Costs and benefits of developing a global language of historical symbols

James H. Liu, Dario Paez, Katja Hanke &

(lots of) Friends

Centre for Applied Cross Cultural Research

School of Psychology

Victoria University of Wellington

New Zealand

Globalization and the End of History?• Liberal theorists like Francis Fukuyama declared the End

of History with the Triumph of Liberal Democracy as the World System in the early 1990s. Fukuyama based his argument on a philosophical model of human psychology that argued that LD filled people’s needs best.

• Concurrently, cross-cultural psychology hit the big time in the USA with the Markus & Kitayama’s (1991) paper that made all motivation, cognition, and emotion contingent on culture-based self-construal.

• We get two very different answers appearing at the same time about how universal Western models of self and governance are.

• Could it be possible that both Fukuyama and Markus and Kitayama are correct?

Universality• The argument for universality needs little

introduction. Western enlightenment ideals were not & are not qualified by culture, and mainstream psychology is a tributary of this stream.

• But non-Westerners, especially those who have been colonized by them, or had their territories dismembered by them under such enlightenment ideas as “White Man’s burden” or Social Darwinism would have reason to question to what extent the claim of universality is description versus prescription.

Cultural Specificity and the Dimensions of Cultural Variation

• Markus and Kitayama (1991) reduced one the dimensions of cultural variation identified by cross-cultural psychologist Geert Hofstede (1980) in Culture’s Consequences to a dichotomy that could be used as an independent variable in laboratory experiments: IND-COL -> independent self interdependent self

• Shalom Schwartz (1987, 1990) concurrently developed a much better psychometric model of the cross-cultural structure of human values. Values are considered to be relatively stable and implicit elements of society that differ in their degree of emphasis but not structure across cultures.

CULTURAL DIMENSIONS: PROTOTYPICAL STRUCTURE

HARMONY Unity With Nature World at Peace EMBEDDEDNESS Social Order, Obedience Respect for Tradition EGALITARIANISM Social Justice Equality HIERARCHY Authority INTELLECTUAL Humble

AUTONOMY Broadmindedness Curiosity MASTERY AFFECTIVE Ambition

AUTONOMY Daring Pleasure Exciting Life

CCOOMMPPAARRAATTIIVVEE CCUULLTTUURRAALL PPRROOFFIILLEE OOFF 6600 NNAATTIIOONNAALL GGRROOUUPPSS IINN 11999900ss ((bbaasseedd oonn tteeaacchheerrss))

HARMONY EMBEDDEDNESS ITA* *SLOVN *CHIL *CYP EST*

CZE* SLOVK* BOL* EGALITARIANISM NOR* BULTK* F IN* ETH* *TUR *GEOR *S ING

POL* *PHI * INDO SPA* RUS* VEN* MAC* *FRA * SWE HUN* *BRAZ BUL* * TA IW *NEP DEN * *WGER AUSL* GHA* *AUST POR* *ARG MEX* *MALAY *THAI *CAN * IRE HKG*

INTELLECTUAL NETH* *NWZ *UGA

AUTONOMY*SWIFr *EGER USA* *I SRARAB * JAP ENG* I SRJEW* *NAM GRE* * N IG

*Z IM

*I NDIA

HIERARCHY AFFECTIVE MASTERY

AUTONOMY *CHI

The Value of Dimensions of Cultural Variation

• Identify points of commonality and points of difference between different societies, so that members can know where they are likely to differ and where they are likely to see eye to eye.

• The structure, or associative meaning of values is fairly consistent across cultures, e.g., broadmindedness and curiosity are positively correlated with each other and negative correlated with authority and humility in most cultures.

• Facilitate cross-cultural communication and identify sources of cross-cultural misunderstandings

Can Political Culture be characterized as an Enduring System of Values?

1) Culture is Dynamically Constructed through Communication in Society: Cultural Meanings are embedded within discursive and representational practices mediated through institutions and individuals and their families. Culture is not as static as cross-cultural psychology implies (e.g., Hofstede’s measures are more than 40 years old)

2) Universality vs Culture Specificity: Not all Cultural Meanings can be arrayed on universal dimensions of variation; the Treaty of Waitangi has symbolic meaning in New Zealand only, but without it, you cannot understand NZ intergroup relations. There is a cost to forcing agreement on the structure/meaning of measures across cultures

History as a Symbolic Reserve

(1) History encompasses the accumulated wisdom and knowledge from our ancestors that can be applied to new situations. History provides traditions, values, and symbols that are vital to the functioning of societies.

