SignificanceBiologists and social scientists have long tried to understand why some societies have more fluid and open interpersonal relationships—differences in relational mobility—and how those differences influence individual behaviors. We measure relational mobility in 39 societies and find that relationships are more stable and hard to form in east Asia, North Africa, and the Middle East, while they are more fluid in the West and Latin America. Results show that relationally mobile cultures tend to have higher interpersonal trust and intimacy. Exploring potential causes, we find greater environmental threats (like disease and warfare) and sedentary farming are associated with lower relational mobility. Our society-level index of relational mobility for 39 societies is a resource for future studies.

Copyright and reuse:Sussex Research Online is a digital repository of the research output of the University.Copyright and all moral rights to the version of the paper presented here belong to the individual author(s) and/or other copyright owners. To the extent reasonable and practicable, the material made available in SRO has been checked for eligibility before being made available.Copies of full text items generally can be reproduced, displayed or performed and given to third parties in any format or medium for personal research or study, educational, or not-for-profit purposes without prior permission or charge, provided that the authors, title and full bibliographic details are credited, a hyperlink and/or URL is given for the original metadata page and the content is not changed in any way.Article accepted for publication in Journal of Experimental Psychology: General. http://dx.doi.org/10.1037/xge0000175 © American Psychological Association (APA) This article may not exactly replicate the authoritative document published in the APA journal. It is not the copy of record. contrast between independence and interdependence does not adequately capture the diverse models of selfhood that prevail in different world regions. Cultural groups emphasize different ways of being both independent and interdependent, depending on individualism-collectivism, national socioeconomic development, and religious heritage. Our seven-dimensional model will allow future researchers to test more accurately the implications of cultural models of selfhood for psychological processes in diverse ecocultural contexts.Keywords: CULTURE; SELF-CONSTRUALS; INDEPENDENCE-INTERDEPENDENCE Twenty-five years ago, Markus and Kitayama (1991) published their classic article on culture and the self, proposing that people in different parts of the world tend to construe themselves in two fundamentally different ways. They argued that Western cultures are unusual in promoting an independent view of the self as bounded, unitary, stable, and separate from the social context, whereas cultures in other parts of the world emphasize an interdependent view of the self as closely connected to others, fluid, and contextually embedded. They proposed that people with independent self-construals would strive for self-expression, uniqueness, and self-actualization, basing their actions on personal thoughts, feelings, and goals. In contrast, people with interdependent self-construals would strive to fit in and maintain social harmony, basing their actions on situationally defined norms and expectations.Markus and Kitayama's (1991) proposals had a dramatic impact on social, personality and developmental psychology, challenging ethnocentric assumptions, drawing attention to cultural diversity, and providing conceptual tools for theorizing about it. Social and personality psychologists used measures and manipulations of self-construals to predict numerous outcomes: cognitive styles, well-being, self-regulation, selfesteem, communication styles, social anxiety, and pro...

Beliefs about personhood are understood to be a defining feature of individualism-collectivism (I-C), but they have been insufficiently explored, given the emphasis of research on values and self-construals. We propose the construct of contextualism, referring to beliefs about the importance of context in understanding people, as a facet of cultural collectivism. A brief measure was developed and refined across 19 nations (Study 1: N = 5,241), showing good psychometric properties for cross-cultural use and correlating well at the nation level with other supposed facets and indicators of I-C. In Study 2 (N = 8,652), nation-level contextualism predicted ingroup favoritism, corruption, and differential trust of ingroup and outgroup members, while controlling for other facets of I-C, across 35 nations. We conclude that contextualism is an important part of cultural collectivism. This highlights the importance of beliefs alongside values and selfrepresentations and contributes to a wider understanding of cultural processes.

