Search

Past research shows that democracy is valued more in affluent societies with challenging climate than in other societies. Building on this finding, the present study examines how the amount of institutional and value support for cultural pluralism in a society is related to its climate and level of innovation performance. Cultural pluralism is defined as the societal condition in which minority groups within a society can maintain their distinctive cultural identities, values, and practices provided that they are consistent with the laws and values of the wider society. Institutions and values that support cultural pluralism include political democracy, tolerance for uncertainty, prioritization of secular-rational values, and openness to foreign cultures. I hypothesize that institutional and value support for cultural pluralism is stronger in societies with more challenging climate and higher innovation performance. I tested this hypothesis using society-level measures of harshness of climatic condition and innovation performance as predictors. The results showed that in societies with demanding climate and high innovation performance, their citizens tend to support democracy, are more tolerant of uncertainty, prioritize secular-rational values, and take more leisure trips outside of their home country. These results illustrate that innovation, through its moderation effect on climate, predicts the amount of institutional and value support for cultural pluralism, highlighting the reciprocal effects of culture and innovation.

This special issue enriches the study of creativity and innovation as a cultural and social process. Authors of nine articles jointly contribute to a nuanced and systematical inquiry into the cultural perspective of creativity. Their topics of investigation include lay conceptions of creativity in different cultures, different natures and manifestations of creativity and innovation, the influence of cultural values, norms, and multiculturalism on creativity, and the dialogical coevolvement between culture and creativity. The collection of articles in this issue presents cutting-edge evidence and lays the groundwork for an active dialogue about integrating the study of culture and creativity.

Results from a field experiment conducted in Guangzhou, China, show that Chinese consumers react more negatively to culture-mixed products after shopping (vs. simply entering) in a high-status Chinese store ( Exception). This effect was absent among Chinese consumers who shopped (vs. simply entered) in a high-status European store, a low-status European store, or a lower status Chinese store. The effect was also absent among Western shoppers. We argue that the Exception effect among Chinese consumers emerges due to heightened perceptions of the rising status of China—which might increase the positivity of Chinese identity and hence prompt a rejection of foreign cultural influences.

China, which was once a world champion in invention, has failed to maintain its global leadership in innovation after the middle of the Ming Dynasty (1368–1644). Today, frame-breaking innovations are more likely to originate from European and North American countries than from China. In the perspective article (Augier, Guo, & Rowen, 2016), the authors attribute this phenomenon, which is often referred to as the Needham Puzzle, to three reasons: (1) the Chinese did not develop a scientific method like that in the West; (2) lack of educational diversity and structural inertia in China; and (3) lack of openness to the outside world. The authors also attribute the US's leadership in innovation to its culture of encouraging experimentation, tolerating failure and accepting deviance, and to its institutional support for decentralization of and competition in R&D and basic research. This commentary aims to enrich this insightful analysis. We focus on (1) the reasons for the demise of Chinese leadership in science and technology since the middle of the Ming dynasty, and (2) the historical and cultural obstacles to the development of frame-breaking innovations in modern China.

Drawing on moral foundation theory, the author found that in response to an infringement of intellectual property rights, both US and Chinese samples reported anger and evaluated the infringement negatively. The results also highlight the importance of considering cultural factors in moral decision-making. Apparently, in Chinese culture, moral decisions tend to be norm-based, even when people are assigning sanction to a transgression of the ethics of autonomy. In contrast, in American culture, moral decisions tend to be preference-based. Furthermore, although people tend to express their anger through punishment and contempt and disgust with social exclusion, in the American context, due to its relatively high mobility, to express their moral anger, individuals prefer to sanction wrongdoing by socially isolating the wrongdoer.

One type of perceived descriptive norm is representations of how widely known or familiar particular entities (including artifacts, people, groups, ideas and practices, etc.) are in one’s society. These perceptions are implicated in important interpersonal, organizational and cultural processes. The authors hypothesize that these familiarity perceptions are formed in part through mere exposure—things frequently seen are assumed to be widely known. Two experimental studies provided support for this hypothesis and showed that incidental exposure to stimulus objects alters their assumed familiarity to others, without conscious processing. Furthermore, this mere exposure effect affected personal preference only when there was a strong motivation for social connectedness. In contrast, when there was a strong motivation for personal distinctiveness, the mere exposure effect on assumed familiarity to others did not affect personal preference.

