Browsing by Subject "Culture"

In this study I address the moral and cultural disagreement and conflict regarding the interpretation of human rights norms that threatens the legitimacy of the human rights enterprise. Such disagreements present an opportunity to probe, question and dissect beliefs to uncover inconsistencies and false assumptions and attain a deeper insight into human rights norms that are presently left in a rather abstract form in international human rights documents and conventions.

I describe and defend an institutionally-driven dialogical approach that promises to systematically address these moral and cultural disagreements. My approach rests on two claims. First, clearer content for human rights norms will emerge from within particular cultures if critical cultural and moral investigation through dialogue is encouraged. By engaging in dialogical processes, we not only discharge our obligation to aid in a process that leads to a fair specification of human rights norms, but we also come to understand how human rights norms are, at their very core, participative.

Second, one way that international human rights institutions (IHRIs) can legitimately fulfill their function of supporting human rights is by encouraging critical moral investigation through dialogue. I make this proposal more concrete by discussing the case law on the issue of transsexuals that has come before the European Court of Human Rights.

The question of what leads an individual to act dishonestly interests researchers, policy-makers, and lay-people alike. While a growing body of research suggests that dishonest behavior is typically limited, and reflects a balance of internal and external incentives, important questions remain unanswered. To what extent is honest behavior guided by stable, internal factors (i.e. moral character), and to what extent is it shaped by situational factors? This question is the subject of continuing and recently revived debate. To what extent do socio-cultural factors impact dishonesty, and to what extent is dishonesty universal? Casual observation suggests significant cross-cultural variation in terms of specific dishonest behaviors (e.g. soliciting bribes), but this source of variation has received little research attention. In five related research chapters encompassing three studies, I explore questions about character and culture using empirical research methods. Using a behavioral die task, I find similar patterns of dishonest behavior across individuals from different countries, though within-country differences are also observed. Using survey data, I find that internal sanctions are the most important deterrent of dishonesty across cultures. In addition, I find that that specific dishonest behaviors vary across cultures, and according to domains. Domain-specific dishonesty and socio-cultural influences are also evident in a study involving socially connected pairs of individuals. I conclude that dishonest tendencies may be best characterized as both universal and culturally sensitive. Furthermore, moral character may be construed as a multidimensional construct, expressed differently across different domains of life.

Cultural transmission processes are not well understood within the field of sociology. Popular models both in cultural and network sociology tend to conceptualize transmission as simple replication, with limited research devoted to examining what systematic changes information tends to undergo as it is transmitted. By contrast, empirical cultural transmission research in psychology shows that information tends to be altered to become more consistent with cultural biases as it is shared. Understanding this consistency bias is important for understanding how cultures are reproduced, because biased transmission increases individuals’ likelihood of receiving information that reaffirms cultural biases, while impeding the spread of information that might challenge such biases. In this dissertation, I investigate different aspects of schema-consistency bias and its impact on information transmission in three empirical studies.

Chapter 2 examines how schema-consistency biases in information transmission and social psychological legitimation processes combine to perpetuate negative stereotypes about the poor. Results of a serial transmission experiment demonstrate that participants used more negative-stereotype consistent material when retelling a story about a main character that experiences a negative outcome (financial instability and unemployment) compared to a positive one (receiving training and gaining employment) following a job loss. These results demonstrate one way systematic errors in information transmission reproduce cultural biases, as individuals draw on negative stereotypes to justify misfortunes experienced by disadvantaged others.

Chapter 3 builds on the work described in Chapter 2, combining insights from the cultural cognition, affect control theory, and cultural transmission frameworks in a new serial transmission study. While previous serial transmission studies have relied on informal stereotype-based measures of cultural schema-consistency, in this study I demonstrate that affect control theory’s measure of deflection provides a formal, theory-based measure of information’s cultural schema-consistency. Further, results show that this measure is predictive of the information people share in communication: while culturally inconsistent, high-deflection information experiences an initial boost in memorability, participants ultimately tend to transform this information to increase its consistency with cultural schemas.

Chapter 4 also focuses on the issue of measuring culture. In this study, I develop a new concept-association-based method for collecting schema data from individuals, as well as a corresponding conceptual association network measure of cultural schemas, using differences between liberal and conservative schemas of poverty in the United States as a test case. Study results show that concept network representations of liberal and conservative schemas of poverty are characterized by large overlaps, punctuated by a few salient differences in terms of associations related to individual (e.g.- laziness, dishonesty) vs structural (e.g.- lacking government safety nets, racism) concepts. I find that these partisan differences in poverty schemas, when internalized by individuals, are predictive of differences in policy preferences regarding government aid spending.

