Values as the Essence of Culture

Abstract

Recent findings of low societal consensus in cultural values suggest that our field's dominant paradigm-culture as shared values-is a fallacy. The perennial persistence of this illusion may come from that it appeals to the human brain's hardwired capacity for essentialism. Evidence against value consensus, however, does not doom all shared-meaning models of culture (pace Schwartz, 2013). I describe evidence for other kinds of mental representations (i.e., concepts, beliefs, norms) that are shared (in the sense of consensus, contagion, or conjoint control) and underlie culturally patterned behavior. Also I consider and probe Schwartz's (2013) proposed definition of culture as a society-level value system, raising questions about its ontology, functionalism and explanatory power, particularly with regard to understanding cultural change. While acknowledging the utility of aggregated value scores for many research programs, I conclude that psychology needs to study individual-level cultural representations and withinsociety variation in order to understand the dynamics of cultural influence and change.In popular discourse, "culture" is a vague and all-encompassing force that can be invoked to explain any of person's or group's behaviors or failings. As scientists we aim to build more precise models that avoid the fallacies of stereotypes and other intuitive biases about societal differences. Yet when we tighten our definitions of culture, we must always consider whether narrowing definitions will also narrow the questions that we can address.This essay responds to Schwartz's (2013) critique of shared-meaning models of culture and his updated theoretical justification for operationalizing culture with aggregated country-level scores from ratings of abstract values. Recent analyses have revealed that such value ratings are not highly consensual within nations, nor highly different across nations. Schwartz (2013) takes these results to have "shaken the confidence of psychology researchers in the prevailing conception of societal culture" (p. 3). Instead of the prevalent conception of culture as the values that a society's members share, Schwartz defines culture as a system of meaning that exists "external to the individual" (p. 5). On this basis, he provides a new rationalization of the methodological aproach of of operationalizing culture in terms of aggregated country-level value scores, an

The relationship among storytelling, values, and resilience of college students from Eastern and Western cultural backgrounds

“…One question remaining is whether the differences in values between individuals were greater than the differences between cultures (Fischer & Schwartz, 2011;Morris, 2014). Specifically, this study attempted to (1) understand how adults' perceptions about childhood experiences of storytelling and value preferences influenced their resilience and teaching approaches (student-centered vs. teacher-centered) and (2) understand the strength of relationships of cultural differences vs. individual differences for storytelling, values, and resilience.…”

Cultural difference, inside and out

“…Instead of using stereotypical statements about aggregates of individuals, such as “Americans are individualistic” or “East Asians want to feel calm,” we can talk about cultural patterns, situations, social ecologies, and contexts. As others have stated more articulately, culture should not be reduced to reified personal values or beliefs (Kurtiş & Adams, ; Markus & Hamedani, ; Morris, ). In my view, if we recognize that culture is also outside the head, we can communicate with each other about cultural differences without inadvertently stereotyping individuals or groups.…”

Balancing evidence and norms in cultural evolution

“…2 Recent research suggests that these social comparison processes may occur in the same neural circuitry (the anterior cingulate cortex) used for error monitoring and cognitive control (Chang, Gariepy, & Platt, 2013). As discussed below, there is increasing evidence that these social consensus judgments are critical to the formation of shared culture (Morris, 2014).…”

“…Growing evidence from multiple research teams (Fischer et al, 2009;Shteynberg, Gelfand, & Kim, 2009;Zou et al, 2009; for a review and discussion see Morris, 2014) suggests that shared cultural biases are better explained by perceived descriptive norms (e.g., ''Americans rise for the National Anthem'') than shared values (''It is important to honor our country by rising for the National Anthem''). This idea might appear inconsistent with evidence from the TRA literature: For example, a meta-analysis of over one hundred estimates (Armitage & Conner, 2001) found that behavioral intentions are more strongly correlated with attitudes than with subjective norms (weighted r = .49 vs. .34), but unlike attitudes, norms were ''typically measured by a single item'' (p. 484), which would tend to attenuate correlations due to low reliability, and these studies assess injunctive rather than descriptive norms.…”