Chapter 14: Culture and Social Behavior PDF

Culture and Social Behavior 14 CHAPTER CONTENTS Cultural Influences on How...

Culture and Social Behavior 14 CHAPTER CONTENTS Cultural Influences on How Culture and Conformity, We Perceive People Compliance, and Obedience Person Perception and Impression Formation Culture and Cooperation Culture and Face Recognition Culture and Attractiveness Culture and Intergroup Relations Ingroups and Outgroups Culture and Attributions Stereotypes What Are Attributions, and Where Do They Come From? Ethnocentrism and Prejudice Early Research on Cultural Differences in Discrimination ­Attributional Styles Culture and Aggression Contemporary Research: Universality and Culture- Specificity of Attributional Styles Acculturation Mate Selection, Love, and C O N CL US I O N Marriage across Cultures Culture and Mate Selection E X PL O R AT I O N A ND D IS C OV E RY Why Does This Matter to Me? Culture and Love Suggestions for Further Exploration Culture and Marriage Intercultural Marriages 333 Copyright 2017 Cengage Learning. All Rights Reserved. May not be copied, scanned, or duplicated, in whole or in part. Due to electronic rights, some third party content may be suppressed from the eBook and/or eChapter(s). Editorial review has deemed that any suppressed content does not materially affect the overall learning experience. Cengage Learning reserves the right to remove additional content at any time if subsequent rights restrictions require it.  334  Chapter 14 All mankind is of one author, and is one volume; when one man dies, one chapter is not torn out of the book, but translated into a better language; and every chapter must be so translated…. As therefore the bell that rings to a sermon, calls not upon the preacher only, but upon the congregation to come: so this bell calls us all: but how much more me, who am brought so near the door by this sickness…. No man is an island, entire of itself; every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main. If a clod be washed away by the sea, Europe is the less, as well as if a promontory were, as well as if a manor of thy friend’s or of thine own were. Any man’s death diminishes me, because I am involved in mankind; and therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for thee. (John Donne, 1624) People of all cultures have a universal need to form meaningful bonds with others, have intimate relationships, and to belong to social groups (Baumeister & Leary, 1995). Creating these bonds and relationships is associated with many things that aid in our survival. Humans are social animals, and all of us are fundamentally interconnected with each other in our lives. All individuals need others to live, work, play, and func- tion in our societies and cultures. Without others, we can neither function effectively nor achieve our goals. Relationships help ensure reproduction by finding mates, aid in our caring for offspring and the elderly, and in buffering many of life’s trials and tribulations. People with meaningful social relationships live longer and are healthier (as discussed in Chapter 11). Yet while the need for affiliation is universal, how people address that need and interact with others can be different depending on their culture. This is one of the richest areas of research in cultural psychology. In this chapter, we will discuss how cultures affect social behaviors. We begin our discussion by examining how we perceive others, and then about how culture influences how we interpret the world around us in our attributions. We will discuss finding mates, love, and mar- riage, and how cultures influence conformity, obedience, compliance, and coopera- tion. We then turn our attention to intergroup relations, discussing ingroups versus outgroups, ethnocentrism, prejudice, stereotypes, and discrimination. We will dis- cuss the relationship between culture and aggression, and end with a discussion of ­acculturation—how we adapt and adjust to new cultures. Cultural Influences on How We Perceive People Person Perception and Impression Formation We form many reliable impressions of people based on our perceptions, including judg- ments of appearance, attractiveness, personality traits, and even recognizing others. person perception Person perception refers to the process of forming them. For example, greater height, The process of forming which is generally considered attractive, has been associated with leadership ability, impressions of others. competence, and high salary (Deck, 1968; Patzer, 1985). Size is generally associated with strength and dominance, even when perceived by infants (Thomsen, Frankenhuis, Ingold-Smith, & Carey, 2011). Adults with baby-face features tend to be judged as warm, kind, naive, and submissive; adults with more mature facial features tend to be judged Copyright 2017 Cengage Learning. All Rights Reserved. May not be copied, scanned, or duplicated, in whole or in part. Due to electronic rights, some third party content may be suppressed from the eBook and/or eChapter(s). Editorial review has deemed that any suppressed content does not materially affect the overall learning experience. Cengage Learning reserves the right to remove additional content at any time if subsequent rights restrictions require it.  Culture and Social Behavior   335 as strong, worldly, and dominant (Berry & McArthur, 1985, 1986). People who are neat dressers are thought to be conscientious (Albright, Kenny, & Malloy, 1988). People with poor eye contact are often judged to be dishonest (DePaulo, Stone, & Lassiter, 1985). Individuals can generally identify the ethnicity of individuals based on their looks and accents (Rakic, Steffens, & Memmendey, 2011). Individuals across cultures also tend to agree on the personality traits they infer from faces, and these infer- ences can be predictive of important outcomes. For example, there is high agreement between American and Chinese individuals in judgments of personality traits asso- ciated with photographs of faces (Zebrowitz, 1997). In one well-known study, naïve ratings of competence of the faces of U.S. congressional candidates predicted the win- ners of elections (Todorov, Mandisodza, Goren, & Hall, 2005). But there are also cultural differences. In a recent study, American and Japanese participants made naïve inferences of traits from the faces of U.S. and Japanese politi- cal candidates (Rule et al., 2010). There was high agreement in the ratings of the faces across cultures, replicating previous findings. Both sets of judgments were predictive of the percentage of votes that each candidate received in the actual election, also rep- licating previous findings. But the traits predicting electoral success differed depend- ing on culture. American judgments were predictive of American election outcomes but not of Japanese elections, whereas Japanese judgments were predictive of J­ apanese election outcomes but not American elections. There are also cultural differences in judgments of truthworthiness. Some research suggests that people who smile tend to cooperate more, and that smiling partners are trusted more than nonsmiling partners (Scharlemann, Eckel, Kacelnik, & Wilson, 2001). A study testing American and Japanese observers who were shown smiling faces of Americans and Japanese individuals reported that Americans trusted the faces with greater intensity in the smiling mouths, while Japanese trusted the faces with greater intensity in the smiling eyes (Ozono et al., 2010). This finding might have occurred because Americans believe smiling faces are more intelligent than neutral faces, whereas Japanese believe neutral faces are more intelligent than smiling faces (Matsumoto & Kudoh, 1993). Thus, not all smiles may be interpreted in the same way across cultures. Weisbuch, Pauker, and Ambady (2009) conducted two studies that have suggested that subtle, unconscious nonverbal