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Outward differences between cultures are very salient, with Western and East Asian cultures as a prominent comparison pair. A large literature describes cross-cultural variation in cognition, but relatively less research has explored the developmental origins of this variation. This study helps to fill the empirical gap by replicating four prominent findings documenting cross-cultural differences in children's reasoning, visual attention, and social cognition in a cross-sectional sample of 240 3-12-year-olds from the US and China. We observe cross-cultural differences in three of the four tasks and describe the distinct developmental trajectory that each task follows throughout early and middle childhood.

Spatial cognition is fundamental to human behavior, but people differ in how they remember spatial relations, variably using body-based (egocentric) and environment-based (allocentric) spatial reference frames. Despite decades of study, the causes of this variation and flexibility in spatial memory remain unclear. Here we show that people spontaneously use different reference frames on different spatial axes at the same time. When remembering the placement of a target object in a 2-dimensional array, Indigenous Tsimane' adults preferentially used allocentric space to determine lateral placement and egocentric space to determine sagittal placement in the same action. This effect of axis was also significant among US university students, whose overall preference for egocentric space was stronger on the sagittal than lateral axis. These findings support a novel account of spatial cognitive diversity and suggest that people across cultures habitually integrate egocentric and allocentric spatial reference frames into the same action.

Differentiating letter shapes accurately is an increasingly crucial competence. Are letters as distinctive as they could be? We used a unique dataset of crowdsourced letter descriptions across 43 writing systems to produce a comprehensive typology of letter shapes for these diverse scripts. We extracted from 19,591 letter classifications, contributed by 1,683 participants, enough features to provide a unique description of all letters in each system. We show that scripts, compared to phoneme inventories, are feature-extensive: they use additional features to do what could be done with a lower number of features, used more efficiently. Compared to 516 phoneme inventories from the P-base dataset, our 43 scripts have lower feature economy (fewer symbols for a given number of features) and lower feature informativeness (a less balanced distribution of feature values). Letter shapes, we argue, having more degrees of freedom than speech sounds, use features in a more wasteful way.

Despite considerable differences in the structures of the world's languages and child-rearing practices, children show remarkable cross-linguistic similarities in their early lexical development, including a preference for nouns. Here, we analyze children's early lexical production in naturalistic longitudinal corpora in a large-scale cross-linguistic comparison of 10 typologically highly diverse languages. We assess morphological complexity as a possible explanatory variable for children's higher noun-to-verb ratios and evaluate whether children's gradual increase in morphological productivity is correlated with their gradual decrease in noun-to-verb ratios towards the level found in their ambient language.We show that in languages with complex verb morphology, children exhibit a higher deviation in their noun-to-verb ratio compared to adults. This deviation gradually diminishes as they become more productive in the use of their target language. This effect holds across languages, despite their differences in morphological complexity.

While meaning variation in common words across language and culture is well established, only a few studies have explicitly quantified how general such differences are and whether differences reflect slight variations in meaning or could be considered to map onto entirely distinct concepts for different groups. The present study aims to investigate the extent to which common words can be interpreted differently between groups of English-proficient native Chinese speakers and native English speakers. This was done through a free judgment of associative strength (JAS) task using 42 cue English nouns. Our findings revealed language-specific meanings across all 42 cue words, with strong evidence for language-specific meaning in nearly 95\% of nouns. To determine whether these words map onto entirely distinct language-specific concepts, we measured conceptual diversity using Latent Profile Analysis (LPA). The results of the LPA showed that nearly 69% of the cue words could be mapped onto more than one concept across all participants. Importantly, language differences were related to conceptual diversity in nearly 64% of words featuring multiple concepts. In sum, we found robust evidence of word meanings and conceptual variations among individuals across distinct linguistic and cultural backgrounds, even for common English words.

The dominant mental timelines of native Chinese speakers (Exp1) and Mandarin learners of near-native proficiency (Exp2) was examined with the spontaneous gesture task. The results demonstrated that (1) both groups produced horizontal, vertical, sagittal, fused horizontal and vertical, and fused horizontal and sagittal gestures for all kinds of Chinese temporal words, indicating a strong preference for horizontal over vertical gestures. (2) Negligible correlations between immediate spatio-temporal metaphors and the mental timelines were observed, with an almost non-existent difference in gesture distribution across metaphorical types between the two groups. The findings indicate that (1) the horizontal mental timeline is the dominant timeline for two groups; (2) visuospatial experience exerts a greater influence on temporal cognition; (3) mental timelines formed by the long-term effects of language may operate beyond the immediate metaphors, similar to the horizontal gestures. A unified model proposing embodied experience as the mechanism for activating mental timelines is presented.

