How They Are
Trusting Talent: Cross-Country Differences in Hiring
Letian Zhang & Shinan Wang
Administrative Science Quarterly, forthcoming
Abstract:
This article argues that a society’s level of social trust influences employers’ hiring strategies. Employers can focus either on applicants’ potential and select on foundational skills (e.g., social skills, math skills) or on their readiness and select on more-advanced skills (e.g., pricing a derivative). The higher (lower) the social trust -- people’s trust in their fellow members of society -- the more (less) employers are willing to invest in employees and grant them role flexibility. Employers in higher-trust societies are therefore more attentive to applicants’ potential, focusing more on foundational skills than on advanced skills. We empirically test this theory by using a novel dataset of more than 50 million job postings from the 28 European Union countries. We find that the higher a country’s social trust, the more its employers require foundational skills instead of advanced skills. Our identification strategy takes advantage of multinational firms in our sample and uses measures of bilateral (country-to-country) trust to predict job requirements, while including an instrumental variable and fixed effects on country, year, employer, and occupation. These findings suggest a novel pathway by which social trust shapes employment practices and organizational strategies.
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Fallow Lengths and the Structure of Property Rights
Etienne Le Rossignol, Sara Lowes & Eduardo Montero
NBER Working Paper, March 2024
Abstract:
We study a fundamental institution in many societies: the structure of property rights over land. Across societies, communal land rights have been more common than private land rights. We test the hypothesis that longer fallow requirements -- the time needed to leave land uncultivated to restore fertility -- led to a higher prevalence of communal property rights. Longer fallow requirements generate higher protection costs and therefore make communal rights more beneficial. We construct an ecological measure of the optimal fallow length for the most suitable staple crop across grid cells based on soil type, temperature, and climate. We find that places where land needs to be fallowed for longer periods are more likely to have communal property rights both historically and presently. We then examine the implications for efforts to title land. We find that World Bank land titling interventions are less effective in places with longer fallow requirements, suggesting a mismatch between development policy and underlying institutions. Finally, we examine implications for income inequality and conflict. We find that longer fallow requirements are associated with less inequality, less conflict, and greater resilience to negative shocks. Our results highlight the origins of property rights structures and how communal property rights interact with development policies.
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Happiness Maximization Is a WEIRD Way of Living
Kuba Krys et al.
Perspectives on Psychological Science, forthcoming
Abstract:
Psychological science tends to treat subjective well-being and happiness synonymously. We start from the assumption that subjective well-being is more than being happy to ask the fundamental question: What is the ideal level of happiness? From a cross-cultural perspective, we propose that the idealization of attaining maximum levels of happiness may be especially characteristic of Western, educated, industrial, rich, and democratic (WEIRD) societies but less so for others. Searching for an explanation for why “happiness maximization” might have emerged in these societies, we turn to studies linking cultures to their eco-environmental habitat. We discuss the premise that WEIRD cultures emerged in an exceptionally benign ecological habitat (i.e., faced relatively light existential pressures compared with other regions). We review the influence of the Gulf Stream on the Northwestern European climate as a source of these comparatively benign geographical conditions. We propose that the ecological conditions in which WEIRD societies emerged afforded them a basis to endorse happiness as a value and to idealize attaining its maximum level. To provide a nomological network for happiness maximization, we also studied some of its potential side effects, namely alcohol and drug consumption and abuse and the prevalence of mania. To evaluate our hypothesis, we reanalyze data from two large-scale studies on ideal levels of personal life satisfaction -- the most common operationalization of happiness in psychology -- involving respondents from 61 countries. We conclude that societies whose members seek to maximize happiness tend to be characterized as WEIRD, and generalizing this across societies can prove problematic if adopted at the ideological and policy level.
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When Rule Breaking in Art Falls Flat: Cultural Tightness Deflates Deviant Artists’ Impact
Eftychia Stamkou et al.
