Values
Krishna Savani, Nicole Stephens & Hazel Rose Markus
Psychological Science, forthcoming
Abstract:
Choice makes North Americans feel more in control, free, and independent, and thus has many positive consequences for individuals' motivation and well-being. We report five studies that uncover novel consequences of choice for public policy and interpersonal judgments. Studies 1-3 found that activating the concept of choice decreases support for policies promoting intergroup equality (e.g., affirmative action) and societal benefits (e.g., reducing environmental pollution), but increases support for policies promoting individual rights (e.g., legalizing drugs). Studies 4 and 5 found that activating the concept of choice increases victim-blaming and decreases empathy for disadvantaged others. Study 5 found that choice does not decrease Indians' empathy for disadvantaged individuals, indicating that these effects of choice are culture specific. This research suggest that the well-known positive consequences of choice for individuals can be accompanied by an array of previously unexamined and potentially negative consequences for others and for society.
------------------------
Nathan DeWall et al.
Psychology of Aesthetics, Creativity, and the Arts, forthcoming
Abstract:
American culture is filled with cultural products. Yet few studies have investigated how changes in cultural products correspond to changes in psychological traits and emotions. The current research fills this gap by testing the hypothesis that one cultural product - word use in popular song lyrics - changes over time in harmony with cultural changes in individualistic traits. Linguistic analyses of the most popular songs from 1980-2007 demonstrated changes in word use that mirror psychological change. Over time, use of words related to self-focus and antisocial behavior increased, whereas words related to other-focus, social interactions, and positive emotion decreased. These findings offer novel evidence regarding the need to investigate how changes in the tangible artifacts of the sociocultural environment can provide a window into understanding cultural changes in psychological processes.
------------------------
The First Machiavellian Moment in America
J.S. Maloy
American Journal of Political Science, forthcoming
Abstract:
Standard interpretations of early American political thought and of the classical-republican tradition fit uneasily with an overlooked episode in the history of ideas: the reception of Machiavelli in seventeenth-century New England. Some puritans there not only found ways to justify bad means for good ends but also adopted a deeper, properly political Machiavellism, upholding the priority of popular judgment over elite wisdom and of institutionalized accountability over discretionary political authority. Unlike the eighteenth-century republicanism that has preoccupied modern scholarship, the theory of radical democracy associated with the first Machiavellian moment in America puts fundamental institutional reform and accountability with teeth on the agenda of democratic theory.
------------------------
Trust, cooperation, and equality: A psychological analysis of the formation of social capital
Philip Cozzolino
British Journal of Social Psychology, forthcoming
Abstract:
Research suggests that in modern Western culture there is a positive relationship between the equality of resources and the formation of trust and cooperation, two psychological components of social capital. Two studies elucidate the psychological processes underlying that relationship. Study 1 experimentally tested the influence of resource distributions on the formation of trust and intentions to cooperate; individuals receiving a deficit of resources and a surplus of resources evidenced lower levels of social capital (i.e., trust and cooperation) than did individuals receiving equal amounts. Analyses revealed the process was affective for deficit participants and cognitive for surplus participants. Study 2 provided suggestive support for the affective-model of equality and social capital using proxy variables in the 1996 General Social Survey data set. Results suggest support for a causal path of unequal resource distributions generating affective experiences and cognitive concerns of justice, which mediate disengagement and distrust of others.
------------------------
Climato-Economic Origins of Variation in Ingroup Favoritism
Evert Van de Vliert
Journal of Cross-Cultural Psychology, April 2011, Pages 494-515
Abstract:
Reflecting coping with threats to survival, national cultures differ in baseline levels of ingroup favoritism. These national baselines are mapped and explained in terms of inhabitants' cultural adaptations to climate-based demands and wealth-based resources. A 73-nation study of compatriotism - the social branch of patriotism - a 116-nation study of nepotism, and a 57-nation study of familism support the demands-resources explanation. Compatriotism, nepotism, and familism are strongest in lower-income countries with demanding cold or hot climates, moderate in countries with temperate climates irrespective of income per head, and weakest in higher-income countries with demanding cold or hot climates. Thus, cultural echos of climatic survival hold up across three distinct group conditions of genetic survival. Integration of the three measures provides a cross-disciplinary applicable index of baselines of cultural ingroup favoritism in 178 countries around the globe.
------------------------
So This Is Censorship: Race, Sex, and Censorship in Movies of the 1920s and 1930s
Francis Couvares
Journal of American Studies, forthcoming
Abstract:
The curious case of So This Is Africa (Columbia, 1933) shows that both Hollywood's in-house censors and state and local censors took seriously cinematic violations of racial and sexual norms. This spoof of "jungle" films exploited audience interest in a cycle of fictional and nonfictional depictions of "primitive" life. These films claimed partial exemption from taboos against sexual and racial boundary-crossing, and usually showed unclothed "native" women. But So This Is Africa went further. However farcical, its suggestions of adultery, interracial sex, homosexuality, and even bestiality raised an unusually large storm among the censors. Cut by one-third, the film still outraged many and helped precipitate the industry's creation of the Production Code Administration, designed to police the screen more tightly.