Humans make sense of space in a variety of ways. We can locate the world relative to our bodies, for instance, and thus adopt an 'egocentric' frame of reference for space. Or we can locate the world relative to an external frame of reference --- the cardinal directions, perhaps, or salient geographical features such as mountains. Across contexts and cultures, people vary in the frame of reference they adopt to think and communicate about space. Here, we test an explanation of this diversity: Egocentric encoding is encouraged by dense urban environments, particularly when reasoning about small-scale space. We constructed a corpus of three decades of published studies of cross-cultural variation in spatial frames of reference (N > 7,000 participants). Multilevel Bayesian models confirmed that egocentric encoding is more common in cities (vs. rural environments) and for small-scale space. Our conceptualization of space is shaped by the spaces we inhabit.

People from every culture observe the natural world in detail and organise it into categories, and Western biology builds on this universal impulse towards classification. Here we provide a quantitative analysis of factors that shape folk and scientific classification of birds from areas associated with three indigenous languages (Anindilyakwa, Tlingit, and Zapotec). We find that traditional Linnaean taxonomies align better with folk categories than do modern phylogenetic classifications, which suggests that human perception is responsible in part for the correspondence between Linnaean and folk taxonomies. Perceptual similarity is difficult to measure at scale, but we use the recently released AVONET database to develop a proxy for the perceptual similarity between pairs of birds and find that traditional Linnaean taxonomies and perceptual similarity both independently predict folk categories. Our results therefore provide quantitative evidence for the view that perceptual similarity influences both scientific and folk classification.

In this paper, we catalog the rates at which people report spiritual presence events: phenomenal experiences understood by the perceiver to imply the presence of a spiritual being. We draw on four large datasets (total N=3150) collected in the US, Ghana, Thailand, China, and Vanuatu, including participants from a range of religious backgrounds. This yields what is, to our knowledge, an unprecedented “epidemiology” of spiritual presence events across diverse cultural settings. While some events vary dramatically in their rates of endorsement across cultural settings, other events are relatively common across all five settings, and still others are relatively rare across settings. In general, the most common events center on ordinary experiences of one's own inner life, while events that hinge on near-tangible perceptions of presence and hallucination-like events involving outer sensory experiences are relatively rare. In sum, local culture shapes but does not fully determine the architecture of spiritual experience.

The "shape bias" -- the bias to generalize new nouns by their shape rather than other features such as color or texture -- has been argued to facilitate early noun learning for children. However, there is conflicting evidence about the magnitude and nature of this bias, as well as how it changes developmentally and how it varies across cultures. In this paper, we synthesize evidence about the shape bias using meta-analysis and meta-regression. We find strong overall evidence for the shape bias, but the literature is dominated by studies of English-speaking children, making it difficult to assess cross-cultural differences. Large between-study heterogeneity also highlights procedural variation in the literature. Overall, publication bias, heterogeneity, and data sparsity may limit the ability to distinguish theoretical accounts of the shape bias.

Understanding visual narratives requires readers to track dimensions of time, spatial location, and characters across a sequence. Previous work found cross-cultural differences for situational changes across adjacent panels, but few works have examined situational dimensions across extended sequences. We therefore investigated situational “runs” – uninterrupted sequences of the situational dimensions (time, space, characters) – in a corpus of 300+ annotated comics from the United States, Europe, and Asia. We compared runs' proportion and average lengths and found that across books, semantic information changed frequently and run length correlated with proportion. Yet, cross-cultural patterns arose, with American and European comics using more continuous runs than Asian comics. American and European comics used more and longer temporal and character continuity, while Asian comics used more spatial continuity. These findings raise questions about comprehenders' processing strategies for visual narratives across cultures and how general frameworks of visual narrative comprehension account for variations in situational (dis)continuity.

Proficient speakers of a second language (L2) show similar processing of affective content as native speakers, but reduced magnitude, later latency, and a less differentiated emotional neural response (e.g., Hsu et al., 2015). Because language and culture are intertwined, this study examined whether cultural relevance of short stories affects immersion during reading, independent of language proficiency. Hong Kong (HK) and Mainland Chinese (MLC) readers were exposed to identical short stories featuring events and traditions related to either culture. Their level of attention, transportation and emotional engagement after each story was measured using the Story World Absorption Scale (Kuijpers et al., 2014). Preliminary results show that HK participants were significantly more immersed in HK cultural stories than in MLC stories, especially when they described modern events. Instead, MLC participants showed no difference in immersion. The results will be discussed considering historical common origins and modern stark distinction between the two cultures.

