The Boundaries of Culture: Do Questions About Societal Norms Reveal Cultural Differences?
Posted: 8 May 2014
Date Written: May 6, 2014
Abstract
Cultural phenomena are usually viewed as possessing some temporal stability. Measured properly, the dimensions that they yield have convincing predictive properties and create clear geographic or economic clusters of countries. Using these criteria, we assess the nature of 10 World Values Survey items that address societal norms. We find that they form two factors at the ecological level. Only one of these (personal-sexual) is unambiguously a cultural dimension, associated with previous measures of conservatism and collectivism; the second one (illegal-dishonest) is not. We conclude that although some norms are within the domain of culture, others are only weakly associated with it. We also comment on the implications of our findings for Gelfand’s tightness versus looseness as a dimension of national culture reflecting attitudes toward norms.
Keywords: societal norms, national culture, cultural dimensions
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