The International Language
The language of implicit preferences
Oludamini Ogunnaike, Yarrow Dunham & Mahzarin Banaji
Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, forthcoming
Abstract:
Are attitudes affected by the language in which they are expressed? In particular, do individual preferences shift to accord with the cultural values embedded in a given language? To examine these questions, two experiments tested bilingual participants, administering the same test of implicit attitudes in two languages. In both studies, participants manifested attitudes that favored social categories associated with the test language, e.g. more pro-Moroccan attitudes when tested in Arabic as compared with French (Study 1) and more pro-Spanish attitudes when tested in Spanish as compared with English (Study 2). The effects of language on elicited preference were large (mean d > .7), providing evidence that preferences are not merely transmitted through language but also shaped by it.
---------------------
Marc Ouellet, Julio Santiago, Ziv Israeli & Shai Gabay
Experimental Psychology, Summer 2010, Pages 308-314
Abstract:
Spanish and English speakers tend to conceptualize time as running from left to right along a mental line. Previous research suggests that this representational strategy arises from the participants' exposure to a left-to-right writing system. However, direct evidence supporting this assertion suffers from several limitations and relies only on the visual modality. This study subjected to a direct test the reading hypothesis using an auditory task. Participants from two groups (Spanish and Hebrew) differing in the directionality of their orthographic system had to discriminate temporal reference (past or future) of verbs and adverbs (referring to either past or future) auditorily presented to either the left or right ear by pressing a left or a right key. Spanish participants were faster responding to past words with the left hand and to future words with the right hand, whereas Hebrew participants showed the opposite pattern. Our results demonstrate that the left-right mapping of time is not restricted to the visual modality and that the direction of reading accounts for the preferred directionality of the mental time line. These results are discussed in the context of a possible mechanism underlying the effects of reading direction on highly abstract conceptual representations.
---------------------
The weirdest people in the world?
Joseph Henrich, Steven Heine & Ara Norenzayan
Behavioral and Brain Sciences, June 2010, Pages 61-83
Abstract:
Behavioral scientists routinely publish broad claims about human psychology and behavior in the world's top journals based on samples drawn entirely from Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, and Democratic (WEIRD) societies. Researchers - often implicitly - assume that either there is little variation across human populations, or that these "standard subjects" are as representative of the species as any other population. Are these assumptions justified? Here, our review of the comparative database from across the behavioral sciences suggests both that there is substantial variability in experimental results across populations and that WEIRD subjects are particularly unusual compared with the rest of the species - frequent outliers. The domains reviewed include visual perception, fairness, cooperation, spatial reasoning, categorization and inferential induction, moral reasoning, reasoning styles, self-concepts and related motivations, and the heritability of IQ. The findings suggest that members of WEIRD societies, including young children, are among the least representative populations one could find for generalizing about humans. Many of these findings involve domains that are associated with fundamental aspects of psychology, motivation, and behavior - hence, there are no obvious a priori grounds for claiming that a particular behavioral phenomenon is universal based on sampling from a single subpopulation. Overall, these empirical patterns suggests that we need to be less cavalier in addressing questions of human nature on the basis of data drawn from this particularly thin, and rather unusual, slice of humanity. We close by proposing ways to structurally re-organize the behavioral sciences to best tackle these challenges.
---------------------
What have we learnt from 20 years of economic research into culture?
Carsten Herrmann-Pillath
International Journal of Cultural Studies, July 2010, Pages 317-335
Abstract:
Economics is undergoing a process of methodological naturalization, i.e. further converging with the sciences. Simultaneously, in past decades there has been an upsurge of interest in the role of culture in the economy. Yet this does not imply an opening up to the humanities, both in the broad sense and in the sense of cultural studies. This article is a stock-taking exercise. I briefly summarize recent economic work on culture and show that this is lacking a systematic theory of culture. This compares with the strong fusion of economics and the humanities, especially historical studies, at the turn from the 19th to the 20th century, in continental Europe, especially Germany. Looking for theoretical foundations of cultural analysis in contemporary economics, the notion of cognitive schemes looms large, seen as a device to deal with uncertainty. Interestingly, this concurs with some views in biological anthropology, and thus fits into the naturalization trend. However, there are many difficulties in what turns out to be close to functional reductionism. This points towards an alternative approach in economics as well, which centres around the notion of identity. I argue that, even in the context of naturalization, identity is significant precisely for its non-functional dimensions, for instance, as a group marker that is resistant to corrosion because of the lack of incentives for functional imitation between groups. This almost paradoxical role of identity explains why economics has troubles with culture, which, on the one hand seems to be ephemeral to economic processes in general, but on the other can obtain strong causal impact depending on idiosyncratic contextual conditions. This stalemate can only be resolved if economics begins to consider creative actions that establish and change identities on both the individual and collective level. I argue that this perspective leads back to the origins of the discipline, in particular Adam Smith in his role as a moral philosopher.