Psychology of Aesthetics, Creativity, and the Arts, February 2024, Pages 14–30
Abstract:
Previous research in western countries shows that artists whose work deviates from their own previous style (intrapersonal deviance) and other artists’ styles (interpersonal deviance) gain greater impact than nondeviant artists (Stamkou et al., 2018). However, aesthetic norms are embedded in cultural contexts that shape the meaning of artist deviance. Deviance is compatible with the ideal of innovation endorsed by loose cultures, yet incongruent with the ideal of conformity prominent in tight cultures. Here we examine how cultural tightness–looseness influences the effect of interpersonal (Studies 1–2) and intrapersonal deviance (Studies 3–4) on various indices of impact, including perceived artist influence, artwork valuation, purchase intention, and recommendation of the artist’s work to a museum. Study 1 shows that Italian participants (looser culture) perceived artists who deviated from the motif used by their contemporary artists as more impactful than Chinese participants (tighter culture). Study 2 shows that the looser U.S. communities’ response to COVID-19 rules, the more impactful they considered deviant artists. Study 3 shows that U.S. participants low in tightness mindset were more likely to recommend artists who deviated from their previous style to a company than artists who consistently followed a single style. Accordingly, Study 4 shows that U.S. participants high in tightness mindset were more likely to recommend nondeviant over deviant artworks to a museum. Cultural tightness attenuates the effect of deviance on impact by reducing the experience of profound aesthetic emotions (e.g., awe, beauty, interest) in response to deviant artworks (Studies 2–4).
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Movies
Stelios Michalopoulos & Christopher Rauh
NBER Working Paper, March 2024
Abstract:
Why are certain movies more successful in some markets than others? Are the entertainment products we consume reflective of our core values and beliefs? These questions drive our investigation into the relationship between a society’s oral tradition and the financial success of films. We combine a unique catalog of local tales, myths, and legends around the world with data on international movie screenings and revenues. First, we quantify the similarity between movies’ plots and traditional motifs employing machine learning techniques. Comparing the same movie across different markets, we establish that films that resonate more with local folklore systematically accrue higher revenue and are more likely to be screened. Second, we document analogous patterns within the US. Google Trends data reveal a pronounced interest in markets where ancestral narratives align more closely with a movie’s theme. Third, we delve into the explicit values transmitted by films, concentrating on the depiction of risk and gender roles. Films that promote risk-taking sell more in entrepreneurial societies today, rooted in traditions where characters pursue dangerous tasks successfully. Films portraying women in stereotypical roles continue to find a robust audience in societies with similar gender stereotypes in their folklore and where women today continue being relegated to subordinate positions. These findings underscore the enduring influence of traditional storytelling on entertainment patterns in the 21st century, highlighting a profound connection between movie consumption and deeply ingrained cultural narratives and values.
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The Truth-Telling of Truth-Seekers: Evidence from Online Experiments with Scientists
Moritz Drupp, Menusch Khadjavi & Rudi Voss
University of Hamburg Working Paper, January 2024
Abstract:
Academic honesty is crucial for scientific advancement, yet replication crises and misconduct scandals are omnipresent. We provide evidence on scientists’ truth-telling from two incentivized coin-tossing experiments with more than 1,300 scientists. Experiment I, with predominantly European and North-American scientists, shows that fewer scientists over-report winning tosses when their professional identity is salient. The global Experiment II yields heterogeneous effects. We replicate Experiment I’s effect for North-American scientists, but find the opposite for Southern European and East-Asian scientists. Over-reporting correlates with publication metrics and country-level measures of academic and field-experimental dishonesty, suggesting that country-level honesty norms also guide truth-telling by scientists.
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Smartphones and attitudes to intimate partner violence: Evidence from Africa
Robert Gillanders & Glenn McNamara
Kyklos, forthcoming
Abstract:
This paper, using data from the Afrobarometer surveys, examines the potential for smartphones to influence attitudes to intimate partner violence (IPV). Controlling for ownership of television and radio, we find that those living in areas with a higher incidence of smartphone ownership are more likely to state that it is never justifiable for a man to beat his wife. This is the case for both male and female respondents. We find that the strength of the association between regional smartphone proliferation and attitudes to IPV is similar for those who frequently get news from social media and those who get news from elsewhere. This suggests that our results are not driven entirely by personal social media use. Finally, we only find a statistically significant relationship for those who are socially conservative.
