Explaining cross-cultural variation in mirror self-recognition: New insights into the ontogeny of objective self-awareness.

AbstractAspects of human life history and cognition, such as our long childhoods and extensive use of teaching, theoretically evolved to facilitate the acquisition of complex tasks. The present paper empirically examines the relationship between subsistence task difficulty and age of acquisition, rates of teaching, and rates of oblique transmission among Hadza and BaYaka foragers from Tanzania and the Republic of Congo. We further examine cross-cultural variation in how and from whom learning occurred. Learning patterns and community perceptions of task difficulty were assessed through interviews. We found no relationship between task difficulty, age of acquisition, and oblique transmission, and a weak but positive relationship between task difficulty and rates of teaching. While same-sex transmission was normative in both societies, tasks ranked as more difficult were more likely to be transmitted by men among the BaYaka, but not among the Hadza, potentially reflecting cross-cultural differences in the sexual division of subsistence and teaching labor. Further, the BaYaka were more likely to report learning via teaching, and less likely to report learning via observation, than the Hadza, possibly owing to differences in socialization practices.

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Affective Interpersonal Touch in Close Relationships: A Cross-Cultural Perspective

Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin ◽

10.1177/0146167220988373 ◽

2021 ◽

pp. 014616722098837

Author(s):

Agnieszka Sorokowska ◽

Supreet Saluja ◽

Piotr Sorokowski ◽

Tomasz Frąckowiak ◽

Maciej Karwowski ◽

...

Keyword(s):

Close Relationships ◽

Cross Cultural ◽

Cultural Variation ◽

Interpersonal Distance ◽

Cultural Perspective ◽

Affective Touch ◽

Individual Level ◽

Interpersonal Touch ◽

Regional Temperature

Interpersonal touch behavior differs across cultures, yet no study to date has systematically tested for cultural variation in affective touch, nor examined the factors that might account for this variability. Here, over 14,000 individuals from 45 countries were asked whether they embraced, stroked, kissed, or hugged their partner, friends, and youngest child during the week preceding the study. We then examined a range of hypothesized individual-level factors (sex, age, parasitic history, conservatism, religiosity, and preferred interpersonal distance) and cultural-level factors (regional temperature, parasite stress, regional conservatism, collectivism, and religiosity) in predicting these affective-touching behaviors. Our results indicate that affective touch was most prevalent in relationships with partners and children, and its diversity was relatively higher in warmer, less conservative, and religious countries, and among younger, female, and liberal people. This research allows for a broad and integrated view of the bases of cross-cultural variability in affective touch.

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Small-scale societies exhibit fundamental variation in the role of intentions in moral judgment

Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences ◽

10.1073/pnas.1522070113 ◽

2016 ◽

Vol 113 (17) ◽

pp. 4688-4693 ◽

Cited By ~ 68

Author(s):

H. Clark Barrett ◽

Alexander Bolyanatz ◽

Alyssa N. Crittenden ◽

Daniel M. T. Fessler ◽

Simon Fitzpatrick ◽

...

Keyword(s):

Moral Judgment ◽

Large Scale ◽

Narrow Range ◽

Cross Cultural ◽

Moral Judgments ◽

Small Scale ◽

Cultural Variation ◽

Moral Assessment ◽

Mitigating Circumstances

Intent and mitigating circumstances play a central role in moral and legal assessments in large-scale industrialized societies. Although these features of moral assessment are widely assumed to be universal, to date, they have only been studied in a narrow range of societies. We show that there is substantial cross-cultural variation among eight traditional small-scale societies (ranging from hunter-gatherer to pastoralist to horticulturalist) and two Western societies (one urban, one rural) in the extent to which intent and mitigating circumstances influence moral judgments. Although participants in all societies took such factors into account to some degree, they did so to very different extents, varying in both the types of considerations taken into account and the types of violations to which such considerations were applied. The particular patterns of assessment characteristic of large-scale industrialized societies may thus reflect relatively recently culturally evolved norms rather than inherent features of human moral judgment.

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The Role of Figurative Complexity in the Comprehension and Appreciation of Advertisements

Applied Linguistics ◽

10.1093/applin/amy039 ◽

2018 ◽

Vol 40 (6) ◽

pp. 957-991 ◽

Cited By ~ 2

Author(s):

Paula Pérez-Sobrino ◽

Jeannette Littlemore ◽

David Houghton

Keyword(s):

Significant Variation ◽

Processing Time ◽

Consumer Response ◽

Cross Cultural ◽

Cultural Variation ◽

Perceived Effectiveness ◽

The Uk ◽

Linguistic Backgrounds ◽

Different Levels

Abstract To date, research in advertising has focussed almost exclusively on metaphor, with linguists and marketing scholars paying very little attention to alternative types of figurative expression. Beyond the finding that metaphor leads to an increased appreciation of advertisements, there has been surprisingly little research into how consumer response is affected by metonymy, or by metaphor–metonymy interactions. In this article, we present findings from a study that investigated the depth to which participants (n = 90) from a range of cultural and linguistic backgrounds (the UK, Spain, and China) were found to process 30 real-world adverts featuring creative metaphor and metonymy in multimodal format. We focus on the cross-cultural variation in terms of time taken to process, appreciation and perceived effectiveness of adverts, and on individual differences explained by different levels of need for cognition. We found significant variation in the understanding of advertisements containing metaphor, metonymy, and combinations of the two, between subjects and across nationalities in terms of (i) processing time, (ii) overall appeal, and (iii) the way in which participants interpreted the advertisements.

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Cross-Cultural Variation in Persuasion Across Specialised Discourses

Persuasion in Specialised Discourses ◽

10.1007/978-3-030-58163-3_7 ◽

2020 ◽

pp. 263-338

Author(s):

Olga Dontcheva-Navratilova ◽

Martin Adam ◽

Renata Povolná ◽

Radek Vogel

Keyword(s):

Cross Cultural ◽

Cultural Variation

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What we talk about when we talk about color

10.1101/2020.09.29.319517 ◽

2020 ◽

Author(s):

Colin R. Twomey ◽

Gareth Roberts ◽

David Brainard ◽

Joshua B. Plotkin

Keyword(s):

Visible Light ◽

Color Space ◽

Color Perception ◽

Geographic Location ◽

Cross Cultural ◽

Cultural Variation ◽

Inference Algorithm ◽

Color Categories ◽

New Directions ◽

Different Color

Names for colors vary widely across languages, but color categories are remarkably consistent [1–5]. Shared mechanisms of color perception help explain consistent partitions of visible light into discrete color vocabularies [6–10]. But the mappings from colors to words are not identical across languages, which may reflect communicative needs – how often speakers must refer to objects of different color [11]. Here we quantify the communicative needs of colors in 130 different languages, using a novel inference algorithm. Some regions of color space exhibit 30-fold greater demand for communication than other regions. The regions of greatest demand correlate with the colors of salient objects, including ripe fruits in primate diets. Using the mathematics of compression we predict and empirically test how languages map colors to words, accounting for communicative needs. We also document extensive cultural variation in communicative demands on different regions of color space, which is partly explained by differences in geographic location and local biogeography. This account reconciles opposing theories for universal patterns in color vocabularies, while opening new directions to study cross-cultural variation in the need to communicate different colors.

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