Taken together, these studies aim to advance current debates about measuring culture and about the cognitive and social psychological mechanisms underpinning cultural processes. Specifically, the ultimate goal of this research is to better understand information transmission as a mechanism that connects micro-level cognitive and social psychological processes to larger scale cultural phenomena.

Background: Emotions are shaped through the internalization of culturally relevant values. Contextualized systems of meaning influence an individual’s experience of emotion, the consequences of a given response, and their connection to long-term functional outcomes. The present study aims to explore the socioemotional world of Nepali adolescents, in order to understand emotional needs and identify opportunities for psychosocial intervention. Methods: A tablet-based battery of quantitative assessments was administered to 102 students in grades 7-9 (age 12-18) in an earthquake affected region of the Kathmandu Valley. Assessments included measures of anxiety, PTSD, functional impairment, and a local idiom of distress (problems in the heart-mind). Semi-structured interviews were conducted with 21 students and explored the emotional experience of a recent stressor. Results: Three domains of emotion experience emerged: cognitive, physical, and social. While key differences in emotional distress across gender and cultural groups emerged, similarities in the overarching model suggest a shared understanding of negative emotion among Nepali adolescents. Of particular note is the social domain, involving both interpersonal and communal elements, which included the local idiom of distress, which has previously been linked to depression risk. Conclusion: This tripartite conceptualization of emotion is a critical step toward understanding cultural meanings of emotional wellbeing, and the connection between socially experienced emotion and psychopathology underlines the importance of psychosocial integration in future interventions.

This dissertation aims to investigate the ways in which culture shape how people perceive, remember, and transmit information to one another and how that information can be shaped by culture. I specifically study: (1) how stigma and stereotypes affect how individuals discern and recall information about an individual with schizophrenia; and (2) how political partisanship may alter one’s perceptions of an ambiguous social interaction that is politically salient. To answer these questions, I conduct two experiments and collect data from online participants. In the first study, I recruit participants from Amazon Mechanical Turk to read a story about an individual with schizophrenia and retell it from memory. In my second study, I recruit participants from Prolific, and I ask them to watch a video and label the characters involved in the interaction they watched. I find that biases about individuals with schizophrenia shape the content participants remember and transmit, leading to narratives that become more stereotype-consistent over time. I also find that political partisanship has a strong relationship with how participants label the characters involved in the video of my second study. These findings contribute to the fields of cultural sociology, medical sociology, and political polarization. While varied in approach, both experiments show that culture, in a variety of forms, shapes not only how individuals interpret the world, but also how they interact with it.

After the devastation wrought by Hurricanes Katrina and Rita in the Fall of 2005, millions of dollars of Northern philanthropic aid have poured into the Gulf Coast, as have volunteers, rebuilding professionals, and NGO workers. Subsequently, New Orleans has witnessed an explosion of NGOs and Social Enterprises, all intent on rebuilding the city and "doing good" for its residents. However, it was not simply the opening of the economic floodgates that has drawn so many outsiders to the city, it was also the threat to New Orleans' mythic exceptionalism as the so-called "Creole Capital," which has spurred so many willing foot soldiers to action. Drawing on ethnographic material gleaned from participant observation, interviews, and some archival research, this dissertation attempts to demystify the social and cultural forces shaping New Orleans' ongoing process of rebuilding and recovery. Special attention is paid to the role of the arts and of aesthetics as political tools, and forms of capital available to Black actors. Illuminating the political and economic contexts within which the work of community building takes place reveals both the possibilities and the limitations which face Black New Orleanians, embedded in this dynamic landscape. Attending to external forces as well as internal relationships, it becomes clear that Black artist-activists see institution-building as a way to 1) build upon some of the only forms of capital available to Black New Orleanians - that is, social and cultural capital; 2) organize Black communities and begin to exercise some forms of Black Power; and 3) to sustain local social movements.

A strong model of culture should capture both the structured and negotiated elements of cultural meaning, allowing for the fluidity of social action and the agency of social actors. Although cultural meanings often reproduce societal structures, supporting stability and consensus, culture is constitutive of and not merely produced by structural arrangements. It is therefore essential to establish clear mechanisms which guide how individuals interpret social events and apply cultural meanings in making sense of the social world. As such, this dissertation focuses on the model of culture forwarded by affect control theory, a sociological theory linking culturally shared meaning with identity, behavior, and emotion in interpersonal interaction (for reviews, see Heise 2007; Robinson and Smith-Lovin 2006).

