Custodes Futurifor the advancement of humanity

Cultural factor, barrier 6 of 6

Cultural value differences

Hofstede (2001) describes how cultures differ in individualism and tolerance for uncertainty. No single profile is better overall, and critics argue that treating each nation as one uniform culture oversimplifies (rated C).

Evidence

  • Tight and loose cultures. A 33-nation study found tighter nations tended to have histories of threats such as dense populations, resource scarcity, conflict, and disease. Tightness can support coordination but leaves less room for nonconformity (Gelfand et al., 2011).
  • Disputed measure. A six-country replication found different country rankings (Treviño et al., 2021), and another study argued the scoring method can distort results (Venaik et al., 2021). The country examples are uncertain.
  • Individualism and innovation. Using gene frequencies and historic disease prevalence as instruments for culture, a cross-country study found individualism raised innovation, productivity, and income per worker. The instruments rest on strong assumptions, so this is rated C (Gorodnichenko and Roland, 2017).

Proposed and experimental methods

Methods that are proposed, under trial, approved in some places, or tried and then failed. Each shows a stage label and an evidence rating. A stage label shows how far a method has progressed, not whether it works. The stage labels are explained on the cultural factor page.

  • Cooperative contact across groups (Large trial, B). A review of 27 randomized studies with outcomes measured at least one day later found that contact typically reduces prejudice (pooled effect 0.39 standard deviations, 24 of 27 estimates positive), but effects were substantially weaker for ethnic or racial prejudice and no study tested adults' racial or ethnic prejudice (Paluck et al., 2019). In India, men randomly placed on mixed-caste cricket teams formed more cross-caste friendships and showed less own-caste favoritism, while being randomly assigned opponents from other castes reduced cross-caste interaction (Lowe, 2021). In Iraq, Christians randomly placed on soccer teams with Muslims behaved better toward Muslim peers, but not in other settings, and attitudes did not change consistently (Mousa, 2020). The overall effect of short depolarization treatments is in "Cognitive dissonance and motivated reasoning" in the psychological factors.
  • Culturally adapting programs (In wide use, B). This changes the content, language, or delivery of an intervention to fit the values of the people it serves. A meta-analysis of 78 studies with 13,998 participants found that culturally adapted psychological interventions outperformed other conditions (g = 0.67) and unadapted versions of the same intervention (g = 0.52), with larger effects for treatment than for prevention (Hall et al., 2016). Most comparisons were with no intervention, and whether adaptation affects culture-specific problems has not been adequately studied.
  • Not shown to help: transplanting institutions without adapting them (Failed or reversed, C). Across 49 countries, how law was originally received mattered more for the effectiveness of legal institutions than which legal family it came from. Countries that adapted imported law, or whose people were already familiar with its principles, had more effective legal institutions, which in turn was linked to development (Berkowitz et al., 2003). The study is a cross-country comparison and cannot show cause.

Sources cited on this page

  1. Gorodnichenko, Y., & Roland, G. (2017). Culture, institutions, and the wealth of nations. Review of Economics and Statistics, 99(3), 402-416. DOI C Limited
  2. Hofstede, G. (2001). Culture's Consequences (2nd ed.). Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage. C Limited
  3. Gelfand, M. J., et al. (2011). Differences between tight and loose cultures: a 33-nation study. Science, 332(6033), 1100-1104. DOI C Limited: for the concept, D for country rankings
  4. Treviño, L. J., Egri, C. P., Ralston, D. A., Naoumova, I., et al. (2021). A multi-country, multi-sector replication challenge to the validity of the cultural tightness-looseness measure. Asia Pacific Journal of Management, 38(2), 735-764. DOI B Moderate
  5. Venaik, S., Midgley, D. F., & Christopoulos, D. (2021). Do within-subject standardized indices of societal culture distort reality? An illustration with the national Tightness culture scale. Journal of World Business, 56(5), 101242. DOI B Moderate
  6. Berkowitz, D., Pistor, K., & Richard, J.-F. (2003). Economic development, legality, and the transplant effect. European Economic Review, 47(1), 165-195. link C Limited
  7. Hall, G. C. N., Ibaraki, A. Y., Huang, E. R., Marti, C. N., & Stice, E. (2016). A meta-analysis of cultural adaptations of psychological interventions. Behavior Therapy, 47(6), 993-1014. link B Moderate
  8. Lowe, M. (2021). Types of contact: A field experiment on collaborative and adversarial caste integration. American Economic Review, 111(6), 1807-1844. link B Moderate
  9. Mousa, S. (2020). Building social cohesion between Christians and Muslims through soccer in post-ISIS Iraq. Science, 369(6505), 866-870. link B Moderate
  10. Paluck, E. L., Green, S. A., & Green, D. P. (2019). The contact hypothesis re-evaluated. Behavioural Public Policy, 3(2), 129-158. link B Moderate

Every source for this factor is listed on the cultural factor page.