liqi Zhu, Gerd Gigerenzer & Gang Huangfu
PLoS ONE, August 2013
Abstract:
Can traces of rapid socio-economic changes within a society be reflected in experimental games? The post-Mao reforms in China provide a unique natural quasi-experiment to study people from the same society who were raised with radically different values about distribution of wealth and altruistic behavior. We tested whether the size of offers in the ultimatum and dictator games are an increasing function of the number of years Chinese citizens experienced of the Mao era (“planned economy”). For the cohort that lived throughout the entire Mao era, we found that mean offers in the two games were substantially higher than what is typically offered in laboratory studies. These offers were also higher than those of two younger Chinese cohorts. In general, the amount offered decreased with less time spent under Mao, while in the oldest group in which every member spent the same amount of time under Mao, the younger members tended to offer more, suggesting an additional effect of early education under Mao and contradicting the alternative hypothesis that generosity increases with age. These results suggest that some of the observed individual differences in the offers made in experimental games can be traced back to the values of the socio-economic era in which individuals grew up.
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Ontogeny of prosocial behavior across diverse societies
Bailey House et al.
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 3 September 2013, Pages 14586-14591
Abstract:
Humans are an exceptionally cooperative species, but there is substantial variation in the extent of cooperation across societies. Understanding the sources of this variability may provide insights about the forces that sustain cooperation. We examined the ontogeny of prosocial behavior by studying 326 children 3–14 y of age and 120 adults from six societies (age distributions varied across societies). These six societies span a wide range of extant human variation in culture, geography, and subsistence strategies, including foragers, herders, horticulturalists, and urban dwellers across the Americas, Oceania, and Africa. When delivering benefits to others was personally costly, rates of prosocial behavior dropped across all six societies as children approached middle childhood and then rates of prosociality diverged as children tracked toward the behavior of adults in their own societies. When prosocial acts did not require personal sacrifice, prosocial responses increased steadily as children matured with little variation in behavior across societies. Our results are consistent with theories emphasizing the importance of acquired cultural norms in shaping costly forms of cooperation and creating cross-cultural diversity.
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Negative emotions predict elevated interleukin-6 in the United States but not in Japan
Yuri Miyamoto et al.
Brain, Behavior, and Immunity, forthcoming
Abstract:
Previous studies conducted in Western cultures have shown that negative emotions predict higher levels of pro-inflammatory biomarkers, specifically interleukin-6 (IL-6). This link between negative emotions and IL-6 may be specific to Western cultures where negative emotions are perceived to be problematic and thus may not extend to Eastern cultures where negative emotions are seen as acceptable and normal. Using samples of 1044 American and 382 Japanese middle-aged and older adults, we investigated whether the relationship between negative emotions and IL-6 varies by cultural context. Negative emotions predicted higher IL-6 among American adults, whereas no association was evident among Japanese adults. Furthermore, the interaction between culture and negative emotions remained even after controlling for demographic variables, psychological factors (positive emotions, neuroticism, extraversion), health behaviors (smoking status, alcohol consumption), and health status (chronic conditions, BMI). These findings highlight the role of cultural context in shaping how negative emotions affect inflammatory physiology and underscore the importance of cultural ideas and practices relevant to negative emotions for understanding of the interplay between psychology, physiology, and health.
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Michele Gelfand et al.
Journal of Social Issues, September 2013, Pages 495–517
Abstract:
Much research in the last several decades has examined the social, political, and economic factors that predict terrorism, yet to date, there has been little attention to cultural factors and their relationship to terrorism. We present findings from the Global Terrorism Database showing how numerous cultural dimensions identified in the cultural psychology literature relate to over 80,000 terrorist attacks that occurred between 1970 and 2007. Controlling for economic and religious variables, our results suggest that fatalistic beliefs, rigid gender roles, and greater tightness are related to a greater number of terrorist attacks or fatalities. While fatalism and low gender egalitarianism were related to the overall number of terrorist incidents and fatalities, cultural tightness was related the overall lethality of events, i.e., fatalities per incident. We discuss theoretical and practical implications of our findings.
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Up or Down? How Culture and Color Affect Judgments
Feng Jiang et al.
Journal of Behavioral Decision Making, forthcoming
Abstract:
In the Mainland China stock market, an upmarket is represented by the color red, whereas a downmarket is represented by the color green. Elsewhere, including the Chinese Hong Kong stock market, the color representations are the opposite. Three studies were conducted to examine the red-up–green-down effect for Mainland Chinese as well as the green-up–red-down effect for Hong Kong people. Study 1 showed that Mainland Chinese tended to predict greater economic growth (study 1a) and higher growth in consumption trends (study 1b) when the experimental materials were presented in red than in green, whereas Hong Kong participants exhibited the opposite tendencies. Study 2 found that Mainland Chinese implicitly associated red and green with up and down, respectively; Hong Kong people, however, implicitly associated green and red with up and down, respectively. Study 3 further indicated that Mainland Chinese were more likely to predict good outcomes when scenarios were presented in red, whereas Hong Kong participants were more likely to predict good outcomes when scenarios were presented in green. These findings suggest that culturally specific environment cues could influence human prediction and judgment. Implications for judgment generally are discussed.
