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Moral vitalism refers to a tendency to view good and evil as actual forces that can influence people and events. The Moral Vitalism Scale had been designed to assess moral vitalism in a brief survey form. Previous studies established the reliability and validity of the scale in US-American and Australian samples. In this study, the cross-cultural comparability of the scale was tested across 28 different cultural groups worldwide through measurement invariance tests. A series of exact invariance tests marginally supported partial metric invariance, however, an approximate invariance approach provided evidence of partial scalar invariance for a 5-item measure. The established level of measurement invariance allows for comparisons of latent means across cultures. We conclude that the brief measure of moral vitalism is invariant across 28 cultures and can be used to estimate levels of moral vitalism with the same precision across very different cultural settings.

Pathogens represent a significant threat to human health leading to the emergence of strategies designed to help manage their negative impact. We examined how spiritual beliefs developed to explain and predict the devastating effects of pathogens and spread of infectious disease. Analysis of existing data in studies 1 and 2 suggests that moral vitalism (beliefs about spiritual forces of evil) is higher in geographical regions characterized by historical higher levels of pathogens. Furthermore, drawing on a sample of 3140 participants from 28 countries in study 3, we found that historical higher levels of pathogens were associated with stronger endorsement of moral vitalistic beliefs. Furthermore, endorsement of moral vitalistic beliefs statistically mediated the previously reported relationship between pathogen prevalence and conservative ideologies, suggesting these beliefs reinforce behavioural strategies which function to prevent infection. We conclude that moral vitalism may be adaptive: by emphasizing concerns over contagion, it provided an explanatory model that enabled human groups to reduce rates of contagious disease.

Attitudes concerning national identity (e.g., nationalism, patriotism) are known to correlate with various social behaviorssuch as party preferences in voting. For instance, survey data indicates that Japanese citizens who are proud of beingJapanese (i.e., patriots) and those who are high in a right-wing tendency are more willing to vote for the conservative party(Liberal Democratic Party). In this study, we employed an agent-based modeling approach to understand how nationalidentity affects individual voting intentions. The individual agents and the political party agents interacted with each otherby spreading their political attitudes (e.g., VAT should be increased to maintain the pension insurance system), and therecipients of the messages changed their attitudes (e.g., persuasion). The simulation revealed that the effects of persuasivemessages were moderated by the strength of its own national identity attitudes, and the resultant individual agents votingpreferences simulated the human participants data more precisely.

Collective guilt is a group-based emotion that extends from recognizing the ingroup has harmed others, and it is known to be predicted by factors related to the ingroup (e.g., ingroup identification, glorification) and by specific details of the event (e.g., temporal distance, ongoing victimization). The current research tested if differences in ingroup members' broader ability to handle inconsistent information also contribute to their experience of collective guilt. In three studies, trait variation in tolerance for contradiction positively predicted collective guilt. Because the relationship could not be explained by specific ingroup perceptions, it may be that tolerance for contradiction enables ingroup members to endure the aversive emotional experience of guilt instead of responding defensively. All three studies also provided evidence that the level of overlap ingroup members perceive between the historical perpetrators and the current ingroup represents a defensive reaction to ingroup wrongdoing that contributes to reduced collective guilt, and this reaction is separate from trait-level perceptions of continuity between past and present ingroup members. Perceived overlap between historical perpetrators and the current ingroup may be a valuable measure of defensive responding in future research on collective guilt., Author(s): Christina M. Brown [sup.1] , Nobuhiko Goto [sup.2] , Saori Tsukamoto [sup.3] , Minoru Karasawa [sup.4] Author Affiliations: (1) grid.252353.0, 0000 0001 0583 8943, Arcadia University, , 450 South [...]

The stereotype content model provides a framework for understanding contextual and relational factors that may explain why some intergroup apologies are ineffective. Using actual and fictional scenarios, we examined whether the apology–forgiveness relationship and the apology–remorse relationship were dependent on the victim-group members' perceived warmth of the offending group. Studies 1 (N = 101) and 2 (N = 109) demonstrated that the perceived warmth of the offending group moderated the influence of apology on forgiveness. The interaction effect between apology and forgiveness and that between apology and perceived remorse were qualified in three-way interactions in Studies 3 (N = 235) and 4 (N = 586). The warmth-by-apology interaction was detectable among those who were highly offended by the incident. In all four experiments, we found an indirect effect of perceived warmth on forgiveness through perceived remorse. The perceived lack of warmth associated with offending groups may help explain the muted effectiveness of intergroup apologies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Five studies are reported testing the hypothesis that Westerners (Italians) rely more on trait adjectives and that East Asians (Japanese) rely more on behavior-descriptive verbs in person description and memory. In Studies 1 (N = 80) and 2 (N = 128), Italians used more adjectives and fewer verbs than Japanese to describe individuals and groups. Likewise, Studies 3 (N = 161) and 4 (N = 84) revealed that Italians committed more memory errors indicative of behavior-to-trait inferences, whereas Japanese showed an opposite tendency (Study 3) or no difference (Study 4). Study 5 (N = 64) revealed that in both languages, adjectives were perceived to provide more information about the actor and that verbs were perceived to provide more information about the situation. Yet, Japanese participants found adjectives less predictive of future behavior but facilitative of the process of imagining a concrete situation. These results are interpreted as providing evidence for systematic cultural differences in the elaboration of social information. Keywords: inferences, language abstraction, person perception, culture, cognition

How members of a low-status group may strive to establish a positive social identity was investigated. The relationship among group identification, recognition of in-group distinctiveness, and evaluations of the group and members was examined, using structural equation modeling. The participants were students at a Japanese vocational school. The results indicated that group identification had a strong direct effect on both group and member evaluations and that there was an indirect effect mediated by the recognition of group distinctiveness. Further, the effect of identification was observed when it pertained to group membership per se but not when it was based on interpersonal attraction among members., Predominant in the study of intergroup relations is social identity theory (SIT; Tajfel & Turner, 1979). According to this theory, discrimination between groups is a function of intergroup social comparison. [...]