The Conscientiousness Paradox: Cultural Mindset Shapes Competence Perception

2014 ◽  
Vol 28 (5) ◽  
pp. 425-436 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sylvia Xiaohua Chen ◽  
Ben C. P. Lam ◽  
Emma E. Buchtel ◽  
Michael Harris Bond

Studies comparing personality across cultures have found inconsistencies between self–reports and measures of national character or behaviour, especially on evaluative traits such as Conscientiousness. We demonstrate that self–perceptions and other–perceptions of personality vary with cultural mindset, thereby accounting for some of this inconsistency. Three studies used multiple methods to examine perceptions of Conscientiousness and especially its facet Competence that most characterizes performance evaluations. In Study 1, Mainland Chinese reported lower levels of self–efficacy than did Canadians, with the country effect partially mediated by Canadian participants’ higher level of independent self–construal. In Study 2, language as a cultural prime induced similar effects on Hong Kong bilinguals, who rated themselves as more competent and conscientious when responding in English than in Chinese. Study 3 demonstrated these same effects on ratings of both self–perceived and observer–perceived competence and conscientiousness, with participants changing both their competence–communicating behaviours and self–evaluations in response to the cultural primes of spoken language and ethnicity of an interviewer. These results converge to show that self–perceptions and self–presentations change to fit the social contexts shaped by language and culture. Copyright © 2013 European Association of Personality Psychology

Urban History ◽  
2010 ◽  
Vol 37 (3) ◽  
pp. 349-359 ◽  
Author(s):  
FABRIZIO NEVOLA

From late antiquity until the nineteenth century the Italian peninsula was made up of numerous states and city-states, governed as republics, or ruled by kings, dukes or popes. While diverse attempts were made to unify these disparate political entities through language and culture, or warfare and realpolitik, the dominant situation was one of intense rivalry and intermittent conflict. That uniquely Italian idea of campanilismo, or pride in one's own bell-tower, was borne of this continuous rivalry. It encapsulates an important concept, that local pride was inscribed in the physical fabric of the city, that a bell-tower could stand for a collective sense of one city's self-image and that this was expressed and calibrated in relation to neighbours, who were usually rivals. It is within this frame of references that much recent scholarship on urban image and identity has focused, teasing out the intentional distinctions that were drawn socio-politically and culturally, between the major centres of the peninsula. Such a process has significantly altered the view, dominant until quite recently, that style in art and architecture followed a single evolutionary route that passed from one place to another, as each lived a ‘golden age’ that defined a single ‘urban’ school – Siena, Venice, Florence, Rome, Bologna. In its place, a more nuanced view of how each centre fostered, reacted, responded and adopted innovation and change has come to the fore. In a generation of scholarship that followed Michael Baxandall's ground-breaking Painting and Experience, the idea that Renaissance Italians consciously fashioned urban images and identities has entered the mainstream. Scholars have put artworks and buildings back into close relation with the social contexts of their production and have asked how they worked in relation to their users and viewers.


Author(s):  
Lakmal Meegahapola ◽  
Florian Labhart ◽  
Thanh-Trung Phan ◽  
Daniel Gatica-Perez

According to prior work, the type of relationship between a person consuming alcohol and others in the surrounding (friends, family, spouse, etc.), and the number of those people (alone, with one person, with a group) are related to many aspects of alcohol consumption, such as the drinking amount, location, motives, and mood. Even though the social context is recognized as an important aspect that influences the drinking behavior of young adults in alcohol research, relatively little work has been conducted in smartphone sensing research on this topic. In this study, we analyze the weekend nightlife drinking behavior of 241 young adults in a European country, using a dataset consisting of self-reports and passive smartphone sensing data over a period of three months. Using multiple statistical analyses, we show that features from modalities such as accelerometer, location, application usage, bluetooth, and proximity could be informative about different social contexts of drinking. We define and evaluate seven social context inference tasks using smartphone sensing data, obtaining accuracies of the range 75%-86% in four two-class and three three-class inferences. Further, we discuss the possibility of identifying the sex composition of a group of friends using smartphone sensor data with accuracies over 70%. The results are encouraging towards supporting future interventions on alcohol consumption that incorporate users' social context more meaningfully and reducing the need for user self-reports when creating drink logs for self-tracking tools and public health studies.


2018 ◽  
Vol 52 (3) ◽  
pp. 275-304 ◽  
Author(s):  
Hannah Wallis ◽  
Christian Klöckner

The present article examines the transmission of energy-saving behaviors in the family on two levels. We investigated the extent to which energy-saving performance differed between adolescents in relation to parental behavior on an aggregated level but also across single behaviors within adolescents. Furthermore, we investigated whether social context (e.g., private areas in a household) interfered with one of the basic mechanisms assumed for this transmission (observation). Correlations between 13 self-reported single energy-saving behaviors from 264 adolescents and their respective parents ( N = 554) were analyzed by combining a path analysis with a multilevel approach. There were strong significant correlations between parents’ and adolescents’ energy-saving behaviors, mediated by adolescents’ perceptions of their parents’ behavior. The congruence between parents’ self-reports and adolescents’ perceptions was lower in private contexts than in shared social contexts in the household. This indicates that differentiated investigations with single behaviors and a focus on the social context (e.g., observability) are needed in transmission research.