Charitable crowdfunding on digital platforms has become a viable way for NGOs to raise funds. This study aims to investigate determinants of charitable behavior (CB) on digital crowdfunding platforms (DCPs), including national culture dimensions, motivations, crowdfunding platform attitude, and donors’ personal characteristics. Data were collected through a CAWI survey of 680 Amazon MTurk users from Europe, the Americas, and Southern Asia. Findings indicate that of the three national culture dimensions considered, CB on DCPs is positively associated with collectivism and negatively with uncertainty avoidance. The link between power distance and CB could be either positive, neutral or negative, due to the interactions with motivations for charity, uncertainty avoidance, and age. Extrinsic and intrinsic motivations do not show significant direct effects on CB but appear to exert their influence through interactions with other motivations, national culture dimensions and respondents’ attributes. People with higher incomes tend to donate more the better is their attitude toward the DCP. CB is stronger among donors more involved in voluntary activities and those living in the Americas as compared to Europe and Asia. The study addresses the knowledge gap concerning the antecedents of CB on DCPs and suggests how NGOs could improve their fundraising effectiveness. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article compares surveillance-related experiences and attitudes of two generations of media users in countries with different historical surveillance regimes (Estonia, Portugal, and Sweden) and analyzes the predictors of the attitudes toward contemporary surveillance. A large-scale online survey (N = 3221) reveals that attitudes toward online state and corporate surveillance are interrelated; the two attitudinal components are, however, generation-specific, having different predictors. Tolerance toward state surveillance is more characteristic of the older group, being predicted by trustful and obedient attitudes toward state authorities and institutions. Tolerance toward corporate dataveillance is more characteristic of the younger group, being predicted by active and self-confident media use. While the socio-historical context molds the intergenerational gaps in surveillance-related experiences and attitudes, individual-level experiences of state surveillance do not predict tolerance toward either type of contemporary surveillance, suggesting that global techno-cultural developments are probably more powerful factors than past experiences in forming generation-specific attitudes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study aims to investigate the differences in e-learning adoption among university students in Indonesia, Albania, Russia, and Kazakhstan and examine the role of cultural dimensions in explaining these differences. This research draws upon Hofstede’s Cultural Dimensions Theory to explore the impact of culture on e-learning adoption in diverse global contexts. A cross-sectional survey was conducted with a sample of university students from the four countries, and the data were analyzed using structural equation modeling (SEM) and multi-group analysis (MGA) techniques. The findings reveal significant differences in e-learning adoption among the four countries, with learner engagement, learning satisfaction, and technology accessibility exhibiting varying levels of influence on e-learning adoption. The multi-group analysis indicates that cultural dimensions partially explain these differences, highlighting the importance of considering cultural factors when examining e-learning adoption in diverse settings. This study fills a gap in cross-cultural e-learning research, offering key insights into factors shaping students’ adoption of online platforms worldwide. The findings emphasize the importance of cultural considerations for educators, policymakers, and e-learning developers in global higher education. This study contributes to the theoretical understanding of the complex interplay between culture and e-learning adoption by demonstrating the explanatory power of cultural dimensions. Doi: 10.28991/ESJ-2024-08-03-015 Full Text: PDF

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This study evaluates the integration of the Professional Capability Framework (PCF) in England's social work education and its potential applicability in the Czech Republic. As England has advanced its social work training through holistic approaches and continuous professional development [1], this paper explores the feasibility of adapting such reforms to enhance the Czech educational system. By conducting a comparative analysis, the research identifies gaps in the Czech framework and suggests tailored adaptations from the English model. This streamlined examination not only furthers the international discourse on social work education but also proposes actionable strategies for cross-cultural educational enhancements. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article examines the evolution of organizational and management structures in the Czech Republic and the Netherlands, highlighting the shift towards more agile and hybrid models to enhance adaptability and resilience. Topics discussed include the comparative analysis of management frameworks, the impact of organizational size on decision-making speed and flexibility, and the influence of cultural and business practices on management structures.

The past few decades have witnessed a proliferation of large comparative cultural databases, primarily consisting of contemporary data (e.g., ethnographic writings), but increasingly historical data as well (including archaeological materials). Individually, these databases already serve as valuable resources as evidenced by the growing number of papers utilizing them. However, further benefits could result from merging or linking these data in ways that surpass their original intentions and ambitions. One avenue is the integration of ethnographic and historical data to help remedy the weaknesses of each (e.g., by addressing lacunae, imprecision, bias, subjectivity, and unreliability) and draw on their reciprocal strengths (e.g., by combining longitudinal depth and primary source material) of these different forms of evidence. The work presented here is a further step in that direction. This article shows how efforts to quantitatively examine historical variation in features of warfare benefit from combining ethnographic, historical, and archaeological data. It describes the general challenges faced by combining datasets (e.g. units of analyses, differing variables across datasets, sampling issues, etc.), how these challenges can be mitigated, and what further challenges remain to be addressed. The overall aim is to encourage further research into the benefits and challenges of  integrating such datasets.