(2) It is appealing as a tool for political communications because it offers concrete events and people with emotional resonance whose relevance to the current situation is open to interpretation and public debate.

(3) Representations of History contribute to aspects of National Political Culture like Nationalism and Willingness to fight for one’s country

Most Important Events in World History according to East Asian Samples (JCCP, 2005)

Rank Japan Pct Taiwan Hong Kong Pct

1 WWII 52% WW II 69% WWII 81%

2 WW I 29% WW I 60% WW I 52%

3 French Revolution 23% Man on the Moon 25% Tien An Men 45%

4 Industrial Rev 17% Industrial Rev 23% Sino-Japanese War 39%

5 Vietnam War 17% American Indep 22% USSR Breakup 23%

6 Cold War 12% Discov. of Americas 20% Cultural Revolution 19%

7 Crusades 11% USSR Breakup 15% German Reunification 16%

8 Atomic Bombing 9% Crusades 15% Gulf War 15%

9 Discov. of Americas 9% Renaissance 14% American Indep 14%

10 Korean War 7% French Revolution 10% French Revolution 14%

Rank Singapore Pct Philippines Pct Malaysia Pct

1 WWII 94% WWII 68% WWII 60%

2 WW I 84% WW I 54% WW I 60%

3 Gulf War 32% Gulf War 23% Industrial Rev 28%

4 Cold War 24% French Rev 16% Rise of Islam 23%

5 Great Depression 22% Industrial Rev 15% Atomic Bombing 17%

6 Industrial Rev 19% Nazism 15% Chinese history 14%

7 Vietnam War 11% Renaissance 15% Islam v.Christian Wars 13%

8 USSR Breakup 10% People Power (EDSA) 14% Opium War 12%

9 Rise of Communism 10% Atomic Bombing 13% Renaissance 12%

10 French Revolution 9% Man on the Moon 11% Japanese colonialism 11%

(N=75) (N=646) (N=119)

American Indep 7%

(N=196) (N=272) (N=145)

German Reunification 9%

World History Survey

• Moving from open-ended nominations to closed-ended evaluations.

• An attempt to derive cross-cultural dimensions of historical evaluation

• Data collected from 30 societies• Initial analyses focused on the rewards & costs of

forcing agreement (or structural equivalence) on survey items across cultures

• Developing a global language of historical symbols: Importance and evaluation of 30 prominent historical events across cultures

Costs and Benefits of Forcing Agreement on CC Data

• Previous cross-cultural research on dimensions of cultural variation (Hofstede, Schwartz, House, Leung & Bond, etc.) investigated domains where universal meaning was presumed (e.g., values, orientations, social axioms).

• There is no reason to expect the meaning of historical events and figures to be shared across all cultures. So we need techniques of measuring rewards and costs of forcing structural equivalence on events and figures of world history

Item Selection• Any event or figure nominated by more than 1

society in either the 2005 or 2009 JCCP papers were included.

• Additional items included for theoretical purposes (e.g., 30 years war because it was the most important European event of the 1600s, but totally forgotten now, topical events like global warming and recent figures like Bill Gates to examine recency effects)

• Item pool was biased against Africa and Arabic societies because they were absent from previous research.