cues imbedded in culture—in media, Internet, mag- azines, movies, and so on—exert powerful influences on the way we perceive others. In the first study, the nonverbal behaviors toward white and black characters on 11 popu- lar TV shows were analyzed. There were more negative nonverbal behaviors toward black characters than toward white. Subsequent studies showed that exposure to the pro-white nonverbal bias increased viewers’ biases unconsciously, even though the viewers could not report the patterns of nonverbal behaviors that produced the bias. Culture and Face Recognition In order to create meaningful bonds with others we need to be able to recognize them when we see them. Early research in this area showed the existence of a same-race bias in this ability. Malpass and Kravitz (1969) showed photographs of either Afri- can American or European American individuals to observers in either a predomi- nantly African American or European American university. Observers recognized individuals of their own race better than they did people of the other race. These results were replicated a number of times (e.g., Malpass, 1974) using different meth- ods (Wright, Boyd, & Tredoux, 2001) and have been supported in meta-analyses (e.g., Bothwell, Brigham, & Malpass, 1989; Meissner & Brigham, 2001). Research has Copyright 2017 Cengage Learning. All Rights Reserved. May not be copied, scanned, or duplicated, in whole or in part. Due to electronic rights, some third party content may be suppressed from the eBook and/or eChapter(s). Editorial review has deemed that any suppressed content does not materially affect the overall learning experience. Cengage Learning reserves the right to remove additional content at any time if subsequent rights restrictions require it.  336  Chapter 14 documented this effect for Asian faces as well (O’Toole, Deffenbacher, Valentin, & Abdi, 1994). There also appears to be a same-race bias in discriminating between male and female faces (O’Toole, Peterson, & Deffenbacher, 1996). This bias exists in children as young as three months old (Bar-Haim, Ziv, Lamy, & Hodes, 2006; Kelly, Quinn, Slater, Lee, Gibson, Smith et al., 2005). Why might this bias exist? Meissner and Brigham (2001) suggested that attitudes toward people of same and other races, social orientation, task difficulty, and expe- rience all contribute to this differential recognition ability. Their meta-analysis also suggested that the explanation provided by intergroup contact theories—that differ- ential recognition stems from limited experience with members of other groups— has received only weak support in the research literature. Orienting strategies may provide an explanation. Devine and Malpass (1985) found no difference in recogni- tion rates when observers in their study were told that they were participating in a reaction-time experiment and would later be asked to make differential judgments about the people they observed. Different schemas about faces of different races may account for the same-race bias (Levy, Lysne, & Underwood, 1995). Or, same-race and other-race faces may be perceived and classified differently, with race features being coded differentially in same-race and other-race perceptions (Levin, 1996). Culture and Attractiveness Do people of different cultures differ in their judgments of attractiveness? On one hand, beauty may be in the eye of the beholder. On the other hand, evolutionary ­t heories predict that there may be a universal standard of attractiveness because attractiveness increases the chances of reproduction, a standard that may be rein- forced by today’s mass media. Early studies on this topic provided evidence for both sides of the argument. Daibo, Murasawa, and Chou (1994), for example, demonstrated that attractiveness ratings were associated with different facial features in Japan and Korea. But, Cunningham, Roberts, Barbee, Druen, and Wu (1995) conducted three studies involving European Americans and African Americans, Asian and Hispanic immigrants, and Taiwanese observers who judged faces of individuals from various ethnicities. There were high correlations among the judge groups in their attractive- ness ratings, and the ratings by all groups correlated with the same facial characteris- tics, which included the nature of the eyes, nose, cheeks, chin, and smile. More recent studies have provided stronger evidence for a possible universal standard of attractiveness. For example, leg-to-body ratio is associated with attrac- tiveness across cultures, with short and excessively long legs judged as less attractive (Sorokowski et al., 2011). A meta-analysis reviewing 1,800 articles and 919 findings indicated that raters agree both within and across cultures about who is and is not attractive (Langlois, Kalakanis, Rubenstein, Larson, Hallam, & Smoot, 2000). Men prefer low female waist-to-hip ratios, and this is true even of blind men (Karremans, Frankenhuis, & Arons, 2010), suggesting that this preference may not be learned through visual input. Research across nine cultures also has demonstrated that small foot size is generally judged as more attractive and preferred, while average foot size is preferred for males (Fessler et al., 2005). But even if people across cultures agree on what is attractive, there are cultural dif- ferences in the meaning of attractiveness. Research with North Americans has consis- tently shown that people tend to ascribe desirable personality characteristics to those who are good-looking, seeing them as more sensitive, kind, sociable, pleasant, likable, and interesting than those who are unattractive (Dion, 1986; Patzer, 1985). Attractive people are also judged to be more competent and intelligent (Ross & Ferris, 1981). Copyright 2017 Cengage Learning. All Rights Reserved. May not be copied, scanned, or duplicated, in whole or in part. Due to electronic rights, some third party content may be suppressed from the eBook and/or eChapter(s). Editorial review has deemed that any suppressed content does not materially affect the overall learning experience. Cengage Learning reserves the right to remove additional content at any time if subsequent rights restrictions require it.  Culture and Social Behavior   337 Attractiveness ratings are strongly correlated with social competence, adjustment, potency, and intellectual competence, and negatively with modesty (Eagly, Ashmore, Makhijani, & Longo, 1991); and are strongly correlated with social skills, sociability, mental health, dominance, intelligence, and sexual warmth, and again negatively with modesty (Feingold, 1992). These studies have demonstrated quite consistent agreement in findings involving North American participants with regard to the psy- chological meanings attributed to attractive people. Many, but not all, of these effects have been replicated in other cultures. For exam- ple, Wheeler and Kim (1997) showed photos of Korean males and females to Korean university students, who made judgments of social competence, intellectual compe- tence, concern for others, integrity, adjustment, potency, sexual interest or warmth, and modesty. Consistent with research involving North American judges, they found that Korean students rated attractive faces as more socially and intellectually compe- tent, better adjusted, more sexually interesting, and less modest. Contrary to previous research with North Americans, however, the Koreans did not rate attractive faces as more potent, and they rated them as having more integrity and concern for others, which was not found in studies with Americans. Thus, there may be a universal standard for attractiveness, but there are cultural differences in the specific features of a person that are more or less relevant in judg- ments of attractiveness, and the meaning of attractiveness is different across cultures. As with person perception, subtle, unconscious nonverbal cues