The motive to attain a distinctive identity is sometimes thought to be stronger in, or even specific to, those socialized into individualistic cultures. Using data from 4,751 participants in 21 cultural groups (18 nations and 3 regions), we tested this prediction against our alternative view that culture would moderate the ways in which people achieve feelings of distinctiveness, rather than influence the strength of their motivation to do so. We measured the distinctiveness motive using an indirect technique to avoid cultural response biases. Analyses showed that the distinctiveness motive was not weaker-and, if anything, was stronger-in more collectivistic nations. However, individualism-collectivism was found to moderate the ways in which feelings of distinctiveness were constructed: Distinctiveness was associated more closely with difference and separateness in more individualistic cultures and was associated more closely with social position in more collectivistic cultures. Multilevel analysis confirmed that it is the prevailing beliefs and values in an individual's context, rather than the individual's own beliefs and values, that account for these differences.

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Self-continuity-the sense that one's past, present, and future are meaningfully connectedis considered a defining feature of personal identity. However, bases of self-continuity may depend on cultural beliefs about personhood. In multilevel analyses of data from 7,287 adults from 55 cultural groups in 33 nations, we tested a new tripartite theoretical model of bases of self-continuity. As expected, perceptions of stability, sense of narrative, and associative links to one's past each contributed to predicting the extent to which people derived a sense of selfcontinuity from different aspects of their identities. Ways of constructing self-continuity were moderated by cultural and individual differences in mutable (vs. immutable) personhood beliefs-the belief that human attributes are malleable. Individuals with lower mutability beliefs based self-continuity more on stability; members of cultures where mutability beliefs were higher based self-continuity more on narrative. Bases of self-continuity were also moderated by cultural variation in contextualized (vs. decontextualized) personhood beliefs, indicating a link to cultural individualism-collectivism. Our results illustrate the cultural flexibility of the motive for self-continuity.Keywords: Identity, Culture, Self-Continuity, Mutability, Personhood Beliefs, Mindset SELF-CONTINUITY ACROSS CULTURES 7Being Oneself Through Time: Bases of Self-Continuity Across 55 CulturesSelf-continuity can be defined as the sense that past, present, and future time-slices of one's identity are meaningfully connected. Philosophers (Taylor, 1989;Wiggins, 2001), as well as both classic (Erikson, 1968;James, 1892) and contemporary (Chandler, Lalonde, Sokol, & Hallett, 2003;Vignoles, Sani, Easterbrook, & Cvetkovska, 2017) psychologists, portray self-continuity as a defining feature of personal identity. Both personal and societal functioning arguably depend on people's forming identities that are seen to persist over time-not just from past to present but also into the future. Without self-continuity, people could not learn from experience, be held accountable for their past actions, make plans for their future, nor cooperate with others in the present to secure future benefits.During the life-course, however, people experience physical, psychological and social changes, and neither past nor future selves can be directly experienced in the present. Hence, people's sense of being the same person through time is not a given, but must be actively constructed-and both individuals and cultural groups may prioritize different bases of selfcontinuity within identity construction (Chandler et al., 2003). In the current paper, we examine the role of cultural and personal beliefs about personhood in moderating the ways in which people construct their personal sense of self-continuity. Self-Continuity and its BasesMotivated Identity Construction Theory (Vignoles, 2011) portrays self-continuity as a core identity motive. The theory states that people strive to construct and maintain a se...

Precarious manhood beliefs portray manhood, relative to womanhood, as a social status that is hard to earn, easy to lose, and proven via public action. Here, we present cross-cultural data on a brief measure of precarious manhood beliefs (the Precarious Manhood Beliefs scale [PMB]) that covaries meaningfully with other cross-culturally validated gender ideologies and with country-level indices of gender equality and human development. Using data from university samples in 62 countries across 13 world regions ( N = 33,417), we demonstrate: (1) the psychometric isomorphism of the PMB (i.e., its comparability in meaning and statistical properties across the individual and country levels); (2) the PMB’s distinctness from, and associations with, ambivalent sexism and ambivalence toward men; and (3) associations of the PMB with nation-level gender equality and human development. Findings are discussed in terms of their statistical and theoretical implications for understanding widely-held beliefs about the precariousness of the male gender role.