Costs and benefits of developing a global language of historical

1
Costs and benefits of developing a global
language of historical symbols

• James H. Liu, Dario Paez, Katja Hanke
• (lots of) Friends
• Centre for Applied Cross Cultural Research
• School of Psychology
• Victoria University of Wellington
• New Zealand

2
Globalization and the End of History?

• Liberal theorists like Francis Fukuyama declared
  the End of History with the Triumph of Liberal
  Democracy as the World System in the early 1990s.
  Fukuyama based his argument on a philosophical
  model of human psychology that argued that LD
  filled peoples needs best.
• Concurrently, cross-cultural psychology hit the
  big time in the USA with the Markus Kitayamas
  (1991) paper that made all motivation, cognition,
  and emotion contingent on culture-based
  self-construal.
• We get two very different answers appearing at
  the same time about how universal Western models
  of self and governance are.
• Could it be possible that both Fukuyama and
  Markus and Kitayama are correct?

3
Universality

• The argument for universality needs little
  introduction. Western enlightenment ideals were
  not are not qualified by culture, and
  mainstream psychology is a tributary of this
  stream.
• But non-Westerners, especially those who have
  been colonized by them, or had their territories
  dismembered by them under such enlightenment
  ideas as White Mans burden or Social Darwinism
  would have reason to question to what extent the
  claim of universality is description versus
  prescription.

4
Cultural Specificity and the Dimensions of
Cultural Variation

• Markus and Kitayama (1991) reduced one the
  dimensions of cultural variation identified by
  cross-cultural psychologist Geert Hofstede (1980)
  in Cultures Consequences to a dichotomy that
  could be used as an independent variable in
  laboratory experiments IND-COL -gt independent
  self interdependent self
• Shalom Schwartz (1987, 1990) concurrently
  developed a much better psychometric model of the
  cross-cultural structure of human values. Values
  are considered to be relatively stable and
  implicit elements of society that differ in their
  degree of emphasis but not structure across
  cultures.

5
(No Transcript)
6
(No Transcript)
7
The Value of Dimensions of Cultural Variation

• Identify points of commonality and points of
  difference between different societies, so that
  members can know where they are likely to differ
  and where they are likely to see eye to eye.
• The structure, or associative meaning of values
  is fairly consistent across cultures, e.g.,
  broadmindedness and curiosity are positively
  correlated with each other and negative
  correlated with authority and humility in most
  cultures.
• Facilitate cross-cultural communication and
  identify sources of cross-cultural
  misunderstandings

8
Can Political Culture be characterized as an
Enduring System of Values?

• 1) Culture is Dynamically Constructed through
  Communication in Society
• Cultural Meanings are embedded within discursive
  and representational practices mediated through
  institutions and individuals and their families.
  Culture is not as static as cross-cultural
  psychology implies (e.g., Hofstedes measures are
  more than 40 years old)
• 2) Universality vs Culture Specificity
• Not all Cultural Meanings can be arrayed on
  universal dimensions of variation the Treaty of
  Waitangi has symbolic meaning in New Zealand
  only, but without it, you cannot understand NZ
  intergroup relations. There is a cost to forcing
  agreement on the structure/meaning of measures
  across cultures

9
History as a Symbolic Reserve

• (1) History encompasses the accumulated wisdom
  and knowledge from our ancestors that can be
  applied to new situations. History provides
  traditions, values, and symbols that are vital to
  the functioning of societies.
• (2) It is appealing as a tool for political
  communications because it offers concrete events
  and people with emotional resonance whose
  relevance to the current situation is open to
  interpretation and public debate.
• (3) Representations of History contribute to
  aspects of National Political Culture like
  Nationalism and Willingness to fight for ones
  country

10
Most Important Events in World History according
to East Asian Samples (JCCP, 2005)
11
World History Survey

• Moving from open-ended nominations to
  closed-ended evaluations.
• An attempt to derive cross-cultural dimensions of
  historical evaluation
• Data collected from 30 societies
• Initial analyses focused on the rewards costs
  of forcing agreement (or structural equivalence)
  on survey items across cultures
• Developing a global language of historical
  symbols Importance and evaluation of 30
  prominent historical events across cultures