imbedded in culture influence the way we perceive others’ attractiveness (Weisbuch & Ambady, 2009). And there are large individual differences in judgments of attractiveness; on the indi- vidual level beauty really is in the eye of the beholder. Culture and Attributions What Are Attributions, and Where Do They Come From? Attributions are the inferences people make about the causes of events or behaviors, attributions Beliefs their own as well as others. For instance, you might attribute a friend’s failure to show about the underlying causes of behavior. up for a date to irresponsibility, too much traffic, or just forgetting. You might attri- bute your success on an exam to your effort or to luck. Attributions represent the ways we understand the world around us and the behaviors of others. In Chapter 1 we discussed some of the unique cognitive abilities that humans have that allow us to create human cultures. One of these was the ability to infer agency in oneself and others, that is, to know that other people are intentional agents. People have needs, motives, desires, and goals, and their behaviors are often the direct result of these. Knowing that this is true for oneself, others, and especially that others make those inferences about oneself, is one of the most important cognitive building blocks of human culture. This same cognitive ability enables humans to create attributions. Attributions allow us to explain things, to put things in order, and to make sense of the world. Because the cognitive abilities to understand that oneself and others are intentional agents are universal to humans, the process of making attributions is a universal psy- chological process. All people of all cultures make attributions. This probably reflects a universal need to know—a universal motive for humans to derive meaning from events and behaviors. This would explain why humans personalize inanimate objects or random acts of nature (e.g., hurricanes) and make causal inferences—attributions— about them. By creating attributions, we exert psychological control over the world. Copyright 2017 Cengage Learning. All Rights Reserved. May not be copied, scanned, or duplicated, in whole or in part. Due to electronic rights, some third party content may be suppressed from the eBook and/or eChapter(s). Editorial review has deemed that any suppressed content does not materially affect the overall learning experience. Cengage Learning reserves the right to remove additional content at any time if subsequent rights restrictions require it.  338  Chapter 14 Immediately after the terror attacks of September 11, 2001, for instance, searching for meaning in the attacks led to a high stress response (greater posttraumatic stress response symptoms); finding meaning in the attacks also led to better adjustment, less stress symptoms, and less fear of future attacks (Updegraff, Silver, & Holman, 2008). The study of attributions has a rich history in social psychology. An important concept in attribution research is the distinction between internal and external attri- internal attributions butions. Internal attributions specify the cause of behavior within a person; these Attributions that specify the are also known as dispositional attributions. External attributions locate the cause cause of behavior within a person; also known as of behavior outside a person, such as other people, nature, or acts of God; these are dispositional attributions, also known as situational dispositions. because they are attributions about people’s dispositions. Early Research on Cultural Differences in Attributional Styles dispositional Because attributions are creations of the mind, they may or may not be rooted in an attributions Attribu- objective reality and are subjected to many possible biases in ways of thinking. One tions about people’s internal characteristics, traits, or of these biases is known as the fundamental attribution error (Ross, 1977), which personality. refers to bias toward inferences about an actor’s disposition even if the presence of very obvious situational constraints. Fundamental attribution error is also known external attributions as correspondence bias. One of the earliest studies to show this bias was Jones and Attributions that locate the Harris’s (1967) study of attributions about an essay supporting Fidel Castro in Cuba. cause of behavior outside a person, such as other people, Participants inferred that the author must have a favorable attitude toward Castro. nature, or acts of God; these Furthermore, such dispositional inferences occurred even when the participants were are also known as explicitly told that the writer was assigned to write a pro-Castro essay and no choice situational dispositions. was given. The participants ignored these situational constraints and erroneously drew inferences about the author’s disposition. Fundamental attribution error has been replicated many times in American psychological experiments. fundamental Early cross-cultural research, however, suggested that it may not be as robust or attribution error pervasive among people of other cultures. For example, J. G. Miller (1984) examined A tendency to explain the behaviors of others using patterns of social explanation in Americans and Hindu Indians. Both Hindu and internal attributions but to American respondents were asked to describe someone they knew well who either explain one’s own behaviors did something good for another person or did something bad to another person. using external attributions; also known as correspon- After describing such a person, the respondents were asked to explain why the per- dence bias. son committed that good or bad act. American respondents typically explained the person’s behavior in terms of general dispositions (e.g., “She is very irresponsible”). correspondence bias See Fundamental Attribu- The Hindus, contrastingly, were much less likely to offer dispositional explanations. tion Error. Instead, they tended to provide explanations in terms of the actor’s duties, social roles, and other situation-specific factors (see also Shweder & Bourne, 1984). self-serving bias A Another type of attributional bias is known as self-serving bias, which refers to bias in which people tend the tendency to attribute one’s successes to personal factors and one’s failures to situ- to attribute good deeds and successes to their own inter- ational factors (Heider, 1976). Research for many decades has shown that ­Americans nal attributes but attribute often exhibit a self-serving bias. If a student fails an exam, for instance, that student bad deeds or failures to may attribute his or her failure to situational causes such as a poorly constructed external factors. test, lousy teaching, distractions, or a bad week at home. If that same student aced an exam, however, he or she would be more likely to attribute that success to disposi- tional causes such as effort, intelligence, or ability. Many early studies demonstrated cultural differences in this bias. Hau and Salili (1991), for example, asked junior and senior high-school students in Hong Kong to rate the importance and meaning of 13 specific causes of academic performance. Effort, interest, and ability—all internal attributions—were rated the most important causes, regardless of success or failure. Crittenden (1991) also found that Taiwanese women used more external and self-effacing attributions about themselves than Copyright 2017 Cengage Learning. All Rights Reserved. May not be copied, scanned, or duplicated, in whole or in part. Due to electronic rights, some third party content may be suppressed from the eBook and/or eChapter(s). Editorial review has deemed that any suppressed content does not materially affect the overall learning experience. Cengage Learning reserves the right to remove additional content at any time if subsequent rights restrictions require it.  