What Doesn’t Kill Us: Harsh Ecologies Beget Difficulty-as-Improvement Norms
Daphna Oyserman,
Farzan Malekabadi,
Alireza Ziabari
et al.
Abstract:Culture-based norms help people make sense of their worlds especially in ambiguous situations. We show that harsher environments foster one such norm, difficulty-as-improvement, which focuses on whether unchosen difficulty has a character-building upside. People are more likely to hold difficulty-as-improvement beliefs if they live in societies with harsher environments (e.g., mortality, economy, ecology). Moreover, difficulty-as-improvement beliefs are sticky –relatively stable once developed, more prevalent … Show more
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