12
Costs and Benefits of Forcing Agreement on CC Data

• Previous cross-cultural research on dimensions of
  cultural variation (Hofstede, Schwartz, House,
  Leung Bond, etc.) investigated domains where
  universal meaning was presumed (e.g., values,
  orientations, social axioms).
• There is no reason to expect the meaning of
  historical events and figures to be shared across
  all cultures. So we need techniques of measuring
  rewards and costs of forcing structural
  equivalence on events and figures of world history

13
Item Selection

• Any event or figure nominated by more than 1
  society in either the 2005 or 2009 JCCP papers
  were included.
• Additional items included for theoretical
  purposes (e.g., 30 years war because it was the
  most important European event of the 1600s, but
  totally forgotten now, topical events like global
  warming and recent figures like Bill Gates to
  examine recency effects)
• Item pool was biased against Africa and Arabic
  societies because they were absent from previous
  research.

14
Evaluation of Most Imp Events in WH
15
Data Samples 30 societies, N5800
16
Multi-Dimensional-Scaling to detect Dimensions of
Meaning

• Non-metric MDS on Euclidean distances using
  standardized z-scores between the 40 events and
  figures separately (MDS between variables) across
  all countries using individual-level data. This
  procedure is useful to detect underlying
  dimensions of meaning.
• We conducted 31 MDS analyses, 1 for each society
  and 1 for the overall data from all societies
• Generalized Procrustes Analysis (GPA Borg
  Groenen, 1997 Commandeur, 1991), which is to MDS
  what Procrustean Target Rotation is for Factor
  Analysis it assesses agreement between
  configurations from different societies. GPA
  rotates the coordinates of all configurations in
  such a way that they maximally correspond to one
  another
• This is done simultaneously with all
  configurations (here 31). Very poor fit.

17
Initial 2 Dimensional Solution
18
Only First Dimension Stable

• Correlations between coordinates for individual
  societies and the overall solution were very high
  for the first (vertical) dim
• But the second (horizontal dimension) produced
  low correlation coefficients. The second
  dimension was uninterpretable.
• So we eliminated items that fit the overall
  solution poorly using the ratio between sum of
  squares fit per item divided by sum of squares
  total.
• Fit did not improve.
• So we aggregated countries into clusters, and
  used MDS and GPA on the clusters to achieve
  better fitting dimensional solutions

19
PosNeg by Modernization (Western)
20
PosNeg by Western Hegemony (non-Western1)
21
No Stable Cross-cultural Dimensions of Variation
in the Historical Evaluation of Events

• Only the first dimension, positive-negative is
  stable
• The second dimension, which comes close to
  Progress according to Western standards versus
  Resistance to Westernization, is unstable.
• The best we can do is come up with clusters of
  meaningful events.

22
A cross-culturally reliable historical events
scale Calamities
23
Less Agreement on Progress and Resistance to
Oppression
24
The tragedy of humanity at the outset of the 21st
century is that

• We know what we want freedom from. Universally,
  we know understand the historical meaning
  calamity.
• We do not know what we want freedom for. There
  is much less agreement about what constitutes
  historical progress.
• Human history is a story of great things coming
  out of great suffering, because it is often only
  in suffering that we are united.

25
Impact on Willingness to Fight, a critical aspect
of Political Culture
26
Country level Data Western countries dont want
to fight and see Calamities as horrific
27
Conclusion

• The Symbolic Landscape of Shared Meaning about
  World History is Limited.
• It is possible to force agreement, but crucial
  culture specific information is lost.
• There are significant differences between Western
  and non-Western representations, with certain
  items completely switching places in terms of
  nomological meaning Womens Emancipation,
  Terrorism, Colonization, etc
• But both Historical Calamities and Progress
  contribute independently to Willingness to Fight,
  and important aspect of Political Culture

28
Conclusion

• As the different peoples of the world rub
  shoulders within the political framework of the
  nation-state, the need to manage cultural
  diversity within and between states is becoming
  paramount. Social science knowledge that
  reflects both universals and culture specifics
  are needed.
• Future research on the meaning of WWII and World
  History using descriptive items rather than by
  association.
• A marriage between content and process provides
  an important avenue for the export of social
  psychological research to larger issues of
  globalization and the emergence of global
  consciousness vital to the 21st century.