The behavioral ecology of cultural psychological variation.

Abstract

Recent work has documented a wide range of important psychological differences across societies. Multiple explanations have been offered for why such differences exist, including historical philosophies, subsistence methods, social mobility, social class, climactic stresses, and religion. With the growing body of theory and data, there is an emerging need for an organizing framework. We propose here that a behavioral ecological perspective, particularly the idea of adaptive phenotypic plasticity, can provide an overarching framework for thinking about psychological variation across cultures and societies. We focus on how societies vary as a function of six important ecological dimensions: density, relatedness, sex ratio, mortality likelihood, resources, and disease. This framework can: (a) highlight new areas of research, (b) integrate and ground existing cultural psychological explanations, (c) integrate research on variation across human societies with research on parallel variations in other animal species, (d) provide a way for thinking about multiple levels of culture and cultural change, and (e) facilitate the creation of an ecological taxonomy of societies, from which one can derive specific predictions about cultural differences and similarities. Finally, we discuss the relationships between the current framework and existing perspectives. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2018 APA, all rights reserved).

Where You Are Is Who You Are? The Geographical Account of Psychological Phenomena

“…And cross-cultural psychology mainly uses experimental methods to demonstrate how culture influences individual psychological processes. Over the past decade, much attention of cross-cultural psychologists has been drawn to ecological causes of cultural psychological constructs (Sng et al, 2018). Therefore, they began to introduce geographical and socio-ecological perspective to cross-cultural psychology.…”

“…This reinvigorated perspective and field at its third wave for history and now, now named and known as geographical psychology, aims to understand psychological phenomena based on their spatial distribution and their interactions with macro-level features of environments (Rentfrow, 2013;Rentfrow and Jokela, 2016). Its (latest) recurrence has been nurtured together by several parallels but related branches emerging in psychology in the past decade, including within-nation research in geographic clustering of personality characteristics (Rentfrow et al, 2008;Rentfrow, 2010;Rentfrow and Jokela, 2016), the trend investigating the socio-ecological causes of cultures Van de Vliert, 2009;Sng et al, 2018), big data research in spatial organizations of psychological constructs proxied by social media or online query data (Mitchell et al, 2013;Eichstaedt et al, 2015;Wu et al, 2018). The aim of this review is to overhaul how geographical psychology paves a new way of understanding human behavior through geographic and aggregate perspectives to implement this area of research at the macro level.…”

Interdependent Self-Construal Predicts Reduced Sensitivity to Norms Under Pathogen Threat: An Electrocortical Investigation

“…Moreover, interdependence may defray the impact of all such threats. At the same time, the threat of pathogen contamination may be unique in numerous ways (Ackerman et al, 2018;Sng et al, 2018). Indeed, other threats such as warfare and resource scarcity may also be unique in theoretically meaningful ways.…”

Cultural Changes in Neural Structure and Function

“…Finally, there is also evidence in the US and many other societies of a shift toward slower life history strategies. Life history strategy refers to a suit of physiological and behavioral dimensions related to the timing of reproduction, delay of gratification, and an orientation toward future or present, which have been found to vary across species and among groups and individuals within-species, including humans (Charnov, 1993;Del Giudice, Gangestad, & Kaplan, 2015;Kenrick & Griskevicius, 2015;Sng, Neuberg, Varnum, & Kenrick, 2018;Stearns, 1992). Fast life history strategies involve early reproduction, greater number of offspring, greater risk taking, reduced delay of gratification, and shorter life expectancies, whereas slower life history strategies involve delayed reproduction, fewer offspring, greater investment in offspring, delay of gratification, investment in long term outcomes, and longer lifespans.…”

“…Other theories regarding the causes of cultural change emphasize the role of ecology. Some of these studies explicitly adopt a behavioral ecological framework, emphasizing how variations across and changes within human societies may be understood as driven by evoked adaptive responses to recurring environmental threats and affordances, such as infectious diseases, population density, resource availability, mortality threat, and relatedness, originally derived from research on other species (Sng, Neuberg, Varnum, and Kenrick, 2018;Varnum & Grossmann, 2017). To this list of key ecological factors, we might also add climatic stress (Van de Vliert, 2013) and income inequality which is arguably a proxy for resource patchiness in modern human societies (Sng et al, in press).…”