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Business Is Tense: New Evidence on How Language Affects Economic Activity
Francesco Campo, Luca Nunziata & Lorenzo Rocco
Journal of Economic Growth, March 2024, Pages 121–149
Abstract:
We provide a large scale within-country analysis of the effect of language future time reference (FTR) on self-employment using individual-level data from Switzerland, a country characterized by a long-standing multilingualism and a large share of immigrant population. We test the hypothesis that speakers of languages where future tense marking is not obligatory in prediction contexts (defined as weak FTR) may have a closer perception of future rewards and be more willing to become self-employed, a choice that reflects future orientation. We perform an epidemiological analysis which consistently indicates that long-term immigrants who speak weak FTR languages are between 2 and 4 percentage points more likely to be self-employed compared to speakers of strong FTR languages, net of unobservable ancestral cultural traits, districts of destination’s characteristics, and linguistic features other than FTR. We find that the effect is largest when the main language of daily use is the mother tongue, but the effect is also significant when the main language is learnt later in life.
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A Universal Cognitive Bias in Word Order: Evidence From Speakers Whose Language Goes Against It
Alexander Martin et al.
Psychological Science, forthcoming
Abstract:
There is a long-standing debate in cognitive science surrounding the source of commonalities among languages of the world. Indeed, there are many potential explanations for such commonalities -- accidents of history, common processes of language change, memory limitations, constraints on linguistic representations, and so on. Recent research has used psycholinguistic experiments to provide empirical evidence linking common linguistic patterns to specific features of human cognition, but these experiments tend to use English speakers, who in many cases have direct experience with the common patterns of interest. Here we highlight the importance of testing populations whose languages go against cross-linguistic trends. We investigate whether adult monolingual speakers of Kîîtharaka, which has an unusual way of ordering words, mirror the word-order preferences of English speakers. We find that they do, supporting the hypothesis that universal cognitive representations play a role in shaping word order.
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Pancultural nostalgia in action: Prevalence, triggers, and psychological functions of nostalgia across cultures
Erica Hepper et al.
Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, March 2024, Pages 754-778
Abstract:
Nostalgia is a social, self-relevant, and bittersweet (although mostly positive) emotion that arises when reflecting on fond past memories and serves key psychological functions. The majority of evidence concerning the prevalence, triggers, and functions of nostalgia has been amassed in samples from a handful of largely Western cultures. If nostalgia is a fundamental psychological resource, it should perform similar functions across cultures, although its operational dynamics may be shaped by culture. This study (N = 2,606) examined dispositional nostalgia, self-reported triggers of nostalgia, and functions of experimentally induced nostalgia in young adults across 28 countries and a special administrative region of China (i.e., Hong Kong). Results indicated that nostalgia is frequently experienced across cultures, albeit better valued in more-developed countries (i.e., higher national wealth and life-expectancy). Nostalgia is triggered by psychological threats (especially in warmer countries), sensory stimuli (especially in more-developed countries), and social gatherings (especially in less-developed countries). The positive or negative affect prompted by experimentally induced nostalgia varied by country, but was mild overall. More importantly, recalling a nostalgic (vs. ordinary) memory increased social connectedness, self-continuity, and meaning in life across cultures. In less-developed countries, recalling an ordinary memory also conferred some of these functions, reducing the effect size of nostalgia. Finally, recalling a nostalgic (vs. ordinary) memory augmented state satisfaction with life in countries with lower quality of living (i.e., lower life-expectancy and life-satisfaction). Overall, findings confirm the relevance of nostalgia across a wide range of cultures and indicate cultural nuances in its functioning.