Cross-Cultural Research

This study finds a common statistical pattern in all major quantitative studies of cultural differences, and discusses theories that explain this pattern.

92 cultural variables from 33 published cross-cultural studies including 125 countries are analyzed with an advanced factor analysis method. The study confirms previous findings that two factors can account for a large part of the variation in all major published cultural variables.

While many previously published cultural variables represent arbitrarily rotated factor analysis results, the present study is improving the explanatory power by un-rotating the factors and by incorporating new theories that link cultural values to conditions in the physical and social environment.

The first factor, accounting for 34% of the total variance, reflects general effects of development and welfare. This factor is explained by theories of development, modernization, emancipation, and secularization. This includes psychological effects of collective security that are explained by evolutionary psychology. The dimension formed by the first factor has one end in poor and war-torn countries, and the opposite end in North European welfare states.

The second factor, accounting for 15% of the total variance, reflects relational mobility, long-term versus short-term orientation, differences in self-construal, and various other effects. Theoretical explanations of these effects are based on differences in subsistence economy, colonial history, ethnic diversity, and religion. The second factor has one end in East Asian countries, and the opposite end in Latin American countries. Analysis of business culture reveals the same two-factor pattern as national culture.

The explicitness of expression or persuasion has been a critical subject of study in cross-cultural studies. The majority of cross-cultural comparisons in this respect, however, have been based on questionnaires and surveys. This study seeks to diversify the methods and validate the results with a corpus-based register analytical approach. Based on the United Nations General Debate Corpus (UNGDC) that comprises comparable multi-cultural speeches, a diachronic comparison (1970-2020) is made between the 2518 speeches (altogether 7,090,221 tokens) of 55 cultures from the East (East, South, and Southeast Asia) and the West (European Union, North America, and Australia) on the dimension ‘explicitness of persuasion’, a synthesized variable operationalized with 6 linguistic features, with the register analytical framework of Multi-Dimensional Analysis (MDA). The potential impacts of the political contexts on the cross-cultural gap in persuasion explicitness are tentatively discussed with the case studies on China and the United States. The results reveal significant difference between the exemplars from the East and the West on the overtness of persuasion, and the gap is generally narrowing down over the 51 years. The quantitative results provide political-setting linguistic evidence for the relevant findings of Hall, Hofstede, and Inglehart & Welzel, and the narrowing gap between cultures from the East and the West in the explicitness of expression points to an open and dynamic view of cultures. This study may offer implications for further research on the cultural styles of political persuasion.

The COVID-19 pandemic has affected 222 countries and territories around the globe. Notably, the speed of COVID-19 spread varies significantly across countries. This cross-cultural research proposes and empirically examines how national culture influences the speed of COVID-19 spread in three studies. Study 1 examines the effects of Hofstede’s national cultural dimensions on the speed of COVID-19 spread in 60 countries. Drawing on the GLOBE study (House et al., 2004), Study 2 investigates how GLOBE cultural dimensions relate to the speed of the pandemic’s spread in 55 countries. Study 3 examines the effect of cultural tightness in 31 countries. We find that five national cultural dimensions – power distance, uncertainty avoidance, humane orientation, in-group collectivism, and cultural tightness – are significantly related to the speed of COVID-19 spread in the initial stages, but not in the later stages, of the pandemic. Study 1 shows that the coronavirus spreads faster in countries with small power distance and strong uncertainty avoidance. Study 2 supports these findings and further reveals that countries with low humane orientation and high in-group collectivism report a faster spread of the disease. Lastly, Study 3 shows that COVID-19 spreads slower in countries with high cultural tightness.

After Hofstede proposed individualism-collectivism (IDV-COLL) as a dimension of national culture, numerous studies have used that name to refer to individual-level psychological constructs, based on theories and empirical operationalizations that are not necessarily compatible with the Hofstede tradition. This has created confusion. In this study, we investigate whether the two revised Minkov-Hofstede dimensions of national culture - IDV-COLL and “flexibility-monumentalism” (FLX-MON) - have individual-level counterparts and if they are isomorphic (have the same structure at both levels of analysis). We find that the three main conceptual facets of national COLL (conformism, ascendancy, and exclusionism) and the three of MON (self-esteem, self-stability, and generosity) materialize as six independent individual-level dimensions in a nationally representative sample from Mongolia (n = 1500). This structure emerged in a confirmatory factor analysis, multidimensional scaling, and hierarchical cluster analyses. This is the first series of analyses of the structure of the individual-level ingredients of national IDV-COLL and FLX-MON,

This paper integrates scaling theory with variation in systems of governance to help explain cross-cultural differences in the energy use of human polities. In both industrial and pre-industrial polities, systems of governance moderate the scaling of population and energy use. Polities with more inclusive governance systems display, on average, lower energy use per agent. However, as populations increase in size, the energy consumed by polities with more inclusive governance increases faster than among polities with less inclusive governance. These results support the hypothesis that more inclusive governance systems help generate a virtuous cycle of increasing trust, larger-scale cooperation, and more productive economies; however, a byproduct of this process is an expanding network–energy throughput tradeoff: Good governance empowers individuals and firms to connect and cooperate. At the same time, similar to Jevons’ classic efficiency paradox, scaling-up this empowerment requires a system, as a whole, to consume ever greater amounts of energy and materials from the earth’s ecosystems.