Summary Innovation is of pivotal importance to economic growth in both developed and developing countries. The current research seeks to provide insights on how human and institutional factors interact to explain country variations in innovation. Using a multiple source, multinational database that covers a wide spectrum of innovation outputs in more than 120 economies in the world from 2011 to 2013, we for the first time examined both the concurrent and predictive associations of the interactive effects of human capital and institutional support with innovation output. Results showed that innovation output is a multi-faceted construct, consisting of at least three aspects: knowledge creation, knowledge impact, and knowledge diffusion. Quality of human capital predicts knowledge creation; institutional support and human capital have additive effects on knowledge impact; and the presence of both human capital and institutional support is required for knowledge diffusion. These results extend past findings on the role of institutions and human capital in innovation and have important implications for national policies of innovation development. Copyright © 2015 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

Classical attribution theories of behavioral responsibility attribution emphasize that individuals should not be blamed for their mere association with a wrongdoer. Nonetheless, perceivers sometimes blame the wrongdoer's associates for the wrongdoer's misdeed even when those associates are not causally connected to the wrongdoing. In an experiment conducted in Singapore, we found that collective culpability attributions result from holistic thinking—the tendency to attribute causal connectedness between discrete entities or events. Activating holistic thinking enhanced perceptions of causal impacts of distal events and facilitated collective culpability attributions. We discuss these results in terms of their implications for understanding the nature of collective culpability and research on holistic thinking.

Integrative research can lead to frame-breaking innovations; it can also lead to disruptive conflicts between research team members. In the present contribution, we propose a cultural perspective to integrative research, treating the knowledge tradition of a discipline or profession as a culture. We discuss how socialization into a disciplinary culture can reinforce intellectual centrism. We further propose that awareness of cultural differences between disciplines can further increase intellectual centrism by enlarging the perceived differences between disciplines. Nonetheless, awareness of disciplinary differences, when coupled with an interdisciplinary learning orientation or growth beliefs, can enhance creative performance and the quality of collaboration in integrative research. We discuss the implications of these ideas for promoting and managing integrative research.

Cross-border transactions are often perceived by the general public as national threats instead of rational business deals. We propose two interpretational mindsets that attenuate (transactional mindset) and agitate (categorization mindset) these culturally motivated responses. Three studies were conducted in Singapore and the United States with various cross-border acquisition scenarios. As predicted, transactional mindset, which centers around cost–benefit calculations, nudged participants to evaluate the foreign acquisition more rationally and evoked fewer social–cultural considerations than categorization mindset, which focuses on categorizing and comparison procedures, and when no mindset was primed. Furthermore, the effects of categorization mindset are particularly strong when one perceives the two transacting parties as dissimilar and when he/she identifies closely with the local culture. We conclude that while economic activities such as cross-border acquisitions can inadvertently evoke nationalistic reactions, it is possible to mitigate them or even encourage rational evaluations by influencing people's interpretational mindset.

As a first step to establish social psychology of globalization as a new area of investigation, we carried out two cross-regional studies to examine lay people's perception of globalization and its related concepts, as well as lay people's appraisal of the social impacts of globalization. The participants were undergraduates from regions with markedly different experiences with globalization (the United States, Mainland China, Taiwan, and Hong Kong). Despite regional differences in experiences with globalization, cross-regional similarities were found in the way globalization-related issues were classified and how their social impacts were evaluated. Participants in all four regions (1) perceived globalization to be related to but not synonymous with modernization, Westernization, and Americanization; (2) used international trade versus technology, and globalization of consumption versus global consequences as the dimensions to categorize globalization-related issues; and (3) perceived globalization to have stronger positive effects on people's competence than on their warmth.

The articles in this forum present many innovative ideas on the role of culture in creativity. In this commentary, we first discuss the contributions of these articles in relation to two recurrent themes: (i) where creativity resides and (ii) what conceptual refinements are needed to push the field forward. Next, we oudine a process model of creativity and explain the role of culture at each stage of knowledge creation. We argue that successful innovation involves one or more iterations of the following three stages: (i) authoring new ideas; (ii) selecting, editing, and marketing new ideas; and (iii) acceptance of the new ideas in the market. The desired outcomes are different at the different stages, and culture influences all stages of the process. Specifically, existing knowledge provides a reference point for evaluating the originality of ideas; assumed cultural consensus provides the normative basis for idea selection, editing, and marketing; and actual cultural norms determine how likely an idea will be accepted in a culture. Furthermore, different social and psychological processes are at work at different stages of the creativity process, and culture can affect the outcomes of the creativity process through its effects on these social and psychological processes.

Prior research indicates that East Asians are more sensitive to contextual information than Westerners. This article explored aesthetics to examine whether cultural variations were observable in art and photography. Study 1 analyzed traditional artistic styles using archival data in representative museums. Study 2 investigated how contemporary East Asians and Westerners draw landscape pictures and take portrait photographs. Study 3 further investigated aesthetic preferences for portrait photographs. The results suggest that (a) traditional East Asian art has predominantly context-inclusive styles, whereas Western art has predominantly object-focused styles, and (b) contemporary members of East Asian and Western cultures maintain these culturally shaped aesthetic orientations. The findings can be explained by the relation among attention, cultural resources, and aesthetic preference.