Culture and Social Behavior   339 did American women. Crittenden suggested that the Taiwanese women did this to enhance their public and private self-esteem by using an attributional approach that conformed to a feminine gender role. Earlier, Bond, Leung, and Wan (1982) found that self-effacing Chinese students were better liked by their peers than those who adopted this attributional style less often. Other cross-cultural studies on attributions concerning academic performance peppered the literature with findings that challenged American notions of attribu- tion. Kashima and Triandis (1986) showed that Japanese use a more group-oriented, collective approach to attribution with regard to attention and memory achievement tasks. Compared to their American counterparts, Japanese subjects attributed failure to themselves more and attributed success to themselves less. Kashima and Triandis interpreted this finding as suggestive of American and Japanese cultural differences in degree of responsibility taking. Many cross-cultural studies of attributions in nonacademic areas as well also showed cultural differences. For example, Moghaddam, Ditto, and Taylor (1990) exam- ined the attributional processes of high- and low-distressed Indian female immigrants to Canada in relation to the degree to which they have adjusted to life in Canada. They found that the Indian women were more likely to attribute both successes and failures to internal causes. Forgas, Furnham, and Frey (1989) documented broad cross-national differences in the importance of different types of specific attributions for wealth. Their study included 558 subjects from the United Kingdom, Australia, and the Fed- eral Republic of Germany. The British considered family background and luck as the most important determinants of wealth. Germans also considered family background the most important determinant. Australians, however, rated individual qualities the most important determinant of wealth. Romero and Garza (1986) examined differ- ences between Hispanic and Anglo women in their attributions concerning occupa- tional success and failure, and found that Chicanas tended to make more attributions on the basis of luck, ethnicity, or gender; in making attributions about failure, Anglo females tended to attribute less competence to the actor than did the Chicana females. Cultural differences in attributions exist in mass media as well. Morris and Peng (1994) found that U.S. newspaper articles were more likely to attribute the cause of a murder to an individual’s personality traits, attitudes, and beliefs (such as “bad temper,” “psychologically disturbed”), but Chinese newspapers were more likely to attribute the cause to situational factors (such as “didn’t get along with his advisor,” “isolated from his community”). Lee, Hallahan, and Herzog (1996) coded Hong Kong and U.S. newspaper articles concerning sporting events for attributional style and judged the extent to which events were attributed to personal or situational factors. As hypothesized, they found that attributions by Hong Kong reporters were more situational and less dispositional than those of U.S. reporters. Contemporary Research: Universality and Culture-Specificity of Attributional Styles Cultural differences in attributional styles clearly exist. But are there contexts in which attributional styles may be universal as well? Two comprehensive reviews of the literature shed some light on this topic. Many of the cultural differences in attributional styles demonstrated that North Americans committed the fundamental attribution error while East Asians did not. Choi, Nisbett, and Norenzayan (1999) concluded that East Asians did not commit the error because they have a greater sensitivity to context and situationalism. To dem- onstrate this, they conducted a study in which Korean and American participants Copyright 2017 Cengage Learning. All Rights Reserved. May not be copied, scanned, or duplicated, in whole or in part. Due to electronic rights, some third party content may be suppressed from the eBook and/or eChapter(s). Editorial review has deemed that any suppressed content does not materially affect the overall learning experience. Cengage Learning reserves the right to remove additional content at any time if subsequent rights restrictions require it.  340  Chapter 14 predicted the behaviors of a group of individuals based on situational information, and the behavior of a single individual based on both personality and situational informa- tion. When dispositional (personality) information was not available or applicable, the Koreans used situational information more than did the American participants, sug- gesting a stronger belief in situational influence in the Koreans than the Americans. When both dispositional and situational information was present, however, there were no cultural differences in the attributions of the Koreans or the Americans. In the second review, Mezulis, Abramson, Hyde, and Hankin (2004) conducted a meta-analysis of 266 studies that produced 503 effects. Across all studies, there was a very large effect for the self-serving bias. This bias was present in nearly all samples, indicating universality. When data were analyzed separately for different cultures, there were no differences in the size of the bias among European, African, Asian, Hispanic, Native, and multiethnic Americans; they all showed the self-serving bias to a large degree. The sizes of the effects for Asian cultures were lower but still showed evidence for the self-serving bias. Moreover, there were differences among the Asian countries. There was almost no degree of bias in Japan, while Mainland China and South Korea were associated with large self-serving biases at levels comparable to the United States. These findings suggested that simple explanations based on individualism ver- sus collectivism cannot account for cultural differences in self-serving bias because many of the Asian cultures share some similarities in collectivism. Instead, religious affiliation or backgrounds and dialectic thinking (the tendency to think that appar- ently mutually dichotomous events are not necessarily dichotomous; see Chapter 8) may be more important variables in explaining cultural differences in attributional styles (Norenzayan & Lee, 2010). Thus, attributional biases such as the self-serving bias or fundamental attribu- tion error may be universal. This makes sense, given the view of the origin of attri- butions we discussed earlier, and the role that self-esteem and cultural worldviews play in maintaining our self-image (recall our discussion of tactical self-enhancement in Chapter 5). All people of all cultures appear to have a universal need to maintain their self-image and protect their self-integrity; attributions are one of the ways in which this is achieved. There are cultural differences, however, in the specific ways in which attributional processes are used, and how much. This cultural influence ­probably starts early; Bornstein and associates (1998), for example, examined attribu- tions of mothers of 20-month-olds in Argentina, Belgium, France, Israel, Italy, Japan, and the United States with regard to success and failure in seven parenting tasks. They found only a few cross-cultural similarities, but many differences, especially with regard to degree of competence and satisfaction in parenting. Child age could not be a factor, as it was controlled in the study, and child gender did not influence the data either. These types of findings provide us with ideas about how and why parents transmit valuable cultural information to their children, resulting in specific styles of attribution (among many other psychological effects). Mate Selection, Love, and Marriage across Cultures Culture and Mate Selection What do people look for in a mate, and is it different across cultures? In one of the best-known studies on this topic (Buss, 1989, 1994), more than 10,000 respondents in 37 cultures from 33 countries completed two questionnaires, one dealing with factors in choosing a mate and the second dealing with preferences concerning potential mates. Copyright 2017 Cengage Learning. All Rights Reserved. May not be copied, scanned, or duplicated, in whole or in part. Due to electronic rights, some third party content may be suppressed from the eBook and/or eChapter(s). Editorial review has deemed that any suppressed content does not materially affect the overall learning experience. Cengage Learning reserves the right to remove additional content at any time if subsequent rights restrictions require it.  