Cross-Cultural Research

We test a theoretical model that explains the development of materialistic beliefs and compulsive buying. The model uses the life course framework, a paradigm that has recently been given attention in the marketing literature. To address the calls of prior consumer researchers, we investigate how these consumption orientations develop in 3 country contexts: the United States, France, and Brazil. We assess the level of measurement invariance and evaluate the model. Findings support family resources playing a mediating role between childhood family disruptions and young adulthood consumption orientations; they are relatively consistent across countries and suggest that some life course explanation of the two consumption orientations may be similar across diverse cultural settings.

This article reports a test of the hypothesis that national differences in personality traits are expressed by national differences in how accurately the final letter of the personal name designates the female or male gender. The names were obtained from lists of more than 80 popular names in each nation, separately for females and males. Gender designation was more accurate for female than male names. In nations with more accurate gender designation of the final letter of first names, four personality traits self-reported more often by inhabitants are high uncertainty avoidance (UA), high power distance (PD), low individualism (Ind), thereby high collectivism, and a low proportion who are very happy (VH).

This study aims to compare the value structure of university students from postcommunist Turkic republics and Turkey within the framework of Schwartz and Bardi’s (1997) acclimation and compensation hypothesis. Participants from four Turkic republics (N = 269; Turkmenistan, Kyrgyzstan, Kazakhstan, and Azerbaijan) and Turkey (N = 286) completed the Portrait Values Questionnaire. The results indicated that students from postcommunist countries reported higher levels of embeddedness and lower levels of intellectual autonomy, affective autonomy, and egalitarianism than Turkish students. No difference was found regarding mastery, harmony, and hierarchy values. This study provided support for the acclimation and compensation hypothesis, except for the hierarchy values. The findings were discussed considering the continuous social change in these countries and its implications for the dynamism of value structure.

Societal trust is widely believed to be a fundamental component of prosperous societies, but geographical determinants of societal trust have not been examined in depth. This study examines hypothesized pathways between geography and societal trust.

Strongest support is found for the hypothesis that higher geographical latitude leads to lower disease prevalence, lower income inequality, and less ethnic and less linguistic heterogeneity. Lower disease prevalence, lower income inequality, and less ethnic and less linguistic heterogeneity in turn appear to determine the viability of a “virtuous circle” of mutually reinforcing societal characteristics, including greater wealth, greater life expectancy, greater political rights, greater civil liberties, greater societal trust, less religiosity, and less corruption.

Skin color is one of the first features that we notice in another person and, therefore, it plays a significant role in the mate selection process as well as in the assessments of attractiveness of others. However, almost all modern research showing a preference for lighter skin tone (particularly in women) was conducted within populations of relatively light skin color. The current study was conducted among the Yali people, who are dark-skinned and native to the isolated highlands of West Papua. We found that for both males (n = 53) and females (n = 53) preferred skin tone was either average or slightly lighter than the average. At the same time, we found that the male preference for lighter skin tone in females was correlated with contact with other cultures. We discuss our results in the context of social and biological theories explaining skin tone preferences.