Early abstract reasoning follows qualitatively different developmental trajectories in the US and China (Carstensen et al., 2019), but the causal mechanisms for these differences are unknown. Existing accounts implicate several potential factors that differ between the US and China, including language (Hoyos et al., 2016), executive function (Richland et al., 2010), visual attention (Christie et al., 2020), and social reasoning (Jurkat et al., 2022). While there is extensive work documenting both language and executive function in US and Chinese children, much less is known about the development of cross-cultural differences in visual attention and social reasoning. We document abstract reasoning about relations (Ambiguous cRMTS, Carstensen et al., 2019) alongside the potential moderating factors of visual attention (Free Description; Imada et al., 2013), and social reasoning (Causal Attribution, Seiver et al., 2013; Uniqueness Preference, Kim & Markus, 1999) in a cross-sectional sample of 240 3-12-year-olds, and observe both similarities and differences.

Abstract reasoning in early childhood is often described as following a "relational shift," over which children become increasingly sensitive to relations. However, recent work has challenged the generality of this account, showing that children in the US and China follow distinct trajectories in a relational match-to-sample task (Carstensen et al., 2019). This difference aligns with multiple cultural and linguistic factors implicated in relational reasoning, in which English speakers in the US and Mandarin speakers in China appear at opposite ends of a continuum spanning from a focus on objects (US) to relations (CN). We explore early relational reasoning in a context that represents a cultural middle ground with a key linguistic similarity (noun spurts) to the US: Korean-learning children in South Korea. In two experiments with 262 Korean children, we document relational reasoning in this novel cultural context, revealing similarities and differences to developmental trajectories in the US and China.

We use data on a cultural fitness landscape, recently inferred from a large-scale cross-cultural survey of religious practices (6000+ years, 407 cultures), to provide new insights into the dynamics of cultural macroevolution. We report three main results. First, we observe an emergent distinction between the long-run fitness of a religious practice, and its short-term stability: in particular, some low-fitness practices are nonetheless highly stable. Second, despite the exponentially large size of the landscape, we find a small number of cultural attractors, and 70% of all observed configurations flow into just four, which we label "monastic", "evangelical", "indigenous", and "pre-Axial". Finally, we find large variation in the evolvability of different traits, with some (such as a belief in punishing gods) strongly fixed by context, and others (such as belief in reincarnation) much more fluid.

In Indonesia, religious education is compulsory in schools. How do scientific values and reasoning—being willing and able to change one’s beliefs in the face of new evidence—emerge in this context? We recruited Indonesian children (N=240, Ages 6-14) from majority Muslim (Jakarta) or Hindu (Bali) schools. As part of a larger battery of tasks, we asked participants a set of scientific values questions (e.g., “How important is it to think carefully about people, ideas, and events instead of relying on gut feelings or emotions?”), scientific reasoning questions (e.g., “How can Sarah best convince Michael that plants are alive?”), and questions about their religiosity. We will report age- and site-related patterns for each variable, and explore the relationships between religiosity, scientific values, and scientific reasoning performance. The findings will be discussed in terms of the development of scientific and religious thinking in cultural contexts.

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Cultural background may shape how people attend to different emotional cues. Emotions can be perceived from both visual and auditory channels. This cross-cultural study investigated individuals’ attention to emotional cues in facial expressions and spoken words. The final sample consisted of 99 Singaporean Chinese and 81 German adults (Mage = 24.03 years, SDage = 6.29 years). In this online study, participants completed two tasks in which they were presented with emotional facial expressions and spoken words simultaneously. They were asked to judge the pleasantness of word meanings (Word task) or facial expressions (Face task) while ignoring the other aspect. Singaporean participants’ accuracies were significantly influenced by the word content while judging the pleasantness of facial expressions in the Face task. However, for German participants, there was no significant interference effect in either the Face or Word task.

How do children’s conceptualizations of natural and supernatural entities develop in religious and cultural contexts? We explored this question in Indonesia—a Muslim-majority country in which religious affiliation is mandatory—as part of a larger multi-site collaborative project (The Developing Belief Network; Weisman et al., under review). Indonesian children (N=100, Ages 5-10) from Muslim or Christian families were asked about the properties and behaviors of different kinds of agents: (1) religious (e.g., God), (2) non-religious supernatural (e.g., ghosts), (3) fictional (e.g., fairies), and (4) natural/scientific (e.g., germs). We also measured each child’s religious identification and involvement. We will compare how children of different religions conceptualize these agents, and how these beliefs vary with the child’s age and religious identity. Our findings will shed new light on the interplay between religion, culture, and children’s theories about the world.