Culture and Social Behavior   341 Table 14.1 Sex Differences in Preferred Traits in a Mate across Cultures Male Preferences in Females Female Preferences in Males Younger Financial prospects Good looking Ambition Less/no sexual experiences Industriousness Older Source: Adapted from Buss (1989) In 36 of the 37 cultures, females rated financial prospects as more important than did males; in 29 of those 36 cultures, females also rated ambition and industriousness as more important than did males. In all 37 cultures, males preferred younger mates and females preferred older mates; in 34 of the cultures, males rated good looks as more important than did females; and in 23 of the cultures, males rated chastity as more important than did females (see Table 14.1). Buss (1989) concluded that females value cues related to resource acquisition in potential mates more highly than males do, whereas males value reproductive capacity more highly than do females. These findings were predicted by an evolutionary-based framework that generated hypotheses related to evolutionary con- cepts of parental involvement, sexual selection, reproductive capacity, and certainty of paternity or maternity. The degree of agreement in sex differences across cultures has led Buss (1989) and his colleagues to view these mate-selection preferences as universal, arising from different evolutionary selection pressures on males and females. But culture also plays a role in influencing mate preferences. Hatfield and ­Sprecher (1995) studied American, Russian, and Japanese students and reported that Americans preferred expressivity, openness, and sense of humor more than did the Russians, who in turn preferred these traits more than did the Japanese. Russians desired skill as a lover most while Japanese preferred it least. The Japanese gave lower ratings than the other two cultures on kind and understanding, good conversational- ist, physical attractiveness, and status. Similarly, the most important traits reported by both men and women in the United States when looking for a partner were kindness, consideration, honesty, and a sense of humor (Goodwin, 1990). Thus mate selection is influenced by both evolutionary forces and culture. But what about trying to romantically attract someone who is already in a romantic ­relationship—that is, stealing someone else’s mate? This is known as mate poaching. mate poaching Attract- A study involving 16,954 participants in 53 countries showed that it was most com- ing someone who is already in a romantic relationship mon in Southern Europe, South America, Western Europe, and Eastern Europe, and with someone else. relatively less frequent in Africa, South and Southeast Asia, and East Asia (Schmitt, 2004). In all regions studied, men were more likely to have attempted mate poach- ing and to be the victims of mate-poaching attempts by others. Across all regions of the world, mate poachers tended to be more extroverted, disagreeable, unconsci- entious, unfaithful, and erotophilic—being comfortable in talking about sex. In all regions, successful mate poachers were more open to new experiences, were sexually attractive, were not exclusive in their relationships, exhibited less sexual restraint, and were more erotophilic. Men and women in all regions who were the targets of mate-poaching attempts were more extroverted, open to experience, sexually attrac- tive, erotophilic, and low on relationship exclusivity. There were also some cultural differences in mate poaching. Cultures with more economic resources had higher rates of mate-poaching attempts. Women were more likely to engage in mate poaching in countries with more women than men; this was not the case for men, however. Sex differences in mate poaching tended to be smaller in cultures that were more gender egalitarian. Copyright 2017 Cengage Learning. All Rights Reserved. May not be copied, scanned, or duplicated, in whole or in part. Due to electronic rights, some third party content may be suppressed from the eBook and/or eChapter(s). Editorial review has deemed that any suppressed content does not materially affect the overall learning experience. Cengage Learning reserves the right to remove additional content at any time if subsequent rights restrictions require it.  342  Chapter 14 Culture and Love Love is one of the uniquely human sentiments, and it is important because it aids in our finding potential mates and creating a social support system to buffer the stresses of life. Love, it is said, “is a many-splendored thing,” and “love conquers all.” In the United States, love seems to be a prerequisite to forming a long-term romantic rela- tionship. But is that so in other cultures as well? Maybe not; many studies have demonstrated cultural differences in attitudes about love. Ting-Toomey (1991), for instance, compared ratings of love commitment, disclosure maintenance, ambivalence, and conflict expression by 781 participants from France, Japan, and the United States. The French and Americans had signifi- cantly higher ratings than the Japanese on love commitment and disclosure mainte- nance. Americans also had significantly higher ratings than the Japanese on relational ambivalence. The Japanese and the Americans, however, had significantly higher rat- ings than the French on conflict expression. Simmons, vom Kolke, and Shimizu (1986) examined attitudes toward love and romance among American, German, and Japanese students. Romantic love was valued more in the United States and Germany than in Japan. These researchers explained this cultural difference by suggesting that romantic love is more highly valued in cul- tures with few strong, extended family ties, and less valued in cultures in which kin- ship networks influence and reinforce the relationship between marriage partners. Thus although love may be a universal and uniquely human sentiment, it is valued differently in different cultures. Additionally, there are many forms of love (Hatfield, 1988; Hatfield & Rapson, 1996; Sternberg, 1988) and we do not know exactly what kinds of cultural similarities and differences exist for what specific types of love. Future research will need to explore this interesting question. Culture and Marriage Marriage is an institutionalized relationship that publicly recognizes the long-term commitment that two people make to each other. About 90% of people in most societies get married, or whatever is the equivalent of marriage in their societies (­Carroll & Wolpe, 1996). A study involving 17,804 participants in 62 cultures around the world found that 79% of the romantic attachments people had could be consid- ered “secure”—that is, one in which both the self and the other are considered valu- able and worthy of trust; they are characterized as being responsive, supportive, and comfortable in their mutual interdependence (Schmitt et al., 2004). This suggested a large degree of normality around the world in the way people form romantic attach- ments with others, and that there is something universal in the fact that people need and want to make such commitments with someone else. But there are cultural differences in the ways in which people around the world form