scholarly journals The Austronesian Game Taxonomy: A cross-cultural dataset of historical games

Author(s):  
Sarah M. Leisterer-Peoples ◽  
Susanne Hardecker ◽  
Joseph Watts ◽  
Simon J. Greenhill ◽  
Cody T. Ross ◽  
...  

AbstractHumans in most cultures around the world play rule-based games, yet research on the content and structure of these games is limited. Previous studies investigating rule-based games across cultures have either focused on a small handful of cultures, thus limiting the generalizability of findings, or used cross-cultural databases from which the raw data are not accessible, thus limiting the transparency, applicability, and replicability of research findings. Furthermore, games have long been defined as competitive interactions, thereby blinding researchers to the cross-cultural variation in the cooperativeness of rule-based games. The current dataset provides ethnographic, historic information on games played in cultural groups in the Austronesian language family. These game descriptions (Ngames = 907) are available and codeable for researchers interested in games. We also develop a unique typology of the cooperativeness of the goal structure of games and apply this typology to the dataset. Researchers are encouraged to use this dataset to examine cross-cultural variation in the cooperativeness of games and further our understanding of human cultural behaviour on a larger scale.

2021 ◽  
pp. 0887302X2110127
Author(s):  
Kim H. Y. Hahn ◽  
Gargi Bhaduri

At the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic, people from around the world made numerous homemade masks for themselves and their community due to shortage of medical masks as well as to stop the spread of COVID-19. The purpose of the current study was to conduct cross cultural exploration of the reasons for making masks, self-construal and wellbeing associated with masks making by collecting data from residents across US, India, and China. The finding of this study presented different reasons for making masks as well as self-construal, and wellbeing in people who made masks versus those who did not. Differences were also observed among three different cultural groups. This study offers a unique contribution to the public health research engaging in craft making related activities to gain a better perspective of the state of health of a population and the understanding of cross-cultural study of craft making behavior during the pandemic.


Author(s):  
Sanjin Grgic

Language is a mean of communication among people including speech, writing, and singing. Language is an important factor in geographical diversity. The English word language drives from the Indo-European. Language is the human ability to acquire and use complex systems of communication. The scientific study of language is called linguistic. Language is a strong element of culture. "Language is a systematic means of communicating ideas and feeling by the use of conventionalized sings, gestures, marks or especially articulate vocal sounds”. At present 5-6, thousands of languages are present in the world. Between them 1200, languages are present in Africa and 600 languages in India. Language provides the single most common variable by which cultural groups are identified. Language provides the main means by which learned customs and skills pass from one generation to the next. Facilitates cultural diffusion of innovations. Because languages vary spatially, they reinforce the sense of region and place. Study of language called linguistic geography and geolinguistics by geographers.


Author(s):  
Özen Odağ

The current chapter focuses on the (cross-)cultural appeal of existing entertainment theories, showcasing the meager evidence that exists with respect to their universality. The central argument throughout the chapter is that most entertainment theories have originated in the Western world and little has so far been done to apply them to the much larger rest of the world. The rest of the world has shown to be profoundly different, however, with respect to various dimensions of human behavior and cognition, including self-concepts, emotion appraisal and display, valued affect, thinking styles, values, and well-being maxims. The chapter scrutinizes five pertinent entertainment theories for their ability to explain this cultural variation. It suggests the inclusion of fruitful macro- and micro-level concepts from cross-cultural psychology and intercultural communication to increase their global explanatory power. The main aim of the current chapter is to spark an overdue (cross-)cultural evolution of media entertainment scholarship.


2019 ◽  
pp. 473-492
Author(s):  
John Irwin ◽  
Anthony H. Normore

Undercover operatives have for decades attempted to interact with and expose criminal activity in identified criminal sub-culture groups of their same ethnic backgrounds, potential criminal participants in diverse ethnic cultural groups other than their own ethnic background, and cross-cultural groups made up of people from different ethnic groups. Through our combined professional experiences (e.g., leadership professor, undercover law enforcement, criminal justice, research, inmate instructor, ethics professors) and having lived and worked in various parts of the world (e.g., Canada, US, UK, Europe, South East and Central Asia) our chapter examines undercover police work and provides a view to cross-cultural issues that exist on both the enforcement and suspect sides of police investigation. A variety of transnational and cross-border ethical issues are examined in undercover work (e.g. trickery, entrapment) along with landmark court cases in an effort to compare and contrast international approaches to undercover operatives. Future directions concerning international collaboration are presented.


2013 ◽  
Vol 37 (3) ◽  
pp. 266-273 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ike Anggraika Kuntoro ◽  
Liliek Saraswati ◽  
Candida Peterson ◽  
Virginia Slaughter

We investigated cultural influences on young children’s acquisition of social-cognitive concepts. A theory of mind (ToM) scale (Wellman & Liu, 2004) was given to 129 children (71 boys, 58 girls) ranging in age from 3 years 0 months to 7 years 10 months. The children were from three distinct cultural groups: (a) trash pickers ( pemulung) living a subsistence lifestyle in Jakarta, Indonesia; (b) middle-class Jakartans living and attending preschools within 5 km of the pemulung group; and (c) middle-class Australians. All children were individually tested in their native language. Cross-group comparisons revealed no significant differences among the three groups in mastery of false belief (the traditional ToM indicator), despite their widely different socio-economic circumstances. However, the pemulung children were slower than the two middle-class groups in mastering two other ToM concepts, namely knowledge access and emotion concealment. These findings shed new light on patterns of cross-cultural consistency in false-belief mastery, as well as revealing cross-cultural variation in other ToM concepts that plausibly reflect variation in children’s everyday life circumstances.