While many theories have attempted to deal with components of the cultural model separately, affect control theory provides a unifying multi-level framework, which rectifies many shortcomings of earlier models by simultaneously accounting for individual cognition and emotion, situational and institutional context, and cultural meaning. The dissertation begins by introducing affect control theory, which considers cultural meanings to be societally bound, based on consensual and widely shared sentiments, and stable over long periods of time. We advocate several refinements to the theory's assumptions about culture, proposing that cultural sentiments are dynamic and structurally contingent, and that mechanisms operating within social networks serve as important sources of meaning consensus and change.

The remainder of the dissertation presents empirical evidence in support of our propositions. First, we draw upon primary survey data to show how social position and patterns of social connectedness relate to inculcation into the dominant culture and commonality with the affective meanings of others. Respondents' demographics, social position, social connectedness, network composition, and experiences in close relationships are explored as predictors of inculcation and commonality in meaning. Second, through an experimental study, we explore social influence processes as a mechanism of cultural consensus and change. Analyses examine both conditionally manipulated features of the group structure and respondents' emergent assessments of social influence as predictors of change in task-related attitudes and affective meanings.

Our results identify structural sources of normative differentiation and consensus, and introduce social networks methodologies as a means of elaborating affect control theory's explanatory model. More broadly, the findings generated by this project contribute to an ongoing academic discussion on the origins of cultural content, exploring the complex and dynamic relationship between patterns of social interaction and cultural affective meaning. We close by introducing research in progress, which examines predictors of clustering in affective meaning and explores how values, self, and identity condition the effects of social influence on decision-making.

This dissertation examines offers a corrective to the world polity theory of globalization, which posits increasing convergence on a single global cultural frame. In contrast, I suggest that national culture limits the adoption of "world culture" by actors and institutions. Instead of adopting world cultural models wholesale, they are adapted through a process I call translated global diffusion. In order to assess my theory, I follow the creation and development of organizations founded by Australia, Canada, and the United States to foster scientific development within their borders. All three national organizations were initiated around 1915, part of an international wave of state science that prima facie appears to support the world polity thesis.

Through a comparative historical analysis that combines archival material and secondary histories from each case, I demonstrate that concerns tied to national identity mediate the incorporation of models sanctioned as part of a "world cultural canopy" of institutional scripts. More specifically, federal legislatures circumscribe new organizations to fit preexisting ideas of proper government. Secondly, the scientists effectively running state science organizations negotiate often conflicting nationalistic and professional impulses. Finally, the national news media report about science in a selective and nationally filtered way. The result is a kind of particular universality, science layered with national import only fully visible from within the nation-state.

How does gender inequality persist in the art world today? Or, more generally, what role do social characteristics like gender play in markets for cultural goods, such as art? That is the focus of this research. Using a novel dataset of 255,887 contemporary artworks produced by 18,624 artists and gleaned from an online marketplace, I employ the case of gender in the art world to investigate how social characteristics of producers can impact market outcomes and structures. Although there is prominent scholarship on product markets and inequality within sociology, questions such as these are rarely posed. Work generally focuses on the quality of goods and on the status of producing organizations, without attention to individual producer characteristics, including gender.The first study of this dissertation implements machine learning classification to examine whether female and male artists produce artworks with different characteristics. These analyses rely on a taxonomy of over 1,000 art-relevant features, coded by a team of art historians, to describe the disciplines, physical attributes, styles and periods, object types, and settings of each artwork in the dataset. I find that artworks by women and men do not substantively differ on the majority of aesthetic, conceptual, or material features that they depict. While some, less common, features of art appear more in work by women or men, by in large these two groups of producers do not bring different products to the art market. Studies two and three of this dissertation move to address alternative hypotheses for disparity in the economic outcomes of women and men in the contemporary art market. With mixed effect regression, I test whether artworks by women are priced differently than artworks by men, even after accounting for the categories and features they depict. I find that art by women is listed at a discount of approximately 10 to 12 percent relative to art by men. I also find that, of those art qualities that differ in use between women and men, qualities of art predominantly made by women are valued less than those predominantly made by men, net of who creates them. In combination, these findings echo and extend calls to value the labor of women and men comparably. They also broaden our understanding of the potential for social status characteristics, like gender, to act as organizing structures in the production, meaning, and valuation of markets.