2020 ◽  
Vol 4 (Supplement_1) ◽  
pp. 619-620
Author(s):  
Ella Cohn-Schwartz ◽  
Liat Ayalon

Abstract The way adults perceive their aging process is an important predictor of later life outcomes, including mental and physical health. Despite the importance of living a socially active life in old age, the inter-connections of individuals’ perceptions of aging with their social lives and behaviors are not well-understood. This symposium addresses questions of how the social environment and social behaviors are related to subjective aging perceptions, including subjective age and self-perceptions of aging. Two papers examine self-perceptions of aging in the context of couple relations. Mejía and colleagues focus on married older adults’ shared beliefs about aging, showing that within older couples, beliefs about aging are shaped in part through partners’ co-experience of each other’s biological aging. Kim and colleagues also examine couples, finding evidence that changes across time, as well as average differences in individual characteristics, may affect self-perceptions of married/partnered men and women differently. The final two papers examine the interplay between chronological age and perceptions of aging. Weiss and Weiss examine the social conditions and consequences of subjective age across the life span in the work domain, demonstrating that feeling relatively older among young adults and younger among older adults predicts proactive behaviors such as speaking up. Cohn-Schwartz and colleagues investigate the bi-directional temporal associations of adults’ self-perceptions of aging and the age composition of their social networks. The symposium concludes with summarizing remarks from the discussant who will suggest possible directions for future research on the social contexts of the perceived experience of aging.


Author(s):  
Mohamed Ahmed

In the late 1950s, Iraqi Jews were either forced or chose to leave Iraq for Israel. Finding it impossible to continue writing in Arabic in Israel, many Iraqi Jewish novelists faced the literary challenge of switching to Hebrew. Focusing on the literary works of the writers Shimon Ballas, Sami Michael and Eli Amir, this book examines their use of their native Iraqi Arabic in their Hebrew works. It examines the influence of Arabic language and culture and explores questions of language, place and belonging from the perspective of sociolinguistics and multilingualism. In addition, the book applies stylistics as a framework to investigate the range of linguistic phenomena that can be found in these exophonic texts, such as code-switching, borrowing, language and translation strategies. This new stylistic framework for analysing exophonic texts offers a future model for the study of other languages. The social and political implications of this dilemma, as it finds expression in creative writing, are also manifold. In an age of mass migration and population displacement, the conflicted loyalties explored in this book through the prism of Arabic and Hebrew are relevant in a range of linguistic contexts.


1986 ◽  
Vol 33 (3) ◽  
pp. 236-251 ◽  
Author(s):  
Martha A. Myers ◽  
Susette M. Talarico

2020 ◽  
pp. 129-148
Author(s):  
Halyna Маtsyuk

The article is devoted to the formation of a linguistic interpretation of the interaction of language and culture of the Polish-Ukrainian border territories. The material for the analysis includes nomic systems of Ukrainian and Polish languages, which are considered as a cultural product of interpersonal and interethnic communication and an element of the language system, as well as invariant scientific theory created in the works of Polish onomastics (according to key theoretical concepts, tradition of analysis, and continuity in linguistic knowledge). The analysis performed in the article allows us to single out the linguistic indicators of the interaction of language and culture typical for the subject field of sociolinguistics. These are connections and concepts: language-territory, language-social strata, language-gender, language-ethnicity, social functions of the Polish language, and non-standardized spelling systems. Linguistic indicators reveal the peculiar mechanisms of the border in the historical memory and collective consciousness, marking the role of languages in these areas as a factor of space and cultural marker and bringing us closer to understanding the social relations of native speakers in the fifteenth-nineteenth centuries.


Author(s):  
Catrin Heite ◽  
Veronika Magyar-Haas

Analogously to the works in the field of new social studies of childhood, this contribution deals with the concept of childhood as a social construction, in which children are considered as social actors in their own living environment, engaged in interpretive reproduction of the social. In this perspective the concept of agency is strongly stressed, and the vulnerability of children is not sufficiently taken into account. But in combining vulnerability and agency lies the possibility to consider the perspective of the subjects in the context of their social, political and cultural embeddedness. In this paper we show that what children say, what is important to them in general and for their well-being, is shaped by the care experiences within the family and by their social contexts. The argumentation for the intertwining of vulnerability and agency is exemplified by the expressions of an interviewed girl about her birth and by reference to philosophical concepts about birth and natality.


2017 ◽  
Vol 6 (Especial) ◽  
pp. 105
Author(s):  
Dante Choque-Caseres

In Latin America, based on the recognition of Indigenous Peoples, the identification of gaps or disparities between the Indigenous and non-Indigenous population has emerged as a new research interest. To this end, capturing Indigenous identity is key to conducting certain analyses. However, the social contexts where the identity of Indigenous persons are (re)produced has been significantly altered. These changes are generated by the assimilation or integration of Indigenous communities into dominant national cultures. Within this context, limitations emerge in the use of this category, since Indigenous identity has a political and legal component related to the needs of the government. Therefore, critical thought on the use of Indigenous identity is necessary in an epistemological and methodological approach to research. This article argues that research about Indigenous Peoples should evaluate how Indigenous identity is included, for it is socially co-produced through the interaction of the State and its institutions. Thus, it would not necessarily constitute an explicative variable. By analyzing the discourse about Aymara Indigenous communities that has emerged in the northern border of Chile, this paper seeks to expose the logic used to define identity. Therefore, I conclude that the process of self-identification arises in supposed Indigenous people, built and/or reinforced by institutions, which should be reviewed from a decolonizing perspective and included in comparative research.


Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document