romantic attachments and view the role of love in marriage. For example, indi- viduals in South, Southeast, and East Asia tend to score higher on preoccupied roman- tic attachment, in which attachments to others are relatively more dependent on the value that they provide to others and that others provide to themselves (Schmitt et al., 2004). That is, they tend to strive more for the approval of highly valued others in romantic relationships. In the United States today, there is decreasing pressure, especially on women, to get married before a certain age or to have children. Yet there are many people in many other cultures of the world that harbor many traditional values concerning marriage, including the belief that women should get married before a certain age, Copyright 2017 Cengage Learning. All Rights Reserved. May not be copied, scanned, or duplicated, in whole or in part. Due to electronic rights, some third party content may be suppressed from the eBook and/or eChapter(s). Editorial review has deemed that any suppressed content does not materially affect the overall learning experience. Cengage Learning reserves the right to remove additional content at any time if subsequent rights restrictions require it.  Culture and Social Behavior   343 such as 25, and have children before 30. These values are at conflict within cultures and societies that are, at the same time, becoming more affluent and individualistic. As children in these cultures leave to visit and/or study in cultures such as the United States, those types of conflicts come to a head, especially for women, who on the one hand, want to get an education, job, and career, and yet on the other, feel the pressure to get married, settle down, have children, and raise a family. Families who provide the financial support for their children to get an international education may not per- ceive the value of an education for their children, especially if they insist on an early marriage and child-rearing. There are cultural differences in the perceived role of love in marriage. Levine, Sato, Hashimoto, and Verma (1995), for instance, asked students in India, Pakistan, Thailand, Mexico, Brazil, Japan, Hong Kong, the Philippines, Australia, England, and the United States to rate the importance of love for both the establishment and the maintenance of a marriage. Individualistic cultures were more likely to rate love as essential to the establishment of a marriage, and to agree that the disappearance of love is a sufficient reason to end a marriage. Countries with a large gross domes- tic product also showed this tendency—not surprising, given the high correlation between affluence and individualism. Countries with high marriage and divorce rates, and low fertility rates, assigned greater importance to romantic love. Divorce rates were highly correlated with the belief that the disappearance of love warranted the dissolution of a marriage. Jankowiak and Fischer (1992) compared 186 traditional cultures on love and showed that in every culture but one, young people reported falling passionately in love; experienced the euphoria and despair of passionate love; knew of poems, sto- ries, and legends about famous lovers; and sang love songs. Nonetheless, this did not mean that the young people from these cultures could pursue these feelings of love and marry the person they fell in love with. Instead, in many of these cultures, arranged marriages were the norm. Arranged marriages are quite common in many cultures of the world. In India, arranged marriages arranged marriages date back 6,000 years (Saraswathi, 1999), although the practice is A marriage in which some- one other than the couple rarer today. Sometimes parents arrange marriages far before the age at which the cou- being married makes the ple can even consider marriage. In other cases, marriage meetings are held between decision about who will be prospective couples, who may then date for a while to decide whether to get married wed. Oftentimes, this can be or not. In these cultures, marriage is seen as more than just the union of two indi- the parents of the individu- als being wed. viduals, but rather as a union and alliance between two families (Dion & Dion, 1993b; Stone, 1990). Love between the two individuals is often not part of this equation but is something that should grow in the marriage relationship. People from these cultures often report that they “love the person they marry,” not “marry the person they love.” Hatfield and Rapson (1996) reported that getting married based on romantic love is a relatively new concept—about 300 years old in the West and much newer in non-Western cultures. With globalization, however, young people from these coun- tries are opting for selecting their own mates. For instance, over 20 years ago, 40% of young people in India intended to find a marriage partner on their own (Sprecher & Chandak, 1992). This trend is currently reflected in other countries as well, such as Japan, China, Egypt, and Turkey (Arnett, 2001). Intercultural Marriages Marriage in any culture is not easy because two people from two different back- grounds, and often two different cultures within a culture, come together to live, work, and play. Being together with anyone 24/7 is tough and is bound to bring about Copyright 2017 Cengage Learning. All Rights Reserved. May not be copied, scanned, or duplicated, in whole or in part. Due to electronic rights, some third party content may be suppressed from the eBook and/or eChapter(s). Editorial review has deemed that any suppressed content does not materially affect the overall learning experience. Cengage Learning reserves the right to remove additional content at any time if subsequent rights restrictions require it.  344  Chapter 14 its own share of conflicts and struggles. Any marriage requires work from both part- ners to be successful, regardless of how “successful” is defined. Intercultural marriages bring with them their own special problems and issues. Conflicts in intercultural marriages arise in several major areas, including the expres- sion of love and intimacy, the nature of commitment and attitudes toward the mar- riage itself, and approaches to child-rearing (see Cottrell, 1990, for a review). Other potential sources of conflict include differences in perceptions of male–female roles, especially with regard to division of labor (McGoldrick & Preto, 1984; Romano, 1988), differences in domestic money management (Ho, 1984; Hsu, 1977; Kiev, 1973; ­McGoldrick & Preto, 1984), differences in perceptions of relationships with extended family (Cohen, 1982; Markoff, 1977), and differences in the definitions of marriage itself (Markoff, 1977). Sometimes couples in intercultural marriages experience conflicts with regard to intimacy and love expression. As described in Chapter 9, people of dif- ferent cultures can vary in their expression of basic emotions such as anger, frus- tration, and happiness (because of cultural display rules). And cultures differ on the degree to which emotions such as love and intimacy are seen as important ingredients of a successful marriage. These differences arise from a fundamen- tal difference in attitudes toward marriage. Americans tend to view marriage as a companionship between two individuals in love. People of many other cultures view marriage more as a partnership formed for succession (that is, for producing offspring) and for economic and social bonding. Love does not necessarily have to enter the equation for people in these cultures, at least in the beginning. With such fundamental differences, it is no wonder that intercultural marriages can be difficult. Another conflict area is around issues of child-rearing, and sometimes the dif- ferences between two people involved in an intercultural marriage do not arise until they have children. This is no surprise because of the enormous