Exposure to automation explains religious declines

Second Thoughts About Culture and Cause: Why and How Do the Chinese and Americans Differ in Causal Attributions?

Academic AbstractCurrent theories on dispositional-situational attributions suggest that East Asians' attributions are more external compared to Westerners. However, empirical studies yield mixed findings. I reflect on historical, philosophical, and sociological resources in China and the United States to address this inconsistency. This paper (a) proposes a new attributional dimension borrowed from Chinese philosophy-human- versus heaven-determined (-); (b) postulates that the Chinese are more likely to make internal human-determined attributions than Americans, whereas Americans are more inclined to make internal and external heaven-determined attributions than the Chinese; (c) reviews the existing literature to examine the extent to which this theory is evidenced and determine aspects remaining untested; and (d) discusses the generalizability to other cultures and directions for further research. Notably, "heaven-determined" is interpreted metaphorically (not religiously). Beyond dispositional-situational theory, this paper spotlights another meaningful pathway for constructing cross-cultural theory: The Chinese emphasize human determinism more than Americans.Public AbstractWhy do I succeed or fail? Why do people help or harm others? Members of different cultures may provide different answers to such questions-known in psychology as "causal attributions." A popular belief in psychology is that East Asians are more likely than Westerners to consider external factors-in other words, environmental/outside factors-as causes of behaviors and outcomes. In this paper, I challenge this prevailing theory and propose an alternative, drawing on cultural resources and social realities of China and the United States. When explaining why something happens, the Chinese may focus more on average than Americans do on internal causes determined by humans (e.g., effort, motivation, attitude, skill, and strategy), whereas Americans may focus more on average than the Chinese do on causes that are not determined by humans (e.g., aptitude, genes, gender, race/ethnicity, physiological characteristics, luck, and supernatural force). More research is needed to test this postulation.

Explaining disparities in robot applications among nations and regions: A cross-level lens of cultural tightness-looseness

In this study, we aim to explain the large disparities among countries and regions on industrial robot application in terms of robot density and robot growth. Based on the premise that people in all cultures have the same potential for innovation, we propose a cross-level lens of cultural tightness-looseness to predict that, in the nascent robotics industry where rules and regulations are underdeveloped (i.e., a loose domain), people in tight cultures (e.g., Singapore, Japan, China) are more likely to innovate than those in loose cultures (e.g., the UK, U.S., the Netherlands) because their creativity is permitted in this or a few other loose domains only. We test this theoretical lens using multi-source longitudinal archival data on robot applications. Several significant findings emerge. First, there is a significant positive relationship between cultural tightness and robot application across 32 countries and territories from 1993 to 2022 (Study 1). Second, such a positive relationship also appears across 50 states in the United States from 1998 to 2022 (Study 2a), and across 31 provinces in China from 2008 to 2022 (Study 2b). Finally, the interaction effect between country- and region-level cultural tightness on robot application is significant (Study 3). These findings provide strong empirical support for our cross-level lens of cultural tightness and shed light on how cultural tightness at different levels interacts to affect incremental innovation (i.e., robot application) in a loose domain (i.e., the robotics industry). Moreover, these findings suggest that loosening tight control on certain domains of a tight culture would remarkably boost creativity and incremental innovation in these domains.

Worldwide divergence of values

Social scientists have long debated the nature of cultural change in a modernizing and globalizing world. Some scholars predicted that national cultures would converge by adopting social values typical of Western democracies. Others predicted that cultural differences in values would persist or even increase over time. We test these competing predictions by analyzing survey data from 1981 to 2022 (n = 406,185) from 76 national cultures. We find evidence of global value divergence. Values emphasizing tolerance and self-expression have diverged most sharply, especially between high-income Western countries and the rest of the world. We also find that countries with similar per-capita GDP levels have held similar values over the last 40 years. Over time, however, geographic proximity has emerged as an increasingly strong correlate of value similarity, indicating that values have diverged globally but converged regionally.