Do people’s world views matter? The why and how.

Abstract

Publisher's copyright statement:c 2016 APA, all rights reserved. This article may not exactly replicate the nal version published in the APA journal. It is not the copy of record.Additional information: Use policyThe full-text may be used and/or reproduced, and given to third parties in any format or medium, without prior permission or charge, for personal research or study, educational, or not-for-prot purposes provided that:• a full bibliographic reference is made to the original source • a link is made to the metadata record in DRO • the full-text is not changed in any way The full-text must not be sold in any format or medium without the formal permission of the copyright holders.Please consult the full DRO policy for further details. Over the past decades, personality and social psychologists have extensively investigated the role of self-views in individual functioning. Research on world views, however, has been less generative due to overly specific conceptualizations, and little research about how and why they impact life outcomes. To answer the questions of why and how world views matter, we conducted seven studies to examine the functions, antecedents, and consequences of generalized beliefs about the world, operationalized as social axioms (Leung et al., 2002). This research focused on two axiom factors, viz., social cynicism and reward for application. These axioms were found to explain individual differences in self-views over and above personality traits in Hong Kong and US samples (Study 1) and to explain cultural differences in self-views in addition to self-construals among Mainland Chinese, Hong Kong Chinese, East Asian Canadians, and European Canadians (Study 2). Endorsement of social axioms by participants, their parents, and close friends was collected from Mainland China, Hong Kong, and Canada to infer parental and peer influences on world views (Study 3). World views affected psychological well-being through the mediation of positive self-views across three age groups, including children, adolescents, and young adults (Study 4) and over time (Study 5). The mediation of negative self-views was through comparative self-criticism rather than internalized self-criticism (Study 6). Holistic thinking moderated the effect of social cynicism on self-views and psychological well-being (Study 7). These results converge to show that both world views as a distal force and self-views as a proximal force matter in people's subjective evaluation of their lives. The Why and How.As a cognitive framework that helps people organize information about the self and guide their social behavior, the utility of positive and negative self-views has received growing attention in the past three decades (e.g., Kuiper & Rogers, 1979;Markus, 1977). Theory and research have demonstrated that self-views function like schemas and beliefs to affect psychological outcomes, fueling the popularity of self-help books and programs designed to boost self-esteem (Swann & Seyle, 2005).Recent critiques, however, have challenged the ...

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