------------------------
Trust in Public Institutions over the Business Cycle
Betsey Stevenson & Justin Wolfers
NBER Working Paper, March 2011
Abstract:
We document that trust in public institutions - and particularly trust in banks, business and government - has declined over recent years. U.S. time series evidence suggests that this partly reflects the pro-cyclical nature of trust in institutions. Cross-country comparisons reveal a clear legacy of the Great Recession, and those countries whose unemployment grew the most suffered the biggest loss in confidence in institutions, particularly in trust in government and the financial sector. Finally, analysis of several repeated cross-sections of confidence within U.S. states yields similar qualitative patterns, but much smaller magnitudes in response to state-specific shocks.
------------------------
Grasping the concept of personal property
Merryn Constable, Ada Kritikos & Andrew Bayliss
Cognition, forthcoming
Abstract:
The concept of property is integral to personal and societal development, yet understanding of the cognitive basis of ownership is limited. Objects are the most basic form of property, so our physical interactions with owned objects may elucidate nuanced aspects of ownership. We gave participants a coffee mug to decorate, use and keep. The experimenter also designed a mug of her own. In Experiment 1, participants performed natural lifting actions with each mug. Participants lifted the Experimenter's mug with greater care, and moved it slightly more towards the Experimenter, while they lifted their own mug more forcefully and drew it closer to their own body. In Experiment 2, participants responded to stimuli presented on the mug handles in a computer-based stimulus-response compatibility task. Overall, participants were faster to respond in trials in which the handles were facing in the same direction as the response location compared to when the handles were facing away. The compatibility effect was abolished, however, for the Experimenter's mug - as if the action system is blind to the potential for action towards another person's property. These findings demonstrate that knowledge of the ownership status of objects influences visuomotor processing in subtle and revealing ways.
------------------------
Soldiers to Citizens: The Link between Military Service and Volunteering
Rebecca Nesbit & David Reingold
Public Administration Review, January/February 2011, Pages 67-76
Abstract:
Research shows that military service is linked with political engagement, such as voting. This connection is strongest for minorities. The authors explore the relationship between military service and volunteering. They conclude that military service helps overcome barriers to volunteering by socializing people with civic responsibility norms, by providing social resources and skills that compensate for the lack of personal resources, and by making veterans aware of opportunities to volunteer as well as asking them to do so. Military service is positively related to volunteering among blacks and Hispanics. Married veterans are more likely to volunteer than nonveterans. Veterans who served during wartime are more likely to volunteer than those who served in peacetime.
------------------------
Masud Chand & Majid Ghorbani
International Business Review, forthcoming
Abstract:
This paper uses a combination of national cultural frameworks and social capital theory to explain the formation and management of entrepreneurial ventures among immigrant communities. The varying rates of venture formation and performance among different ethnic groups points to the role that the different dimensions of culture play in how immigrants use their social networks to start such firms. We use the specific example of the Indian and Chinese communities in the US to demonstrate this effect and explain how businesses created by members of these communities could have potentially different ways of starting and operating that can be directly traced to the differences in cultural orientation of their owners. What emerges can be summarized as: (a) different immigrant communities have different ways of accumulating and using social capital in starting and managing their ethnic ventures; (b) these dissimilarities manifest themselves in variations in the motives for forming these ventures, human resource practices and termination rates; and (c) that these variations can partly be explained by the differences in their respective national cultures.
------------------------
Classroom Discipline Across Forty-One Countries: School, Economic, and Cultural Differences
Ming Ming Chiu & Bonnie Wing Yin Chow
Journal of Cross-Cultural Psychology, April 2011, Pages 516-533
Abstract:
This study examined classroom discipline and its determinants through multilevel analyses of 107,975 students in 7,259 schools from 41 countries. In schools with proportionately more girls, better school discipline, higher achieving students, more teacher support, or better teacher-student relations, students reported better classroom discipline. Countries' economies and cultural values were linked to reported classroom discipline. In countries that were poorer, more equal, or had more rigid gender roles, students reported higher classroom discipline. Moreover, school variables' links to classroom discipline differed across countries. Specifically, in richer countries, teacher support and teacher-student relations had stronger, positive links to reported classroom discipline. In more equal countries, students' mathematics achievement had stronger, positive links to reported classroom discipline. Moderation effects of cultural values were also explored.
------------------------
The relationship of competitiveness motive on people's happiness through education
Hoi Yan Cheung & Alex Chan
International Journal of Intercultural Relations, March 2011, Pages 179-185
Abstract:
This paper applied data from 32 countries to find out the relationship between competitiveness motive and happiness, and results showed that competitiveness motive negatively predicted happiness through public education expenditure. Public education expenditure was found to have a mediation effect between competitiveness motive and happiness. Different variables were used, such as happiness score of 2000-2008, public health expenditure as percentage of GDP in 2001 and 2004, public education expenditure as percentage of GDP in 2001 and 2004, and competitiveness motive score. Overall, countries with high competitiveness motive had low public expenditure on education and thus countries had low happiness scores.