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The Inaccuracy of National Character Stereotypes
Robert McCrae et al.
Journal of Research in Personality, December 2013, Pages 831–842
Abstract:
Consensual stereotypes of some groups are relatively accurate, whereas others are not. Previous work suggesting that national character stereotypes are inaccurate has been criticized on several grounds. In this article we (a) provide arguments for the validity of assessed national mean trait levels as criteria for evaluating stereotype accuracy; and (b) report new data on national character in 26 cultures from descriptions (N=3,323) of the typical male or female adolescent, adult, or old person in each. The average ratings were internally consistent and converged with independent stereotypes of the typical culture member, but were weakly related to objective assessments of personality. We argue that this conclusion is consistent with the broader literature on the inaccuracy of national character stereotypes.
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How Does Culture Influence Corporate Risk-Taking?
Kai Li et al.
Journal of Corporate Finance, December 2013, Pages 1–22
Abstract:
We investigate the role of national culture in corporate risk-taking. We postulate that culture influences corporate risk-taking both through its effect on managerial decision-making and through its effect on a country’s formal institutions. Further, we postulate that the influence of culture is conditioned on the extent of managerial discretion as measured by earnings discretion and firm size. Using firm-level data from 35 countries and employing a hierarchical linear modeling approach to isolate the effects of firm-level and country-level variables, we show that individualism has a positive and significant association, whereas uncertainty avoidance and harmony have negative and significant associations, with corporate risk-taking. Greater earnings discretion strengthens and larger firm size weakens the association of culture with corporate risk-taking. We conclude that even in a highly globalized world with sophisticated managers, culture matters.
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The Role of Culture and Language in Avoiding Misinformation: Pilot Findings
Cagla Aydin & Stephen Ceci
Behavioral Sciences & the Law, forthcoming
Abstract:
In two pilot studies, we investigate the possibility that patterns in our linguistic environment affect the likelihood of accepting misinformation. Turkish, which marks its verbs for the source of a speaker's evidence (first-hand perception vs. hearsay), was contrasted with English which does not mark its verbs but which, to signal strength of evidence, must employ optional lexical marking. In the first pilot study, Turkish adults were shown to be affected by that language's obligatory evidential markings: their free recall for details of the events changed as a function of the type of the tense-aspect marker in use, and strong evidential markers led to increased levels of suggestibility when employed with misleading questions. In the second pilot study, Turkish- and English-speaking children were shown to be differentially suggestible depending on combinations of evidential markers in the story presented and the evidential marker employed in the misinformation subsequently provided. Together, these two pilot studies show promise in this area of research, which has been ignored by the forensic community and yet would seem to be relevant when interviewing, taking statements, and giving testimony in cross-linguistic settings.
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Love Thy Neighbor? Recessions and Interpersonal Trust in Latin America
Elizabeth Searing
Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization, October 2013, Pages 68–79
Abstract:
Trust is critical during times of institutional crisis, but intuition is ambiguous with regards to economic calamity: would a scarcer supply of goods cause greater animosity, or does a worsening economic climate constitute a common foe against which people can unite? This study investigates the relationship between the experience of recent recessionary years and levels of interpersonal trust, specifically in Latin America. First, we find that as the number of recessionary years grows larger, the strength of interpersonal trust increases; the results are generally robust to the effects of time and alternate measurements of recession. Second, levels of trust are positively correlated with confidence in the central government but negatively with corruption, robust to political ideology. Finally, we refute the assertion that Catholicism hinders economic growth through strong vertical trust channels. Instead, we find that religiosity, especially Catholicism, increases levels of interpersonal trust. Understanding such relationships opens doors for policy tools which can utilize strong central or community-level efforts, without sacrificing levels of trust in the alternate measure, in addition to options which take a hybrid approach.
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Zhuoying Zhu, Samuel Ho & George Bonanno
American Journal of Psychology, Fall 2013, Pages 261-273
Abstract:
Despite being challenged for their ecological validity, studies of emotion perception have often relied on static, posed expressions. One of the key reasons is that dynamic, spontaneous expressions are difficult to control because of the existence of display rules and frequent co-occurrence of non-emotion related facial movements. The present study investigated cross-cultural patterns in the perception of emotion using an expressive regulation paradigm for generating facial expressions. The paradigm largely balances out the competing concerns for ecological and internal validity. Americans and Hong Kong Chinese (expressors) were presented with positively and negatively valenced pictures and were asked to enhance, suppress, or naturally display their facial expressions according to their subjective emotions. Videos of naturalistic and dynamic expressions of emotions were rated by Americans and Hong Kong Chinese (judges) for valence and intensity. The 2 cultures agreed on the valence and relative intensity of emotion expressions, but cultural differences were observed in absolute intensity ratings. The differences varied between positive and negative expressions. With positive expressions, ratings were higher when there was a cultural match between the expressor and the judge and when the expression was enhanced by the expressor. With negative expressions, Chinese judges gave higher ratings than their American counterparts for Chinese expressions under all 3 expressive conditions, and the discrepancy increased with expression intensity; no cultural differences were observed when American expressions were judged. The results were discussed with respect to the "decoding rules" and "same-culture advantage" approaches of emotion perception and a negativity bias in the Chinese collective culture.