Toward a Psychological Atlas of the World With Mixture Modeling

Abstract

This article presents findings based on the outcomes of research conducted with 8,883 participants from 33 countries. It employs mixture modeling (latent profile analysis) to classify countries into latent classes. The country-level analyses are based on three social attitudes factor scores of Nastiness, Religiosity, and Morality. The results indicate that the main sources of cross-cultural differences are with respect to a broadly defined Conservatism/Liberalism. Three groups of societies—that is, “psychological continents”—appear to exist in the world today. They are as follows: (a) liberal European countries plus Canada and Australia; (b) conservative countries from South and South-East Asia, Sub-Saharan Africa, and Latin America; and (c) all other countries, including the United States, Russia, and China, that are in between liberal and conservative groups. In addition, gross domestic product (GDP) per capita, cognitive test performance, and governance indicators were found to be low in the most conservative group and high in the most liberal group.

Development and validation of the five-factor LAMBI measure of God representations.

“…Thus, the LAMBI subscales have good stability and test-retest reliability. or from various papers (e.g., Muthen, 2002;Stankov & Lee, 2016). We found that the best fitting model (in bold) yielded four profile groups as shown in Table 5.…”

The Psychology of Morality: A Review and Analysis of Empirical Studies Published From 1940 Through 2017

“…Furthermore, the overreliance on U.S. samples and political ideologies is now beginning to be complemented by studies examining how moral concerns may be similar or different in different cultural and political contexts (e.g., Nilson, & Strupp-Levitsky, 2016). Recent work has compared the moral foundations endorsed by Chinese versus U.S. samples (Kwan, 2016), has examined this among Muslims in Turkey (Yilmaz, Harma, & Bakçekapili, & Cesur, 2016), and has made other intercultural comparisons (Stankov & Lee, 2016a, 2016b; Sullivan, Stewart, Landau, Liu, Yang, & Diefendorf, 2016). This helps understand that some moral concerns emerge consistently across different cultural contexts, and the macro-level cultural values and corruption indicators that characterize them (Mann, Garcia-Rada, Hornuf, Tafurt, & Ariely, 2016).…”

Conservative Syndrome: Individual and Cross-Cultural Differences

“…A typical finding is that, for the same variables, the correlations among the countries are higher than among the individuals. Consequently, at the country-level, a strong social Conservatism factor tends to appear implying that instead of being unrelated, Morality and Nastiness, together with Religiosity, define the same Conservative Syndrome (see Stankov & Lee, 2016b).…”