---------------------
The Impact of Culture on Adaptive Versus Maladaptive Self-Reflection
Igor Grossmann & Ethan Kross
Psychological Science, forthcoming
Abstract:
Although recent findings indicate that people can reflect either adaptively or maladaptively over negative experiences, extant research has not examined how culture influences this process. We compared the self-reflective practices of Russians (members of an interdependent culture characterized by a tendency to brood) and Americans (members of an independent culture in which self-reflection has been studied extensively). We predicted that self-reflection would be associated with less-detrimental outcomes among Russians because they self-distance more when analyzing their feelings than Americans do. Findings from two studies supported these predictions. In Study 1, self-reflection was associated with fewer depressive symptoms among Russians than among Americans. In Study 2, Russians displayed less distress and a more adaptive pattern of construals than Americans after reflecting over a recent negative event. In addition, they self-distanced more than Americans while analyzing their feelings, and self-distancing mediated the cultural differences in self-reflection. These findings demonstrate how culture shapes the way people reflect over negative experiences.
---------------------
Old Habits Are Hard to Change: A Case Study of Israeli Real Estate Contracts
Doron Teichman
Law & Society Review, June 2010, Pages 299-330
Abstract:
This article presents a case study on the persistent dollarization norm in the Israeli real estate market. For many years Israeli real estate contracts have been denominated in American dollars. This contracting norm has remained surprisingly stable despite tremendous changes in the structure of the Israeli foreign currency market that severed the connection between the dollar and local inflation and added significant risks to exchange rates. Using an array of theoretical tools, I explain this puzzling phenomenon and demonstrate the centrality of social norms to the design of high-stakes contracts. Finally, I explore the interaction between social norms and the law and highlight the potential obstacles to regulating contracting norms.
---------------------
Baldwin Way & Matthew Lieberman
Social Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience, June 2010, Pages 203-211
Abstract:
Genes and culture are often thought of as opposite ends of the nature-nurture spectrum, but here we examine possible interactions. Genetic association studies suggest that variation within the genes of central neurotransmitter systems, particularly the serotonin (5-HTTLPR, MAOA-uVNTR) and opioid (OPRM1 A118G), are associated with individual differences in social sensitivity, which reflects the degree of emotional responsivity to social events and experiences. Here, we review recent work that has demonstrated a robust cross-national correlation between the relative frequency of variants in these genes and the relative degree of individualism-collectivism in each population, suggesting that collectivism may have developed and persisted in populations with a high proportion of putative social sensitivity alleles because it was more compatible with such groups. Consistent with this notion, there was a correlation between the relative proportion of these alleles and lifetime prevalence of major depression across nations. The relationship between allele frequency and depression was partially mediated by individualism-collectivism, suggesting that reduced levels of depression in populations with a high proportion of social sensitivity alleles is due to greater collectivism. These results indicate that genetic variation may interact with ecological and social factors to influence psychocultural differences.
---------------------
Vivian Miu-Chi Lun, Ronald Fischer & Colleen Ward
Learning and Individual Differences, forthcoming
Abstract:
Critical thinking is deemed as an ideal in academic settings, but cultural differences in critical thinking performance between Asian and Western students have been reported in the international education literature. We examined explanations for the observed differences in critical thinking between Asian and New Zealand (NZ) European students, and tested hypotheses derived from research in international education and cultural psychology. The results showed that NZ European students performed better on two objective measures of critical thinking skills than Asian students. English proficiency, but not dialectical thinking style, explained these differences. This finding holds with both self-report (Study 1) and objectively measured (Study 2a) English proficiency. The results also indicated that Asian students tended to rely more on dialectical thinking to solve critical thinking problems than their Western counterparts. In a follow-up data analysis, students' critical thinking was found to predict their academic performance after controlling for the effects of English proficiency and general intellectual ability, but the relationship does not vary as a function of students' cultural backgrounds or cultural adoption (Study 2b). Altogether, these findings contribute to our understanding of the influence of culture on critical thinking in international education.
---------------------
Michelle Shiota, Belinda Campos, Gian Gonzaga, Dacher Keltner & Kaiping Peng
Cognition & Emotion, August 2010, Pages 786-799
Abstract:
Studies suggest that emotional complexity - the experience of positive and negative emotion in response to the same event - is unusual in Western samples. However, recent research finds that the co-occurrence of positive and negative emotion during unstructured situations is more common among East Asians than Westerners, consistent with theories emphasising the prevalence of dialectical folk epistemology in East-Asian culture. The present study builds upon previous research by examining Asian- and European-Americans' experience of a particular positive emotion - love - and a situationally appropriate negative emotion during four structured laboratory conversations with their romantic partner. Among Asian Americans, love and the experience of negative emotion were typically less negatively correlated during these conversations than was true for European Americans.
