Catching up with wonderful women: The women-are-wonderful effect is smaller in more gender egalitarian societies

Predictors of College Academic Achievement for Medical Students: The Case of Gondar University, College of Medicine and Health Sciences, Ethiopia

Background

In Ethiopia, the University Entrance Exam (UEE) score is the only criteria for selecting prospective medical students entering the university system, disregarding their career choice motivation.

Methods

A cross-sectional study design was conducted to identify medical students career choice motivation and predictors of college academic achievement at Gondar university, Ethiopia. The study was conducted on 222 medical students enrolled at Gondar University in 2016. A self-administered questionnaire was used to collect data on study participants demographic characteristics, career choice motivation, and informed career choice. Data on the UEE score and student's college academic achievement were collected from the university registrar. Descriptive statistics and regression analysis were used to analyze the data.

Results

Desire to help others as a medical doctor and prevent and cure diseases were mentioned as the first important career choice reasons by 147 (68.2%) and 135 (64.0%) study participants, respectively. The results of regression analysis showed that the UEE score was significantly associated with pre-clinical cumulative GPA (R2=.327, p<.05) and 5th year cumulative GPA (R2=.244, p<.05) respectively. The stepwise multiple regression revealed that UEE score, having prior knowledge about medical profession, positive experience in the medical school, and intrinsic career choice motivation significantly predicted 5th year cumulative GPA (p<.05). The high beta weight of 0.254 and 0.202 confirmed the strongest prediction to come from prior knowledge about the medical profession and positive experience in medical school, respectively.

Conclusion and Recommendation

The UEE score is a significant predictor for medical students' academic achievement, but it should not be the sole admission criterion. We suggest that comprehensive admissions criteria covering both cognitive and non-cognitive factors, as well as informed career choice, be developed to select the best applicants in the future.

Family First: Evidence of Consistency and Variation in the Value of Family Versus Personal Happiness Across 49 Different Cultures

People care about their own well-being and about the well-being of their families. It is currently, however, unknown how much people tend to value their own versus their family’s well-being. A recent study documented that people value family happiness over personal happiness across four cultures. In this study, we sought to replicate this finding across a larger sample size ( N = 12,819) and a greater number of countries ( N = 49). We found that the strength of the idealization of family over personal happiness preference was small (average Cohen’s ds = .20, range −.02 to.48), but present in 98% of the studied countries, with statistical significance in 73% to 75%, and variance across countries <2%. We also found that the size of this effect did vary somewhat across cultural contexts. In Latin American cultures highest on relational mobility, the idealization of family over personal happiness was very small (average Cohen’s ds for Latin America = .15 and .18), while in Confucian Asia cultures lowest on relational mobility, this effect was closer to medium ( ds > .40 and .30). Importantly, we did not find strong support for traditional theories in cross-cultural psychology that associate collectivism with greater prioritization of the family versus the individual; country-level individualism–collectivism was not associated with variation in the idealization of family versus individual happiness. Our findings indicate that no matter how much various populists abuse the argument of “protecting family life” to disrupt emancipation, family happiness seems to be a pan-culturally phenomenon. Family well-being is a key ingredient of social fabric across the world, and should be acknowledged by psychology and well-being researchers and by progressive movements too.

The development of Brazilian women's and gender studies: a bibliometric diagnosis

This study analyzes the characteristics and development of Brazilian research on women's and gender studies using a new comprehensive data source that is still hardly explored in bibliometric studies called 1Findr. The search expression forms a part of a methodological proposition for similar studies, based on the literature review of other analogous studies and on the historical and current characteristics of Brazil. We analyzed 31,609 Brazilian articles on women's and gender studies based on bibliometric indicators including activity, collaboration, and thematic association, with excerpts from the 1970s to 2019. Our results show that, initially, research was linked to the health sciences and was carried out in institutions in the Southeast and South of the country; however, this trend started changing since the 1990s, when two journals specialized in the area were first developed in Brazil and when researchers in the human and social sciences started working with this subject. Since then, the volume of articles, collaboration, and research has grown throughout the country, although production is still concentrated in the Southeast and South. Federal public universities are the main research actors, and researchers prioritize national journals and the Portuguese language. However, the main characteristic, which increases over time, is plurality: in relation to science in general and to other areas of Brazilian research, women's and gender studies present a greater plurality in terms of its publication characteristics, for example, in relation to the amount and percentage of languages. Plurality is also observed in the fact that, over the years, researchers from new disciplines have started to publish on gender studies, making the area more and more inter- and multidisciplinary, and also consolidating it scientifically, in the sense that it has become a subject of interest for all areas of research. Its presence in journals with the best ratings in the Brazilian research system supports the understanding that this is a scientifically consolidated area. In contrast, despite its continuous growth, collaboration is a rare phenomenon, and specific characteristics of studies carried out with foreign partners can be observed. Collaboration clusters among national institutions are characterized, among other factors, by their geographic proximity and the central role of major universities, such as Universidade de São Paulo, and others associated with the history of the area in the country, such as Universidade de Campinas, Universidade Federal de Santa Catarina and Universidade Federal do Rio Grande do Sul. The dataset obtained, prepared, and used in the present research is available for new studies.