------------------------
Values and Display Rules for Specific Emotions
Birgit Koopmann-Holm & David Matsumoto
Journal of Cross-Cultural Psychology, April 2011, Pages 355-371
Abstract:
Based on the CAD Triad Hypothesis (Rozin, Lowery, Imada, & Haidt, 1999), the authors hypothesized relationships between specific values and display rules for specific emotions. In particular, the authors proposed that Conservation and Self-Enhancement would be related to the display rule to express contempt, Conservation would be related to the display rule to express disgust, and Openness to Change and Self-Transcendence would be related to the display rules to express anger and sadness. To test this framework and its cross-cultural applicability, the present study examines values and emotional display rules among 106 U.S. Americans and 77 Germans. As predicted, Americans valued Conservation and Self-Enhancement more than did Germans, who valued Openness to Change and Self-Transcendence more than did Americans. These value differences were associated with differences in display rules; Americans endorsed contempt and disgust expressions more than did Germans, who endorsed anger and sadness expressions more than did Americans. Values mediated ("unpackaged") many of these country differences in display rules. Implications of these findings are discussed.
------------------------
Jacquie Vorauer & Stacey Sasaki
Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, forthcoming
Abstract:
Three studies demonstrated that a salient multicultural ideology increases hostile treatment of threatening outgroup interaction partners. The effect of multiculturalism on hostile behavior was evident regardless of whether threat was operationalized in terms of disagreement with an outgroup partner on important social issues (Studies 1 and 3) or rejection by the partner (Study 2). Moreover, the results clearly point to the learning orientation fostered by multiculturalism - as opposed to other factors such as enhanced other-focus, group-level attributions, or focus on differences - as the critical mediator of its effect on hostile behavior under threat. Thus, it appears that multiculturalism enhances the expression of hostility because it prompts individuals to really engage with and attach meaning and importance to threatening behaviors exhibited by outgroup members. The effects of multiculturalism were distinct from those of anti-racism and color-blindness, which set in motion processes that in many respects are directly opposite to those instantiated by multiculturalism. The findings highlight that the behavioral implications of multiculturalism may be quite different in conflictual interactions than they have previously been demonstrated to be in less threatening exchanges.
------------------------
Christopher Lo et al.
Self and Identity, April 2011, Pages 203-212
Abstract:
We examined the extent to which individuals from East Asia and North America exhibit self-enhancing and self-critical tendencies when appraising their personal strengths and weaknesses, to test whether a self-critical motivation may replace a self-enhancing motivation among Easterners. Four hundred four university students from Hong Kong, Japan, Canada, and the United States were surveyed concerning their beliefs about ten self-nominated positive and negative attributes. Questions included how long they have possessed each attribute, its importance and salience, and the desire to improve the attribute. The pattern of findings suggests that both self-enhancing and self-critical tendencies coexist within individuals across both cultural contexts, although Easterners were less self-enhancing and more self-critical than Westerners.
------------------------
Eran Shalev
Journal of the Early Republic, Spring 2011, Pages 39-73
Abstract:
From the fifty-star flag to the Great Seal, from Greenbacks to the Star Spangled Banner, the star-as-American state, and consequently the United States as a constellation of stars-states, is arguably the most salient-and least explored-symbol in American public language. The configuration of the star-as-state, and the consequent image of the United States as a "new constellation," emerged in the early days of the American Revolution. The republicanism and anti-monarchism of the Revolution shattered the traditional political view based on the imagery of a single solar power center, habitually associated with monarchical systems. Instead of the king as Sun around which the political realm revolves and which holds the nation in equilibrium, in the 1770s an alternative and revolutionary political cosmology emerged and was enshrined in the new nation's symbols: a diffuse constellation of uniform floating stars devoid of a solar center that embodied egalitarian and republican values. The American Revolution would thus give rise to new modes of understanding and communicating the political order: no kingly star overshadowed and dominated others; together they constituted a novel political system in which a plurality of individual stars held together, comprising a unity that was more perfect than its discrete parts. Throughout the republic's founding, expansion and the consequent addition of stars to its spangled banner, when it temporarily collapsed during the Civil War-and beyond, the idiom of the "new constellation" provided a distinct vocabulary to articulate and express Americans' shifting attitudes toward, and understanding of their federal republic.
------------------------
What Is the Meaning of "on Time"? The Sociocultural Nature of Punctuality
Lawrence White, Raivo Valk & Abdessamad Dialmy
Journal of Cross-Cultural Psychology, April 2011, Pages 482-493
Abstract:
University students (N = 301) in Estonia, Morocco, and the United States read scenarios about various scheduled appointments and indicated the time at which a person arriving would be inappropriately early or inappropriately late. Participants also completed measures of time orientation, collectivism, and personality. Definitions of "on time" varied substantially across countries and across individuals but interacted in a regular fashion with specific features of appointments (e.g., the purpose of an appointment or the status of persons involved). Flexible definitions of "on time" were associated with youth, collectivist values, and a fatalistic orientation toward the present. Finally, definitions of "on time" were largely independent of personality traits. Taken as a whole, personal standards of punctuality appear to be best understood within a situational and sociocultural-rather than dispositional-framework.