Preparatory works for the next 5-year plan of research

Abstract

Every year, the Vietnamese people reportedly burned about 50,000 tons of joss papers, which took the form of not only bank notes, but iPhones, cars, clothes, even housekeepers, in hope of pleasing the dead. The practice was mistakenly attributed to traditional Buddhist teachings but originated in fact from China, which most Vietnamese were not aware of. In other aspects of life, there were many similar examples of Vietnamese so ready and comfortable with adding new norms, values, and beliefs, even contradictory ones, to their culture. This phenomenon, dubbed “cultural additivity”, prompted us to study the co-existence, interaction, and influences among core values and norms of the Three Teachings –Confucianism, Buddhism, and Taoism–as shown through Vietnamese folktales. By applying Bayesian logistic regression, we evaluated the possibility of whether the key message of a story was dominated by a religion (dependent variables), as affected by the appearance of values and anti-values pertaining to the Three Teachings in the story (independent variables). Our main findings included the existence of the cultural additivity of Confucian and Taoist values. More specifically, empirical results showed that the interaction or addition of the values of Taoism and Confucianism in folktales together helped predict whether the key message of a story was about Confucianism, β_{VT⋅VC} =0.86. Meanwhile, there was no such statistical tendency for Buddhism. The results lead to a number of important implications. First, this showed the dominance of Confucianism because the fact that Confucian and Taoist values appeared together in a story led to the story’s key message dominated by Confucianism. Thus, it presented the evidence of Confucian dominance and against liberal interpretations of the concept of the Common Roots of Three Religions (“tam giáo đồng nguyên”) as religious unification or unicity. Second, the concept of “cultural additivity” could help explain many interesting socio-cultural phenomena, namely the absence of religious intolerance and extremism in the Vietnamese society, outrageous cases of sophistry in education, the low productivity in creative endeavors like science and technology, the misleading branding strategy in business. We are aware that our results are only preliminary and more studies, both theoretical and empirical, must be carried out to give a full account of the explanatory reach of “cultural additivity”.

Cultural additivity: behavioural insights from the interaction of Confucianism, Buddhism and Taoism in folktales

“…However, other sensitivity analyses show a similar pattern: the major changes in prior do not lead to any considerable change in the final results, which demonstrates the models are robust. The codes are presented in the Supplementary file and the visualization of the results of those tests are deposited in OSF (For further discussion of the technical aspects, see (Vuong et al, 2018c).…”

The Painting Can Be Fake, But Not the Feelingg: An Overview of the Vietnamese Market Through the Lens of Fake, Forgery and Copy Paintings

“…The 'nonchalant' attitude towards fake and plagiarism in Vietnamese art as the Vice President's statement in the case of An Lac (1) stresses a problem resulted from the effect of cultural additivity in Vietnamese culture (Vuong et al, 2018). Such attitude is also a direct result of self-copying.…”

Public Acceptability of Policy Interventions to Reduce Sugary Drink Consumption in Urban Vietnam

“…For example, being part of a paternal state increases the tendency to embrace policy interventions, such as nudging [56], while a conformity culture makes people more likely to support intrusive interventions, such as taxation [47,48]. This is particularly relevant in Asian countries, where people's beliefs are often historically grounded in Confucianism and its underlying values of obedience and hierarchy [63].…”