Evaluation of Most Imp Events in WH

Data Samples: 30 societies, N=5800Gender Country N

Female Male Age

Australia 183 138 45 27,26 (12,10) Austria 195 113 82 25,06 (4,62) Belgium 141 115 24 20,53 (4,409 Brasil 212 156 56 24,11 (7,51) Bulgaria 239 202 36 19,4 (1,1) Canada 196 133 62 19,55 (4,61) China 186 103 83 19,76 (1,17) Colombia 159 78 81 21,26 (2,86) Fiji 196 102 94 22,19 (3,00) Germany 151 78 73 23,92 (3,31) Hong Kong 152 98 51 -- Hungary 185 119 65 21,36 (2,21) India 202 100 102 21,24 (2,83) Indonesia 199 93 106 20,68 (2,38) Italy 142 78 64 24,22 (7,75) Japan 113 60 53 21,06 (1,52) Korea 224 123 101 20,98 (2,37) Malaysia 198 159 39 23,64 (4,37) Mexico 198 100 98 20,19 (2,04) Netherlands 201 163 38 19,74 (2,91) New Zealand 161 -- -- -- Norway 181 118 62 22,43 (3,54) Philippines 330 218 112 18,96 (1,65) Portugal 198 135 63 19,87 (2,67) Russia 214 101 113 20,97 (3,61) Singapore 220 162 58 20,89 (1,45) Switzerland 145 107 37 21,41 (3,44) Taiwan 291 140 151 20,66 (1,84) Tunisia 135 109 24 22,61 (5,18) USA 253 145 108 19,67 (1,22) Σ = 5800

Multi-Dimensional-Scaling to detect Dimensions of Meaning

• Non-metric MDS on Euclidean distances using standardized z-scores between the 40 events and figures separately (MDS between variables) across all countries using individual-level data. This procedure is useful to detect underlying dimensions of meaning.

• We conducted 31 MDS analyses, 1 for each society and 1 for the overall data from all societies

• Generalized Procrustes Analysis (GPA: Borg & Groenen, 1997; Commandeur, 1991), which is to MDS what Procrustean Target Rotation is for Factor Analysis: it assesses agreement between configurations from different societies. GPA rotates the coordinates of all configurations in such a way that they maximally correspond to one another

• This is done simultaneously with all configurations (here 31). Very poor fit.

Initial 2 Dimensional Solution

Only First Dimension Stable• Correlations between coordinates for individual

societies and the overall solution were very high for the first (vertical) dim

• But the second (horizontal dimension) produced low correlation coefficients. The second dimension was uninterpretable.

• So we eliminated items that fit the overall solution poorly using the ratio between sum of squares fit per item divided by sum of squares total.

• Fit did not improve.• So we aggregated countries into clusters, and used

MDS and GPA on the clusters to achieve better fitting dimensional solutions

PosNeg by Modernization (Western)

0.250.00-0.25

westrot2

0.25

0.00

-0.25

we

str

ot1

TsunE

IslamEColonE

IsraelE

PrintE

VietNmE

UNE

WarmE

EUE

DeprE

MoonE

CultRevE

HolocE

WomenE

ColdE

AtomE

AncCivE CreatEvE

WW2E

WW1E

TerrorE

IndRevE

AmIndyEFrRevE

RenaisE

IraqWarE

AbolSlavE

CrusadesE

PosNeg by Western Hegemony (non-Western1)

0.200.00-0.20

nonwestrot2

0.25

0.00

-0.25

no

nw

es

tro

t1

TsunE

IslamE

ColonE

IsraelE

PrintE

VietNmE

UNE

WarmE

EUE

DeprE

MoonE

CultRevE

HolocE

WomenE

ColdE

AtomE

AncCivE

CreatEvE

WW2E

WW1E

TerrorE

IndRevE AmIndyEFrRevE

RenaisE

IraqWarE

AbolSlavE

CrusadesE

No Stable Cross-cultural Dimensions of Variation in the Historical Evaluation of

Events

• Only the first dimension, positive-negative is stable

• The second dimension, which comes close to Progress according to Western standards versus Resistance to Westernization, is unstable.

• The best we can do is come up with clusters of meaningful events.

A cross-culturally reliable historical events scale: Calamities

Table 5 Overall Factor Loadings, Cronbach’s alpha, mean inter-item correlation, and Tucker’s Phi for “Historical Calamities”, “Historical Progress”, and” Historical Resistance to Oppression”

Factor 1 Factor 2 Factor 3 Event

“Historical Calamities” (αoverall = .85; αwestern = .82, αnon-western1 = .82; αnon-western2 = .84 overall mean inter-item correlation= .32; Tucker’s Phi = 1.00, 1.00, .99)