Systems of semantic categories vary across languages, and it has been proposed that this variation is constrained by a need for efficiency in communication. An important element of efficiency is communicative need, or how often a particular object needs to be referenced. Previous work has sometimes assumed for simplicity that the distribution of need over objects in a semantic domain does not vary across languages or cultures. Here, we explore culture-specific need as it relates to the kinship terminologies of Hindi and English. We assess the efficiency of each language's kin naming system under a variety of need distributions, including one based on that language's usage statistics, one based on the other language's usage statistics, and random permutations of each of those two distributions. Our results suggest that kinship terminologies reflect culture-specific communicative need.

Is “cow” more closely related to “grass” or to “chicken”? Speakers of different languages judge similarity in this context differently, but why? One possibility is that cultures covarying with these languages induce differences in conceptualizations of similarity. Specifically, East Asian cultures may promote reasoning about thematic similarity, by which cow and grass are more related, whereasWestern cultures may bias judgments toward taxonomic relations, like cow and chicken. We measure similarity judgments across the US, China, and Vietnam and replicate US-China differences, but do not find that responding in Vietnam patterns with China. Instead, similarity judgments in Vietnam are intermediate between the US and China. We also show that word embedding models (fastText models for each language) are related to judgments within each country, suggesting a possible alternative interpretation of cross cultural differences. Perhaps notions of similarity are similar across contexts, but the statistics of the linguistic environment vary.

