Motivational Underpinnings of Intergenerational Transmission

NfCC as a Motivational Underpinning of Cultural Stability

NfCC is a basic epistemic motivation with important implications for norms stability and change within group, in particular, as concerns intergenerational transmission of culture (Livi, Kruglanski, Pierro, Mannetti, & Kenny, 2015). As a fundamental human motivation, need for closure affects sensitivity to norms and the desire to maintain them in subsequent generations. Indeed, NfCC has proved highly relevant to psychological processes underlying the development of culture. In what follows, we explain why.

NfCC was defined as a desire for a quick and firm answer to a question and the evasion of confusion and ambiguity (Kruglanski, 2004; Roets, Kruglanski, Kossowska, Pierro, & Hong, 2015). This particular need may not only constitute a stable trait on which persons vary (Webster & Kruglanski, 1994) but also is capable of being induced situationally when uncertainty is enhanced, for example, at times of war, economic downturn, or family dynamics characterized by tense disagreements among members creating a sense of confusion and uncertainty (Roets et al., 2015). Two important consequences of the need for closure consist of the urgency and permanence tendencies: Urgency refers to the inclination to quickly seize on closure promising cues while permanence reflects the propensity to freeze on a closure once it has been formed and to become resistant to subsequent information that threatens to undermine it.

In the last three decades, research on NfCC has obtained consistent evidence for varied effects of this motivation across broad swathes of social psychological phenomena (for recent review, see Roets et al., 2015) at the intrapersonal (e.g., ideological or religious beliefs), interpersonal (e.g., conformity and deviance rejection), intragroup (group centrism), and intergroup (outgroup derogation) levels. A straightforward implication of the notion that need for closure induces the tendency to preserve existing knowledge is that it promotes resistance to change (Gelfand & Harrington, 2015; Kruglanski et al., 2006). Several lines of evidence from field and laboratory studies converge in support of the possibility that NfCC affects individual tendency to exhibit particular orientation to ingroup cultural norms (Chao, Zhang, & Chiu, 2010; Kosic, Mannetti, & Livi, 2014; Morris, Hong, Chiu, & Liu, 2015). Kruglanski et al. (2006) integrated these distinctly social NfCC effects under the umbrella hypothesis of group centrism. Specifically, studies revealed that individuals under high NfCC tend to promote norms maintenance through a preference for autocratic group leadership in which consensus and hence a stable shared reality is guaranteed (Pierro, Mannetti, de Grada, Livi, & Kruglanski, 2003), rejection of opinion deviates (Pierro, de Grada, Mannetti, Livi, & Kruglanski, 2004), and aversion for diversity of membership (that connotes the possibility of divergence and dissensus).

In the same vein, Livi et al. (2015) found in three studies that groups composed of individuals high (vs. low) on NfCC exhibited greater stability of group norms across different generations of group membership and lower within group variability. In summary, both experimental and naturalistic studies suggest that norms’ stability is fostered by the urgency tendency that leads newcomers to seize upon group standards, thus, perpetuating them. More specifically, these results imply that cultural resistance to change is promoted mostly by the process of seizing through conformity of newcomers on perceived norms of the old timers. Moreover, Tam, Lee, Kim, Li, and Chao (2012) found that parents with high NfCC have a stronger association between perceived norms and transmission preferences. Both studies thus attest that NfCC aligns cultural knowledge to the closure goal. These studies recall also normative approaches to cultural psychology that demonstrated that members of a given culture strategically use their cultural knowledge to adapt to their social environment. From this point of view, Tam’s perceived norms perspective further suggests that parents’ goals affect the extent to which individuals single out some cultural norms as particularly valuable and so particularly deserving to be transmitted to their children. Therefore, parents high in NfCC, to reach a stable reality, could select group norms that seem to enjoy wide consensus, hence, contributing to shared reality and hence closure. This quest for shared reality of both old timers (parents) and newcomers (offspring) promotes intra and intergenerational uniformity. From this perspective, the goal of preserving the parents’ culture in subsequent generations, amplified by cultural identification, as suggested by Tam and Chan (2015) could be mediated by high NfCC’s members goal to maintain stability of group.