World War I 0.74 0.01 0.06 World War II 0.73 0.04 0.04 Atomic Bombings 0.62 0.01 -0.05 Vietnam War 0.58 0.00 -0.04 Terrorism (terror bombings) 0.57 -0.21 -0.04 Cold War 0.56 -0.02 0.13 Israeli-Palestinian Conflict 0.56 -0.03 -0.14 Iraq War (2005) 0.55 0.05 -0.09 Asian Tsunami (2004) 0.55 -0.19 -0.07 Global Warming 0.53 -0.03 -0.16 Holocaust 0.51 0.02 -0.21 Great Depression (1930s) 0.46 -0.14 0.10

Less Agreement on Progress and Resistance to Oppression

“Historical Progress” (αoverall = .65; αwestern = .65, αnon-western1 = .65; αnon-western2 = .65; overall mean inter-item correlation=,.24; Tucker’s Phi = .99, .98, .96)

Digital Age (Computers, Internet) 0.03 0.71 -0.07 Man on the Moon / Space Travel -0.06 0.64 0.05 Creation/Evolution of Humanity -0.07 0.54 0.19 Industrial Revolution 0.03 0.53 0.31 Rise of European Union -0.03 0.53 0.18 Foundation of United Nations -0.13 0.44 0.21 “Historical Resistance to Oppression” (αoverall = .59; αwestern = .50, αnon-western1 = .56; αnon-western2 = .57; overall mean inter-item correlation= .19;Tucker’s Phi = .99, .97, .96)

American Civil War 0.28 -0.07 0.55 American (war of) Independence 0.06 0.22 0.54 Abolition of Slavery (19th c) -0.20 0.05 0.51 Renaissance (15th c) -0.10 0.19 0.51 Fall of Berlin Wall/End of USSR -0.05 0.21 0.50 Decolonization -0.15 0.12 0.50

The tragedy of humanity at the outset of the 21st century is that

• We know what we want freedom from. Universally, we know understand the historical meaning calamity.

• We do not know what we want freedom for. There is much less agreement about what constitutes historical progress.

• Human history is a story of great things coming out of great suffering, because it is often only in suffering that we are united.

Impact on Willingness to Fight, a critical aspect of Political Culture

Table 6. Coefficients for the fixed and random components of nested multilevel

models assessing the effects of historical evaluations on willingness to fight for one’s

country across cultures.

Fixed part Random part

γ se t u χ2

Step 1 Intercept 4.10 .16 25.13* .78 1467.32*

WWII .08 .03 2.83* .01 89.37* September 11th -.03 .02 -1.43 .01 40.33

Step 2 Intercept 4.14 .16 25.68* .76 728.05* WWII -.01 .03 -.22 .01 48.52* September 11th -.04 .03 -1.49 50.53* Historical Calamities .27 .11 2.56* .21 131.39* Historical Resistance .01 .04 .36 .01 44.30 Historical Progress .21 .04 4.96* .04 62.88*

Country level Data: Western countries don’t want to fight and see Calamities as horrific

6,004,002,00

Willingness to Fight

2,75

2,50

2,25

2,00

1,75

His

toric

al C

alam

ities

Malaysia

Italy

Indonesia

Brasil

South Korea

USA

TunisiaTaiwan

Switzerland

Singapore

Russia

Portugal

Philippines

New Zealand

NorwayNetherlands

Mexico

Japan

India

Hungary

Hong Kong

Germany

Fiji

Colombia

China

Canada

BulgariaBelgium

Austria

Australia

Conclusion• The Symbolic Landscape of Shared Meaning

about World History is Limited. • It is possible to force agreement, but crucial

culture specific information is lost.• There are significant differences between Western

and non-Western representations, with certain items completely switching places in terms of nomological meaning: Women’s Emancipation, Terrorism, Colonization, etc

• But both Historical Calamities and Progress contribute independently to Willingness to Fight, and important aspect of Political Culture

Conclusion• As the different peoples of the world rub shoulders

within the political framework of the nation-state, the need to manage cultural diversity within and between states is becoming paramount. Social science knowledge that reflects both universals and culture specifics are needed.

• Future research on the meaning of WWII and World History using descriptive items rather than by association.

• A marriage between content and process provides an important avenue for the export of social psychological research to larger issues of globalization and the emergence of global consciousness vital to the 21st century.