Studies on learning strategies across cultures in higher education inform the internationalisation of teaching and learning. Previous comparisons relied on geographical generalisations (e.g., "Asian", "Western", "Latin-American") or only variable-centred methods, which can overgeneralise the contexts they represent. Eight learning strategy datasets (ILS; Inventory of Learning patterns of Students) from seven countries (n = 4883) were obtained and (re-)analysed using variable-centred and person-centred (Latent Profile Analysis; LPA) methods. Employing Hofstede's individualism-collectivism and power distance indices as predictors, lower individualism and higher power distance scores corresponded to students' overall combined reporting of meaning-directed, reproduction-directed and application-directed learning strategies. Furthermore, sample LPAs found that less individualistic contexts presented profiles with similar shape (i.e., profiles differed by similar amounts across most learning strategies). More individualistic contexts presented profiles with different shapes (i.e., different profiles preferred different strategies). Multiple "Western" contexts presented profiles that describe the "Asian" and "Latin-American" learner stereotypes. These results question the existence of such stereotypes and point to the usefulness of cultural indicators for making cross-cultural learning strategy comparisons. Theoretical and practical implications are discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Much public debate today is carried out on Twitter (now X), where the participants employ a range of diverse resources to convey their ideas effectively. Disentangling the resources into clear and understandable structures and patterns presents a fresh challenge for discourse pragmatics. This article addresses that challenge methodologically by evaluating existing methods for identifying and classifying pragmatic patterns, revealing their drawbacks, and advocating for a new coding system. This categorizes tweets based on a post's primary pragmatic function (informing, appealing, or expressing emotivity), considering subsidiary functions. The study then applies this new scheme to analyze the Twitter debate on the Polish Turów lignite mine, which became a subject of international dispute as the Czech and European authorities sought the mine's closure to eliminate its negative environmental impact. The debate unfolds mainly in Polish, Czech, and English, each language being associated with a distinct discourse. The English discourse emphasizes a transnational appeal for widespread decarbonization, contrasting with the predominantly oppositional, national political perspectives in the Polish and Czech discourses. These rely heavily on emotivity directed, in the Polish case, primarily against the country's ruling party, and in the Czech one against the deal eventually reached with Poland to mitigate the problems. • introduces a novel coding system for navigating complex Twitter discourse. • provides a systematic approach to categorizing primary and subsidiary functions of tweets. • unveils distinct pragmatic strategies in diverse discourses/debates. • reveals the specific character of debates on Twitter across cultures. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study aims to (a) reveal the relationships between the destination brand personality (DBP), destination brand image (DBI), satisfaction, and post-experience behaviors (PEBs), (b) unveil divergences by nationality in terms of DBP, (c) analyze the mediating role of destination satisfaction on the post-experience behaviors (PEBs), and (d) evaluate the moderated mediation by nationality in the structural model. The quantitative method was adopted, and the data was collected from a sample of 1688 British, Russian, German, and Turkish tourists who visited Antalya destination of Turkey. The findings reveal that DBP has four dimensions: excitement, sincerity, androgyny, and competence. The dimensions of DBP play a significant role in building DBI. Path analysis results indicate that tourists' positive perception of DBP influences DBI and satisfaction. It has been found that the PEBs are highly predicted by the positive perception of DBI through satisfaction. The results reveal that the relationship between satisfaction with DBI and DBP is positively moderated by nationality as an indicator of culture. The moderated mediation effect is stronger for British and German tourists than Turkish and Russians. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This research analyses how high emotional cause-related marketing claims influence attitudes and viral behaviors. With a SEM and an international sample of 1,232 respondents (Spain, England, and Ecuador) exposed to a video viral cause marketing stimulus, analysis shows, from a global international perspective (1) the influence of emotions on attitudes; (2) the attitudinal constructs consistency; (3) the simultaneous impact of the emotions also on viral behaviors; (4) the effect of attitudes variables on viral behaviors; and (5) the strong viral consequences connection. From a cross-cultural perspective, significant differences are identified. Recommendations in the context analysed: (1) convenience of including emotional claims, (2) adaption of international campaigns to local cultures to strength certain advantages; however, tailoring locally a global campaign cannot be affordable. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the study of residential satisfaction in architectural design different physical comfort domains have received the most attention. But with this comfort-driven approach, residential satisfaction is reduced to a psychophysical relationship. Adding psychological substance to the design process, the paper argues that a distinction should be made between residential satisfaction and home attachment and that we need to consider home attachment as a mediator variable for comfort. The aim of the paper is to empirically assess whether the mediation, if it exists at all, is partial or complete. Distinguishing different forms of comfort, a set of alternative structural equation models are tested with data from a 14-nation population survey in Europe. The result of the model tests is that our wellbeing at home comes in two forms—satisfaction and attachment—and that there is partial as well as complete mediation of home attachment on satisfaction depending on the kind of comfort studied. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This research is based on an approach that looks at cross-cultural research design as a "lens" for a deeper understanding of what goes on in the classroom. The research question is how a cross-cultural study like this one can lead to identifying the cultural script of teaching and help educators reflect on their practice. In this context, Chinese lessons could be described as a case-based study of pedagogical reasoning that drives a shift from focusing on "content" to "competence". This article draws on qualitative data collected by the researchers and a cross-cultural analysis of a science lesson in an elementary school in Beijing, China. Using the Japanese educators' critiques and Chinese reviews, the article determines the cultural script of teaching science (the first research question) and the way Chinese teachers reflect on their practice through the Japanese lens (the second research question). This study exposes the importance of teachers' understanding and reflecting on their practice, technically, practically, and critically. The analysis results show how teachers learn to change their lenses, to reflect on their teaching and reconstruct their understanding about teacher professionalism through at least four basic elements: didactics, praxis, pedagogy, and theory. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The relationship between leadership and culture and the influence of culture on leadership have been relevant to scholars for the last 50 years. Culture itself is one of the determining factors that directly influence the leadership model that is most effective in a particular culture, because even understanding the model of effective leadership depends on the culture and its underlying values. Different national cultures understand the model of effective leadership in different ways, because they have different basic values and models of behavior that are the basis of a specific effective model of leadership. According to the dominant values of a national culture, people subconsciously imagine their leaders as behaving in accordance with these ideals of leadership and value their leaders accordingly. The study of leadership in a cultural context has undergone significant transformations along with the evolution of leadership theories and the development of cross-cultural management. The purpose of this study is to analyze contemporary theories of leadership in the cross-cultural context and determine the influence of culture on modern models of effective leadership. The cross-cultural analysis of contemporary leadership theories determined that almost all theories emphasize a significant influence of culture on modern models of effective leadership. Behavioral theory and contingency theory of leadership emphasize that cultural norms play a key role in a cross-cultural context. The autocratic leadership style has been found to have significant cultural limitations to its effective use, whereas transformational leadership can be used and be effective in any culture. In transactional leadership is based subordinates are not self-motivated because they need to be closely observed and controlled. Servant leadership will now gain even more acceptance in different cultures, but has already proven to be effective primarily in cultures based on individualism, democracy, and egalitarianism. Contemporary leadership theories such as relational leadership, complex leadership, ambidextrous leadership, and adaptive leadership also emphasize the need to consider the interaction between leaders and the environment as influenced by culture.