differences in social- ization practices and the role of parenting in the development of culture, as discussed in Chapter 3. Although it has been a common belief that children of intracultural marriages have stronger ethnic identities than children of intercultural marriages, research does not tend to support this claim (e.g., Parsonson, 1987). Children tend to develop strong or weak ethnic identities based not on their parents’ similarities or differences, but on their upbringing, especially with regard to attitudes, values, and behaviors regarding their single or dual cultures. Children with stronger ethnic identities, however, are more likely to want to marry within their own ethnic group conformity Yielding (Parsonson, 1987). to real or imagined social In many ways, intercultural marriages are the prime example of intercultural pressure. relationships. For them to be successful, both partners need to be flexible, compro- mising, and committed to the relationship. If these ingredients are in play, couples compliance Yielding to will find ways to make their relationships work. Perhaps it all comes down to how social pressure in one’s pub- much both spouses are willing to work to negotiate differences, compromise, and stay lic behavior, even though together—a good recipe for all marriages. one’s private beliefs may not have changed. Culture and Conformity, Compliance, and Obedience obedience A form of compliance that occurs Conformity means yielding to real or imagined social pressure. Compliance is gener- when people follow direct ally defined as yielding to social pressure in one’s public behavior even though one’s commands, usually from someone in a position of private beliefs may not have changed. Obedience is a form of compliance that occurs authority. when people follow direct commands, usually from someone in a position of authority. Copyright 2017 Cengage Learning. All Rights Reserved. May not be copied, scanned, or duplicated, in whole or in part. Due to electronic rights, some third party content may be suppressed from the eBook and/or eChapter(s). Editorial review has deemed that any suppressed content does not materially affect the overall learning experience. Cengage Learning reserves the right to remove additional content at any time if subsequent rights restrictions require it.  Culture and Social Behavior   345 Two of the best-known studies on these topics are the Asch and Milgram studies. In his earliest experiments, Asch (1951, 1955, 1956) examined a participant’s response to a simple judgment task after other “subjects” (actually experimental confederates) had all given the same incorrect response. For example, a subject would be placed in a room with others, shown objects (lines, balls, and so forth), and asked to make a judgment about the objects (such as relative sizes). The answer was often obvious, but participants were asked to give their answers only after a number of confederates had given theirs. Asch (1956) reported that 36.8% of the participants conformed by giving the wrong answer even though it was obviously wrong. Across studies and tri- als, group size and group unanimity were the influencing factors; conformity peaked when the group contained seven people and was unanimous in its judgments (even though the judgments were clearly wrong). In Milgram’s (1974) famous study, participants were brought into a laboratory ostensibly to study the effects of punishment on learning. They were instructed to administer shocks to another person (actually a confederate) when the latter gave the wrong response or no response. The shock meter was labeled from “Slight Shock” to “DANGER: Severe Shock” and the confederate’s behaviors ranged from simple utter- ances of pain through pounding on the walls, pleas to stop, and then deathly silence. No shock was actually administered. Milgram reported that 65 percent of the subjects obeyed the commands of the experimenter and administered the most severe levels of shock. The Asch experiments were rather innocuous in the actual content of the com- pliance (e.g., judgments of the length of lines), and compliance resulted from subtle, implied pressure. But in the real world, compliance can occur in response to explicit rules, requests, and commands. We can imagine how forceful and pervasive group pressure to conform and comply is in the real world if it can operate in a simple labo- ratory environment among people unknown to the subject on a task that has rela- tively little meaning. The Milgram studies highlighted the potential negative and harmful effects of compliance and obedience. To this day, it stands as one of the best- known studies in American social psychology. Its findings spoke for themselves on the power of group influence. A number of cross-cultural studies have attempted to replicate the Asch experi- ment. For example, a replication of the Asch experiment in Japan using only ingroup members (teammates in sport clubs) also reported a conformity rate of 25.2%, which was comparable to four other behavioral studies in Japan using the same paradigm (Takano & Sogon, 2008). Bond and Smith (1996) conducted a meta-analysis analyzing 133 studies conducted in 17 countries, and reported that the mean conformity rate was 25%. There were considerable cultural differences, however. Conformity was higher when the majority that tried to influence the conforming participant was larger and with a greater proportion of female participants. Conformity was also greater when the majority did not consist of outgroup members and when the stimuli were more ambiguous. Conformity was higher in collectivistic countries than in individualistic ones. Smith and Bond (1999) also reviewed nine studies that used the Milgram para- digm across nine countries. These studies indicated a broad range in the percentage of participants obeying the experimenter, spanning from a low of 16% among females in Australia to a high of 92% in the Netherlands. These differences may have reflected real cultural differences in obedience, but they may have also reflected other types of differences, including differences in the meaning of the particular tasks used in the studies, the specific instructions given to the participants, and the nature of the con- federate who supposedly received the shocks. Copyright 2017 Cengage Learning. All Rights Reserved. May not be copied, scanned, or duplicated, in whole or in part. Due to electronic rights, some third party content may be suppressed from the eBook and/or eChapter(s). Editorial review has deemed that any suppressed content does not materially affect the overall learning experience. Cengage Learning reserves the right to remove additional content at any time if subsequent rights restrictions require it.  346  Chapter 14 Recent research has suggested that the source of these cultural differences may be in the historical prevalence of disease-causing pathogens: cultures in which patho- gens were more prevalent in history may have facilitated cultural norms promoting greater conformity in order to deal with increased risk of disease. In an ecological- level study (recall our discussion of these in Chapter 2), pathogen prevalence was positively associated with the amount of conformity in behavioral experiments and in the percentage of population who prioritize obedience. Prevalence was also nega- tively correlated with within-country dispositional variability and the percentage of the population that were left-handed (Murray, Trudeau, & Schaller, 2011). That conformity differs across cultures makes sense. Traditional American cul- ture fosters individualistic values, endorsing behaviors and beliefs contrary to con- formity. To conform in American culture is to be “weak” or somehow deficient. But many other cultures foster more conforming values; in those cultures, conformity, obedience, and compliance enjoy much higher status and are viewed