Supplementary Information

The online version contains supplementary material available at 10.1007/s11192-022-04545-w.

Cross-Cultural Psychology à la française: An Overview of Interdisciplinary Intercultural Studies and Intercultural Psychology

The paper aims to show the international impact of 50 years of cross-cultural psychology on interdisciplinary intercultural studies and intercultural psychology, as developed in French-speaking countries. An original overview of the most prominent research carried out by Association pour la Recherche Interculturelle (ARIC, Association for Intercultural Research) and the research team Interculturation Psychique et Contacts Culturels (IPCC, Psychological Interculturation and Cultural Contacts) is suggested, while tending to cover the worldwide research related to the individual in intercultural situations. ARIC’s main topics are education, socio-political aspects and identity, individual, and cultures. This international association focuses on the articulation of research and practice to propose better policies to multicultural societies. In this perspective, it has carried out research about the immigration challenges considering the immigrants as well as the host societies. As it concerns intercultural psychology, it develops according to interculturation, that is, the psychological process that allows to overcome the cultural differences. It shapes intercultural personality and identity and the cognitive, affective and behavioral reactions of individuals or groups in any cultural contact. The various fields of application of both underline the undoubtable influence of cross-cultural psychology and the possibilities for further in-depth collaboration due to mutual contributions.

Gender Stereotypes in Hollywood Movies and Their Evolution over Time: Insights from Network Analysis

The present analysis of more than 180,000 sentences from movie plots across the period from 1940 to 2019 emphasizes how gender stereotypes are expressed through the cultural products of society. By applying a network analysis to the word co-occurrence networks of movie plots and using a novel method of identifying story tropes, we demonstrate that gender stereotypes exist in Hollywood movies. An analysis of specific paths in the network and the words reflecting various domains show the dynamic changes in some of these stereotypical associations. Our results suggest that gender stereotypes are complex and dynamic in nature. Specifically, whereas male characters appear to be associated with a diversity of themes in movies, female characters seem predominantly associated with the theme of romance. Although associations of female characters to physical beauty and marriage are declining over time, associations of female characters to sexual relationships and weddings are increasing. Our results demonstrate how the application of cognitive network science methods can enable a more nuanced investigation of gender stereotypes in textual data.

Nationality dominates gender in decision-making in the Dictator and Prisoner's Dilemma Games

Across a variety of contexts, adults tend to cooperate more with ingroup members than outgroup members. However, humans belong to multiple social groups simultaneously and we know little about how this cross-categorization affects cooperative decision-making. Nationality and gender are two social categories that are ripe for exploration in this regard: They regularly intersect in the real world and we know that each affects cooperation in isolation. Here we explore two hypotheses concerning the effects of cross-categorization on cooperative decision-making. First, the additivity hypothesis (H1), which proposes that the effects of social categories are additive, suggesting that people will be most likely to cooperate with partners who are nationality and gender ingroup members. Second, the category dominance hypothesis (H2), which proposes that one category will outcompete the other in driving decision-making, suggesting that either nationality or gender information will be privileged in cooperative contexts. Secondarily, we test whether identification with-and implicit bias toward-nationality and gender categories predict decision-making. Indian and US Americans (N = 479), made decisions in two cooperative contexts-the Dictator and Prisoner's Dilemma Games-when paired with partners of all four social categories: Indian women and men, and US American women and men. Nationality exerted a stronger influence than gender: people shared and cooperated more with own-nationality partners and believed that own-nationality partners would be more cooperative. Both identification with-and implicit preferences for-own-nationality, led to more sharing in the Dictator Game. Our findings are most consistent with H2, suggesting that when presented simultaneously, nationality, but not gender, exerts an important influence on cooperative decision-making. Our study highlights the importance of testing cooperation in more realistic intergroup contexts, ones in which multiple social categories are in play.

Psychologizing indexes of societal progress: Accounting for cultural diversity in preferred developmental pathways

Since the Second World War, the dominating paradigm of societal development has focused on economic growth. While economic growth has improved the quality of human life in a variety of ways, we posit that the identification of economic growth as the primary societal goal is culture-blind because preferences for developmental pathways likely vary between societies. We argue that the cultural diversity of developmental goals and the pathways leading to these goals could be reflected in a culturally sensitive approach to assessing societal development. For the vast majority of post-materialistic societies, it is an urgent necessity to prepare culturally sensitive compasses on how to develop next, and to start conceptualizing growth in a more nuanced and culturally responsive way. Furthermore, we propose that cultural sensitivity in measuring societal growth could also be applied to existing development indicators (e.g. the Human Development Index). We call for cultural researchers, in cooperation with development economists and other social scientists, to prepare a new cultural map of developmental goals, and to create and adapt development indexes that are more culturally sensitive. This innovation could ultimately help social planners understand the diverse pathways of development and assess the degree to which societies are progressing in a self-determined and indigenously valued manner.