While it is commonly assumed that farmers have higher, and foragers lower, fertility compared to populations practicing other forms of subsistence, robust supportive evidence is lacking. We tested whether subsistence activities--incorporating market integration--are associated with fertility in 10,250 women from 27 small-scale societies and found considerable variation in fertility. This variation did not align with group-level subsistence typologies. Societies labeled as "farmers" did not have higher fertility than others, while "foragers" did not have lower fertility. However, at the individual level, we found strong evidence that fertility was positively associated with farming and moderate evidence of a negative relationship between foraging and fertility. Markers of market integration were strongly negatively correlated with fertility. Despite strong cross-cultural evidence, these relationships were not consistent in all populations, highlighting the importance of the socioecological context, which likely influences the diverse mechanisms driving the relationship between fertility and subsistence. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Ethical climates remain one of the most popular ways to assess the ethical orientations of companies. There has been a plethora of studies examining the relationship between ethical climates and critical outcomes, which was triggered by Victor and Cullen's seminal work published 35 years ago. After such a long period of strong research activity in this topic area, it is time to take stock of the accumulated empirical evidence. This meta-analytic review incorporates the considerations of alternative conceptualizations of ethical climates and integrates an international comparative perspective on the consequences of ethical climates. Given the state of the field, it is imperative to assess the tenability of the various relationships of ethical climate types across national contexts. As such, we first provide an update on how ethical climates are related to key organizational outcomes and assess how country-level factors affect the consequences of ethical climates. We present our findings along theoretical, empirical, and methodological issues, discuss the implications of our findings for extant research and provide suggestions for future research for each of the three avenues. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper investigates the factors influencing the career decisions of Chinese college graduates. The study applied the experimental method, with a survey conducted among two groups of college graduates (Chinese and international students). The experiment involved 686 students (343 Chinese students and 343 international students) in their final year. The main criteria for career choices among Chinese students include motivation (76%), interest (62%), personal development (53%), aptitudes (48%), awareness of the profession (38%) and attitudes of their parents/instructors (72%). By contrast, international students chose personal development (81%), aptitudes (74%) and motivation (68%) among the criteria. A career guidance training programme has been developed in order to improve motivation and willingness of college graduates to make decisions about their careers. The practical value and research outlooks are based on the opportunities arising when determining the influence of cross-cultural characteristics on the choice of a profession in the course of exploring the motivation and willingness to make career decisions not just for college graduates but also for universities in China and other countries in a comparative context. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Grammatical gender (GG) affects object categorization (e.g., Samuel et al., 2019). This study is among the first to examine the extent of this effect using both implicit and explicit tasks. Speakers of French (GG language) and Turkish (genderless) completed an Implicit Association Test (IAT) about classifying faces based on their gender (female/male) and objects conceptually associated with a specific gender (e.g., necktie) based on a criterion unrelated to gender (tool/clothing item). Participants also completed an explicit task of attributing gender to those objects and a survey assessing sexist attitudes. Turkish speakers were only affected by conceptual gender (CG) whereas French speakers showed the effect of CG in their explicit gender attributions and of both GG and CG in their IAT responses. These effects were stronger for participants who were high in their sexist attitudes. Thus, GG implicitly interferes with object categorization, and individual differences in attitudes may modulate this effect.

Opponent Colors Theory advances that four colors have special status and are yoked in opponent fashion (yellow-versus-blue, and red-versus-green). Classic hue cancelation studies provide evidence for this theory: people readily pick out colors that are neither red nor green, usually yellow. Here we conducted a version of a hue-cancelation experiment with the Tsimane’ people, a non-industrialized culture in the Amazon. Tsimane’ speakers readily identified reddish and greenish color chips, but they showed idiosyncratic choices when asked to identify a color that is neither reddish nor greenish, unlike English speakers who consistently select focal yellow. The Tsimane’ participants who also spoke Spanish and had a consistent label for English “yellow” (“amarillo”), performed similarly to the Tsimane’ monolinguals, suggesting that simply having a label for “yellow” is not sufficient to explain the consistency of English speakers. The results add to a growing body of evidence that does not support Opponent Colors Theory.

It has been proposed that a drive for efficient communication shapes systems of semantic categories across languages. Recent work in this vein has increasingly emphasized communicative need: how often a particular object or idea will need to be referenced. Many studies assume for simplicity that the distribution of need across referents is the same for different cultures, and that this need distribution can be reliably inferred from corpora. In contrast, we elicited culture-specific estimates of communicative need from native speakers of English and Chinese. We compared those need distributions to each other and to a corpus-based need distribution, and we assessed the efficiency of the English and Chinese naming systems for the semantic domain of household containers under different need distributions. Our results suggest that languages reflect culture-specific need patterns, and that subjective estimates are sometimes superior to corpus data as a measure of need.

Many non-geographic factors influence spatial judgments, which implies that spatial representations are not metrically veridical. We investigated the influence of social and political factors in the geopolitical context of Cyprus–an island divided since 1974 into the Turkish Cypriot and Greek Cypriot communities in the north and south, respectively. Participants (249 Greek Cypriots, 322 Turkish Cypriots) indicated their familiarity with 19 towns, estimated town locations, and the straight-line distance between those towns. They also rated their attitudes toward the other community. Cypriots underestimated distances and contracted the placement of towns within the other community more so than within their own community. Moreover, those more willing to live together with Cypriots from the other community underestimated distances between towns, whereas those less willing to live together overestimated distances. The results support the notion that representations of global-scale environments have multi-faceted origins, including sociopolitical factors not usually associated with spatial representations.