Relevant to this point, studies of Livi et al. (2015) further demonstrated that heightened need for closure affects maintenance of norms in cultures by reducing within cultures variability through conformity to descriptive norms presented by members of older generations. In fact, basic values, beliefs, and attitudes or behavioral norms shared by members of a given group culture derive not only from the social comparison and attempt to influence others but also by the readiness to be influenced by others to be part of the same group as suggested by the Tam’s perceived norms perspective and amplified by heightened NfCC. Hence, reduced variability within group of high NfCC cultures induce group centrism which, in turn, affects perceived intersubjective agreement representation (Shteynberg, 2015; Wan, 2015), decreasing uncertainty of the group.

Epilogue

In this commentary, we proposed that for the emergence, maintenance, and transformation of a culture over time, the perceived norms perspective factors (personal orientation and perception of what is normatively important for the culture) have its cognitive and motivational underpinnings in epistemic motivation and in particular in strivings for certainty and closure operationalized by the NfCC. This perspective is important to understand how human cognition affects the emergence and shaping of culture.

In our opinion from a general point of view, cultural norms transmission is granted by means of two basic mechanisms (see Livi et al., 2015): (a) conformity of the offspring/newcomers to the norms but also (b) the maintenance of the cultural norms over time by the parents/old timers despite cultural transformation brought by changes of the situation (such as cultural innovation, intragroup or intercultural conflicts) or introduced by the new generations. From the epistemic point of view, members of a culture may decide to seize and conform to the norms of a new social environment or to freeze on previously internalized norms and maintaining ideas according to the (perceived) benefits and costs of closure relative to the benefits and costs of lacking closure. Findings from previous studies were conceptually consistent with this theoretical derivation on relationship between need for closure and the acculturation process (Kosic, Kruglanski, Pierro, & Mannetti, 2004) that showed a similar effect demonstrating that immigrants with high need for closure prefer to assimilate to either the host or to their native culture whichever seems more accessible in given circumstances. The reference group culture (native or host) operates to reduce epistemic ambiguity and confer security (Chao & Chiu, 2011). Consistent with this idea, Tam et al. (2012) found that perceived normative values are stronger determinants of socialization values among parents with a stronger need for closure.

From a motivational point of view, it is worth to underline that the need to maintain (freeze) and conform (seize) to cultural norms are independent processes that can be in conflict. For example, immigrants’ parents high in NfCC (due to their personal orientation or their uncertainty by previous life experience) should weigh whether benefits associated to the preservation of their cultural heritage overcome the costs to adapt themselves and their offspring to the descriptive norms of the host culture. In this sense, cultural change can be promoted by individuals with low NfCC who may feel comfortable with innovation created by new cultural conditions and may enhance their capability to cope with it. Moreover, from the Intersubjective Cultural Representation approach (Wan, 2015), reduced discrepancy between common knowledge of culture and NfCC self-characteristics should help individuals to align to their culture shared reality. In fact, a fundamental aspect of culture is the need for a common worldview held by its members (Wan, 2012). From this perspective, we are able to clarify the role of NfCC in socially shared cultural formation and the construction of a firm shared group reality through perceived group norms that constitute a central element of “culture.” A recent study by Pierro, Sheveland, Livi, and Kruglanski (2015) demonstrated that high NfCC individuals performed better in workgroups in which the remaining members were also high in NfCC, whereas low NfCC individuals performed better in workgroups with lower levels of aggregate NfCC. This cross-level effect between group and individual members could suggest that, in some cases, parents (or offspring) have an additional choice to make whether to rely on personal views or group norms depending on the seizing or freezing process activated by their NfCC.