positively. In these cultures, conformity is viewed not only as “good” but as necessary for the suc- cessful functioning of the culture, its groups, and the interpersonal relationships of its members. This probably explains why the best-known studies of conformity and obedience conducted in the United States are negative in their connotation. Although the Asch studies are rather innocuous, the Milgram studies are clearly a powerful indictment of the potential negative consequences of obedience. Have any studies been conducted by American social psychologists that might show positive outcomes of conformity, compliance, or obedience? If not, perhaps we need to examine the pos- sible biases of American social scientists in approaching these topics. Conformity and obedience are important constructs in any social system as a way of reinforcing behaviors (Lachlan, Janik, & Slater, 2004). Culture and Cooperation cooperation People’s Cooperation refers to people’s ability to work together toward common goals. Trust ability to work together and cooperation are necessary for the efficient functioning and survival of any toward common goals. social group, human or animal. Yet humans differ from animals in important ways. Whereas cooperative behavior in nonhuman primates exists, it is generally limited to kin and reciprocating partners and is virtually never extended to strangers; humans, on the other hand, give blood, volunteer, recycle, and are willing to incur costs to help even strangers in one-shot interactions (Silk, Brosnan, Vonk, Henrich, Povinelli, Richardson, et al., 2005). Cooperation, trust, and giving allow people to care for oth- ers’ children, even those of strangers, and to help out victims of tragedies, even if we do not know them. This does not happen in the nonhuman animal world. Human trust and cooperation appears to be based on unique human cognitive abilities (see Chapter 1), including empathy and concern for the welfare of others (Silk et al., 2005), memory (Pennisi, 2005), and shared intentions; reciprocity and cooperation can be practiced only by those who can remember who was helpful and who was not. One of the most well-known lines of research on cooperation and culture is that of Yamagishi and colleagues. In one study, Yamagishi (1986) categorized Japanese participants as high and low trusters; they then participated in an experiment in which they could cooperate with three other players by giving money to them, either with or without a sanctioning system that provided for punishments. The conditions, therefore, were the presence or absence of the sanctioning system. The sanctioning system involved the participants donating any or all of their earnings at the end of Copyright 2017 Cengage Learning. All Rights Reserved. May not be copied, scanned, or duplicated, in whole or in part. Due to electronic rights, some third party content may be suppressed from the eBook and/or eChapter(s). Editorial review has deemed that any suppressed content does not materially affect the overall learning experience. Cengage Learning reserves the right to remove additional content at any time if subsequent rights restrictions require it.  Culture and Social Behavior   347 the experiment into a “punishment fund,” which was then subtracted from the earn- ings of the participant who contributed the least to the totals for all players. High trusters did indeed cooperate more than low trusters without the sanctioning system; when the sanctioning system was in effect, however, low trusters cooperated more than did the high trusters. Yamagishi (1988) replicated this study in the United States and compared the American and Japanese responses. He found the same results for ­Americans as he did for the Japanese; when there was no sanctioning system, high- trusting Americans cooperated more than low-trusting Americans. When there was a sanctioning system, the findings reversed. Moreover, there were no differences between the Americans and the Japanese when the sanctioning system was in effect. These findings have been replicated numerous times (Mashima, Yamagishi, & Macy, 2004; Yamagishi, Makimura, Foddy, Matsuda, Kiyonari, & Platow, 2005) and sug- gest that cultural differences in cooperation exists because of the sanctioning system within which individuals exist; when people are placed in the same type of system, they behave in similar ways. These conclusions are consistent with other studies that have examined punish- ment as the source of cooperation. All populations of the world studied to date dem- onstrate some willingness to administer costly punishment in response to unequal behavior and that costly punishment positively correlates with altruistic behavior across countries (Henrich et al., 2006). The size of the communities within which people live is positively associated with punishment—the larger the communities, the greater the punishments. The degree of market integration based on exchanges of goods and services is positively associated with fairness across cultures (Henrich et al., 2010). The most recent review in this area, covering 83 studies with 7,361 partici- pants in 18 societies, revealed the punishment more strongly promotes cooperation in societies with high rather than low trust (Balliet & Van Lange, 2013). Many studies have reported that intercultural interactions produce increased competitiveness and less cooperation. In one recent study, students played a game of cooperation and competition (Prisoner’s Dilemma) either with a same-sex student of the same ethnicity or a different ethnicity. The participant pairs were strangers to each other prior to the experiment. Different ethnicity pairs produced less posi- tive outcomes and cooperative behaviors, and more competition than same ethnicity pairs, and the increased competitive play occurred with both players from the start of the game (Matsumoto & Hwang, 2011). But these findings may be limited to specific types of behaviors and targets. Allik and Realo (2004), for instance, examined the relationship between individualism and social capital across the states in the United States and across 42 cultures around the world. Social capital was broadly defined as interpersonal trust, civic engagement, social capital This and time spent with friends. The results were clear: both states in the United States refers to the social resources available to a person that and countries around the world that were more individualistic were associated with can be used to obtain one’s greater social capital; people are more trusting of others and engaged with them (see goals. These include social Figure 14.1). Kemmelmeier, Jambor, and Letner (2006) also showed that in the United factors such as interpersonal States, states that were more individualistic also had higher rates of charitable giving trust, civic engagement, and time spent with friends. and volunteerism. Thus cultural differences in cooperative behavior may exist but these are most likely related to the specific situational constraints that individuals are in at the time when a behavior occurs. Some contexts foster some types of cooperative behavior with some people; others do not. Culture provides the environment that defines the situational constraints and contexts. The effects of culture, therefore, are specific to type of behavior and context. Copyright 2017 Cengage Learning. All Rights Reserved. May not be copied, scanned, or duplicated, in whole or in part. Due to electronic rights, some third party content may be suppressed from the eBook and/or eChapter(s). Editorial review has deemed that any suppressed content does not materially affect the overall learning experience. Cengage Learning reserves the right to remove additional content at any time if subsequent rights restrictions require it.  348  Chapter 14 2.0 SD ND 1.5 VT MT NE MN IA 1.0 NH WY WI OR WA ME UT 0.5 KS MA CT Social Capital