Infant points are often accompanied by preverbal vocalisations but little is known about their acoustic properties. In this study we explore the role of point-accompanying preverbal infant vocalisations in expressing intention, declarative or imperative. We test whether the interpretation of these preverbal expressions is independent from the communicative and cultural context by assessing Swiss adult speakers’ ability to interpret preverbal point-accompanying vocalisations from Shipibo-Konibo (Peru) children. Results suggest that adults can easily distinguish declarative and imperative preverbal pointing acts by their accompanying vocalisations. We thus show that acoustic properties of these vocalisations contain a rich amount of information which is understood by members of a different culture. This hints towards a larger preverbal repertoire of communicative tools than previously assumed.

The extent to which people can infer new mathematical concepts in the absence of cultural support is not clear. We test such learning with a simple math concept: additive commutativity. Experimental work with children in industrialized cultures suggests that cultural support is necessary, since children take time to learn commutativity and ultimately show signs of knowing it after entering school. However, children are at a disadvantage in learning because they are not yet cognitively mature. Moreover, they have only had a short time to experience the world and possibly learn principles like commutativity on their own. Unschooled adults, on the other hand, may be in a better position to have inferred commutativity on their own. We test indigneous Amazonians with variable levels of math cultural supports, and find that those with low cultural supports do not show signs of knowing additive commutativity.

Male-protagonist overrepresentation exists in US children’s books and varies as afunction of author-gender and target audience age (Casey et al., 2021). We investigate whether these patterns appear across cultures by coding 437 bestselling children’s books from China and comparing them to the US dataset. Mixed-effects and chi-square models revealed cross-cultural male-overrepresentation. Effects of author-gender showed that books written by American male authors and Chinese female authors were associated with greater male-overrepresentation. Effects of target audience age showed that books written for 3-8-year-olds in the US and 3-5-year-olds in China exhibited the most male-overrepresentation, suggesting that children in these age groups may be particularly vulnerable to inequitable gender representation in print media. This is the first study to examine gender representation in Chinese children’s books on a large scale and to directly compare rates of gender representation across cultures. Implications for educational practices and literacy development will be discussed.

We investigated the influence of the COVID-19 pandemic on young people’s value temporal focus, religiosity, and time spatialization. Samples of young participants from eight cultures (Americans, Spaniards, Serbs, Bosniaks, Croats, Moroccans, Turks, and Chinese) collected before the pandemic (N = 497, mean age = 21.09) were matched with samples collected during the first confinement period (N = 497, mean age = 20.96). Our results in study 1 showed that during the pandemic, young adults were less religious, more future-focused, and placed the future in front to of them in a greater extent. In study 2, using the whole sample collected during the pandemic (N = 893, mean age = 21.94), we observed that the more affected the participants were by the pandemic, the greater their future focus, the lower their religiosity, and the greater their tendency to locate the future in front. These pattern of results held in most cultures.

The methods by which people harm others evolve with changes in, and in access to, technology. Several cognitive, linguistic, and behavioral theories have suggested that biased language use is correlated with dominance and can reduce the diversity and inclusivity of a community (e.g. Poteat et al, 2010). We present a cross-cultural and cross-linguistic study of moderators on Reddit in English, Arabic, and French. We collect and analyze a large Reddit moderation dataset and use machine learning models to study cognitive and behavioral differences of moderation across cultures. We then work with expert linguists who analyze and evaluate our results. Finally, we explore the implications of our models for studying how we might shut down voices from different communities by not moderating online content properly. Our preliminary results reveal biases towards women and minority groups, and more broadly affirm our hypothesis that culture and topic of discussions bias moderation decisions.

This paper describes some epistemic cultural considerations which shape the uses of psychology. I argue the study of mind is bound by the metaphysical background of the given locale and era in which it is practiced. The epistemic setting in which psychology takes place will shape what is worth observing, how it is to be studied, how the data is to be interpreted, and the nature of the ultimate explanatory units. I argue epistemic constraints shape the praxes that arise from structural study of the mind. In order to illustrate this notion of epistemic cultural constraint, I discuss Soviet Psychology and provide a contrast between practical uses of psychoanalysis in India, Egypt, and rural Ghana. In response to these conceptual and practical epistemic limitations, psychology could adapt methods drawn from history and anthropology towards an interdisciplinary psychology.

This study explored white lie-telling behaviour in 3- to 6-year-old children from three cultural groups: Anglo Canadian (n = 49), Chinese Canadian (n = 45), and Eastern-European Canadian (n = 11). In a video-conferencing setup, a female researcher expressed a misconception about her artwork and asked participants for their opinion, in the presence versus absence of a stated social consequence (i.e., two conditions). Parental measures of collectivism and parenting styles were also collected. The results indicated that the likelihood of children telling a white lie (versus challenging the researcher’s misconception) did not differ significantly across cultural groups or conditions and was not predicted by parental collectivism, authoritativeness, or authoritarianism. However, the effect of authoritativeness on white lie telling did approach significance. These findings are discussed in relation to possible factors that might have accounted for the lack of cultural differences.