---------------------
Culture differences in neural processing of faces and houses in the ventral visual cortex
Joshua Goh1, Eric Leshikar, Bradley Sutton, Jiat Chow Tan, Sam Sim, Andrew Hebrank & Denise Park
Social Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience, June 2010, Pages 227-235
Abstract:
Behavioral and eye-tracking studies on cultural differences have found that while Westerners have a bias for analytic processing and attend more to face features, East Asians are more holistic and attend more to contextual scenes. In this neuroimaging study, we hypothesized that these culturally different visual processing styles would be associated with cultural differences in the selective activity of the fusiform regions for faces, and the parahippocampal and lingual regions for contextual stimuli. East Asians and Westerners passively viewed face and house stimuli during an functional magnetic resonance imaging experiment. As expected, we observed more selectivity for faces in Westerners in the left fusiform face area (FFA) reflecting a more analytic processing style. Additionally, Westerners showed bilateral activity to faces in the FFA whereas East Asians showed more right lateralization. In contrast, no cultural differences were detected in the parahippocampal place area (PPA), although there was a trend for East Asians to show greater house selectivity than Westerners in the lingual landmark area, consistent with more holistic processing in East Asians. These findings demonstrate group biases in Westerners and East Asians that operate on perceptual processing in the brain and are consistent with previous eye-tracking data that show cultural biases to faces.
---------------------
Cognitive and social influences on early prosocial behavior in two sociocultural contexts
Joscha Kärtner, Heidi Keller & Nandita Chaudhary
Developmental Psychology, July 2010, Pages 905-914
Abstract:
In this cross-cultural study, we tested 2 main hypotheses: first, that an early self-concept along with self-other differentiation is a universal precursor of prosocial behavior in 19-month-olds, and second, that the importance attached to relational socialization goals (SGs) concerning interpersonal responsiveness (obedience, prosocial behavior) is related to toddlers' prosocial behavior. Contrary to these predictions, the results show that mirror self-recognition, as an indicator of early self-concept, was correlated with toddlers' prosociality only in the Berlin sample (N = 38) and not in the Delhi sample (N = 39). As expected, however, Delhi mothers emphasized relational SGs more strongly than did Berlin mothers. There were no cross-cultural differences in toddlers' prosociality. On an individual level, mothers' emphasis on relational SGs (obedience) was a significant predictor of toddlers' prosocial behavior. On the basis of these results, we propose that situational helping behavior based on shared intentional relations provides an alternative developmental pathway for understanding toddlers' prosocial behavior. This view differs from the often-cited view that anticipating other people as autonomous intentional agents with their own psychological states gives rise to prosocial behavior in toddlers.
---------------------
Neural differences in the processing of semantic relationships across cultures
Angela Gutchess, Trey Hedden, Sarah Ketay, Arthur Aron & John Gabrieli
Social Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience, June 2010, Pages 254-263
Abstract:
The current study employed functional MRI to investigate the contribution of domain-general (e.g. executive functions) and domain-specific (e.g. semantic knowledge) processes to differences in semantic judgments across cultures. Previous behavioral experiments have identified cross-cultural differences in categorization, with East Asians preferring strategies involving thematic or functional relationships (e.g. cow-grass) and Americans preferring categorical relationships (e.g. cow-chicken). East Asians and American participants underwent functional imaging while alternating between categorical or thematic strategies to sort triads of words, as well as matching words on control trials. Many similarities were observed. However, across both category and relationship trials compared to match (control) trials, East Asians activated a frontal-parietal network implicated in controlled executive processes, whereas Americans engaged regions of the temporal lobes and the cingulate, possibly in response to conflict in the semantic content of information. The results suggest that cultures differ in the strategies employed to resolve conflict between competing semantic judgments.
---------------------
Carlos Torelli & Sharon Shavitt
Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, forthcoming
Abstract:
Five studies indicate that conceptualizations of power are important elements of culture and serve culturally relevant goals. These studies provide converging evidence that cultures nurture different views of what is desirable and meaningful to do with power. Vertical individualism is associated with a conceptualization of power in personalized terms (i.e., power is for advancing one's personal status and prestige), whereas horizontal collectivism is associated with a conceptualization of power in socialized terms (i.e., power is for benefiting and helping others). Cultural variables are shown to predict beliefs about appropriate uses of power, episodic memories about power, attitudes in the service of power goals, and the contexts and ways in which power is used and defended. Evidence for the cultural patterning of power concepts is observed at both the individual level and the cultural-group level of analysis.
---------------------
Individualism-Collectivism and Co-operation: A Cross-Society and Cross-Level Examination
Hannah-Hanh Nguyen, Huy Le & Terry Boles
Negotiation and Conflict Management Research, August 2010, Pages 179-204
Abstract:
We examined the influence of Individualism and Collectivism (I-C) on co-operation in workgroups at three levels (societal, organizational, and personal). Data were from 153 American business students representing an individualistic society and 207 Vietnamese counterparts (a collectivistic society). Participants role-played managers for a simulated company with either a collectivistic or individualistic organizational culture in a computerized social-dilemma game. Societal cultures did not moderate the interaction effect between organization-level I-C and person-level Individualism. Those high on individualism pursued their own gains in a dominantly individualistic organizational culture, yet behaving co-operatively in a collectivistic organizational culture. Interestingly, societal cultures moderated the effect of organizational culture on co-operation, such that the positive relationship between organization-level I-C and co-operation was weaker in a collectivistic society (Vietnam) than in an individualistic society (the United States). The results indicate the need for an integrative, cross-level approach to better understand the determinants of co-operation across societies, organizations, and individuals.