Morality is an evolved aspect of human nature, yet is heavily influenced by cultural environment. This developmental study adopted an integrative approach by combining measures of socioeconomic status (SES), executive function, affective sharing, empathic concern, theory of mind, and moral judgment in predicting sharing behavior in children (N = 999) from the age of 5 to 12 in five large-scale ...

The authors argue that attribution patterns reflect implicit theories acquired from induction and socialization and hence differentially distributed across human cultures. In particular, the authors tested the hypothesis that dispositionalism in attribution for behavior reflects a theory of social behavior more widespread in individualist than collectivist cultures. Study 1 demonstrated that ca...

All individuals strive to be happy. How they pursue this ultimate human goal, however, seems to vary in interesting ways across cultures. Three key findings have emerged from recent scientific research: 1) individualist cultures are happier than collectivists, 2) psychological attributes characterizing the self (e.g., self-esteem, self-consistency) are more relevant to the happiness of Western ...

A small amount of research has examined the association between the belief in free will and subjective well-being (SWB) among Western laypersons from individualist cultures. However, no study has examined this association among participants from collectivist cultures (e.g., Eastern Asian cultures). Therefore, in this study, we explored this association among two large, independent cohorts of Ch...

In addressing the mental health of international students, individualism-collectivism is treated as a dimension of cultural distance that produces differential sensitivity to life events. A collectivist cultural orientation is hypothesized to promote depressive dysphoria in response to negative social events and to increase the inhibitory effect of positive social events. An individualist cultu...

We carried out 3 studies in which methods to increase implicit life satisfaction in collectivist participants were investigated. In Study 1, participants were instructed to recall their day from a positive perspective, each day for a total of 17 days. While participants explicitly rated their lives as being less negative, this did not result in implicit life satisfaction changes in those partic...

A meta-analysis of conformity studies using an Asch-type line judgment task (1952b, 1956) was conducted to investigate whether the level of conformity has changed over time and whether it is related crogs-culturally to individualism-collectivism. The fiterature search produced 133 studies drawn from 17 countries. An analysis of U.S. studies found that conformity has declined since the 1950s. Re...

Studies of beliefs about social stratification have generally focused on how individual-level factors shape people’s explanations of poverty and inequality. In this article, the authors contribute to this literature by adding a community-level measure of “concentrated disadvantage” (poverty and associated conditions) to models predicting support for individualistic (person-centered) and structu...

Bhutan’s current constitution draws upon the historical dual system of religious-civil governance under monarchy (previously Abbot-king) embodying Mahayana Buddhist concept Boddhisatva-leadership. democracy includes an executive-military and pluralist religious custodian role for King who can be abdicated by parliament. It Gross National Happiness as spiritual core, which is non-binding law, in...