PLoS ONE ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 16 (11) ◽  
pp. e0259746
Author(s):  
Sarah M. Leisterer-Peoples ◽  
Cody T. Ross ◽  
Simon J. Greenhill ◽  
Susanne Hardecker ◽  
Daniel B. M. Haun

While most animals play, only humans play games. As animal play serves to teach offspring important life-skills in a safe scenario, human games might, in similar ways, teach important culturally relevant skills. Humans in all cultures play games; however, it is not clear whether variation in the characteristics of games across cultural groups is related to group-level attributes. Here we investigate specifically whether the cooperativeness of games covaries with socio-ecological differences across cultural groups. We hypothesize that cultural groups that engage in frequent inter-group conflict, cooperative sustenance acquisition, or that have less stratified social structures, might more frequently play cooperative games as compared to groups that do not share these characteristics. To test these hypotheses, we gathered data from the ethnographic record on 25 ethnolinguistic groups in the Austronesian language family. We show that cultural groups with higher levels of inter-group conflict and cooperative land-based hunting play cooperative games more frequently than other groups. Additionally, cultural groups with higher levels of intra-group conflict play competitive games more frequently than other groups. These findings indicate that games are not randomly distributed among cultures, but rather relate to the socio-ecological settings of the cultural groups that practice them. We argue that games serve as training grounds for group-specific norms and values and thereby have an important function in enculturation during childhood. Moreover, games might server an important role in the maintenance of cultural diversity.


Author(s):  
John Irwin ◽  
Anthony H. Normore

Undercover operatives have for decades attempted to interact with and expose criminal activity in identified criminal sub-culture groups of their same ethnic backgrounds, potential criminal participants in diverse ethnic cultural groups other than their own ethnic background, and cross-cultural groups made up of people from different ethnic groups. Through our combined professional experiences (e.g., leadership professor, undercover law enforcement, criminal justice, research, inmate instructor, ethics professors) and having lived and worked in various parts of the world (e.g., Canada, US, UK, Europe, South East and Central Asia) our chapter examines undercover police work and provides a view to cross-cultural issues that exist on both the enforcement and suspect sides of police investigation. A variety of transnational and cross-border ethical issues are examined in undercover work (e.g. trickery, entrapment) along with landmark court cases in an effort to compare and contrast international approaches to undercover operatives. Future directions concerning international collaboration are presented.


2020 ◽  
Vol 37 (2) ◽  
pp. 297-309
Author(s):  
Farjana Islam ◽  
Giosuè Baggio

Abstract This paper revisits a study by Machery et al. (2004), suggesting that, in experimental versions of Kripke’s (1980) fictional cases on the use of proper names, Westerners are more likely than East Asian participants to show intuitions compatible with Kripke’s causal-historical (CH) theory of reference. We conducted two experiments, recruting participants from Norway and Bangladesh, either in English (experiment 1; N = 75) or in the participants’ native languages (experiment 2; N = 60), using modified cases and a new approach to data analysis. We replicated the results of Machery et al. (2004), but we show that the residual finding—i.e., that participants who are not aligned with CH produce responses consistent with a definite descriptions (DD) theory of reference—does not hold. Most participants in our experiments, and nearly all those who do not provide CH answers, respond as predicted by a theory that accommodates speaker’s reference in reasoning about uses of proper names, not according to DD. We suggest that cross-cultural variation in this task is real. However, explanations of variation within or across cultures need not invoke competing theories of reference (CH vs DD), and can be unified within a single, broadly Kripkean analysis that honors the basic distinction between semantic reference and speaker’s reference.


2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Lorijn Zaadnoordijk ◽  
Helen Buckler ◽  
Rhodri Cusack ◽  
Sho Tsuji ◽  
Christina Bergmann

Online testing holds great promise for infant scientists. It could increase participant diversity, improve reproducibility and collaborative possibilities, and reduce costs for researchers and participants. However, despite the rise of platforms and participant databases, little work has been done to overcome the challenges of making this approach available to researchers across the world. In this paper, we elaborate on the benefits of online infant testing from a global perspective and identify challenges for the international community that have been outside of the scope of previous literature. Furthermore, we introduce ManyBabies-AtHome, an international, multi-lab collaboration that is actively working to facilitate practical and technical aspects of online testing as well as address ethical concerns regarding data storage and protection, and cross-cultural variation. The ultimate goal of this collaboration is to improve the method of testing infants online and make it globally available.


2017 ◽  
Vol 17 (1-2) ◽  
pp. 116-128 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mariya Voytyuk ◽  
Daniel Hruschka

What counts as healthy eating varies both within and across cultures. While people often focus on specific foods and nutrients, the timing and style of eating (eating context) can also be an important consideration, and one that appears to vary across cultures. One possible explanation for this variation is differences in basic cognition, with holistic thinking in collectivist cultures favouring contextual factors. We assess this hypothesis by examining perceptions between two cultural groups that vary in collectivism. In study 1, we investigate whether residents of Ukraine place more importance on considerations of eating context than residents of the usa. In study 2, we test whether this between-country difference is due to the mediating effect of individual differences in collectivism. Ukrainian participants consistently placed more importance on context (Cohen’s d = 0.71–0.84; p < 0.01) and were more collectivist (Cohen’s d = 0.95, p < 0.001). A mediation analysis shows that collectivism significantly mediates the effect of nationality on context endorsement, and renders the effect of nationality non-significant (p > 0.05). These results suggest that the holistic pattern of attention might extend to the domain of nutrition and may account for some cross-cultural differences in perceptions of healthy eating. We briefly discuss the benefits of perception focused on the context of eating, such as decreased burden of self-regulation in a food-rich environment.


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