1. Neither Eastern nor Western: Patterns of independence and interdependence in Mediterranean societies.
- Author
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Uskul AK, Kirchner-Häusler A, Vignoles VL, Rodriguez-Bailón R, Castillo VA, Cross SE, Yalçın MG, Harb C, Husnu S, Ishii K, Jin S, Karamaouna P, Kafetsios K, Kateri E, Matamoros-Lima J, Liu D, Miniesy R, Na J, Özkan Z, Pagliaro S, Psaltis C, Rabie D, Teresi M, and Uchida Y
- Subjects
- Humans, United States, Japan, Racial Groups, United Kingdom, Self Concept, Emotions, Social Behavior
- Abstract
Social science research has highlighted "honor" as a central value driving social behavior in Mediterranean societies, which requires individuals to develop and protect a sense of their personal self-worth and their social reputation, through assertiveness, competitiveness, and retaliation in the face of threats. We predicted that members of Mediterranean societies may exhibit a distinctive combination of independent and interdependent social orientation, self-construal, and cognitive style, compared to more commonly studied East Asian and Anglo-Western cultural groups. We compared participants from eight Mediterranean societies (Spain, Italy, Greece, Turkey, Cyprus [Turkish Cypriot and Greek Cypriot communities], Lebanon, Egypt) to participants from East Asian (Korea, Japan) and Anglo-Western (the United Kingdom, the United States) societies, using six implicit social orientation indicators, an eight-dimensional self-construal scale, and four cognitive style indicators. Compared with both East Asian and Anglo-Western samples, samples from Mediterranean societies distinctively emphasized several forms of independence (relative intensity of disengaging [vs. engaging] emotions, happiness based on disengaging [vs. engaging] emotions, dispositional [vs. situational] attribution style, self-construal as different from others, self-directed, self-reliant, self-expressive, and consistent) and interdependence (closeness to in-group [vs. out-group] members, self-construal as connected and committed to close others). Our findings extend previous insights into patterns of cultural orientation beyond commonly examined East-West comparisons to an understudied world region. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2023 APA, all rights reserved).
- Published
- 2023
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