How much cultural variation around the globe is explained by ecology?

How much cultural variation is explained by the physical and social ecologies people inhabit? Here, we provide an answer using nine ecological variables and 66 cultural variables (including personality traits, values and norms) drawn from the EcoCultural Dataset. We generate a range of estimates by using different statistical metrics (e.g. current levels, average levels across time, unpredictability across time) of each of the ecological variables. Our results suggest that, on average, ecology explains a substantial amount of human cultural variation above and beyond spatial and cultural autocorrelation. The amount of variation explained depended on the metrics used, with current levels and average levels of ecological conditions explaining the greatest amounts of variance in human culture on average (16% and 20%, respectively).

The Ecology-Culture Dataset: A new resource for investigating cultural variation.

Scholars interested in cultural diversity have long suggested that similarities and differences across human populations might be understood, at least in part, as stemming from differences in the social and physical ecologies individuals inhabit. Here, we describe the EcoCultural Dataset (ECD), the most comprehensive compilation to date of country-level ecological and cultural variables around the globe. ECD covers 220 countries, 9 ecological variables operationalized by 11 statistical metrics (including measures of variability and predictability), and 72 cultural variables (including values, personality traits, fundamental social motives, subjective well-being, tightness-looseness, indices of corruption, social capital, and gender inequality). This rich dataset can be used to identify novel relationships between ecological and cultural variables, to assess the overall relationship between ecology and culture, to explore the consequences of interactions between different ecological variables, and to construct new indices of cultural distance.

Changing cultures, changing brains: A framework for integrating cultural neuroscience and cultural change research.

Cultural neuroscience research has provided substantial evidence that culture shapes the brain by providing systematically different sets of experiences. However, cultures are ever-changing in response to the physical and social environment. In the present paper, we integrate theories and methods from cultural neuroscience with the emerging body of research on cultural change and suggest several ways in which the two fields can inform each other. First, we propose that the cultural change perspective helps us reexamine what is meant by culturally typical experiences, which are shaped by the dynamic interaction between cultural norms, values, meanings, and other environmental constraints on behavior. It also allows us to make predictions about the variability/stability of cultural neural differences over time. Then, we discuss how methods used in cultural change research may be applied to cultural neuroscience research and vice versa. We end with a "blue sky vision" for a neuroscience of cultural change.

Culture, ecology, and grounded procedures.

We propose that grounded procedures may help explain psychological variations across cultures. Here we offer a set of novel predictions based on the interplay between the social and physical ecology, chronic sensorimotor experience, and cultural norms.

Variations in the regulation of affective neural responses across three cultures.

In the present research, we assessed the effects of culture on the ability to regulate affective neural responses. Using an event-related potential design focusing on the centroparietal late positive potential (LPP), we found that cultural groups differed in their ability to intentionally regulate these responses. As a group, European Americans demonstrated successful up-regulation of the LPP in response to positive and negative valence images, as did participants from Mexican cultural backgrounds who also showed successful down-regulation of the LPP in response to positive valence images. As a group, participants from Chinese cultural backgrounds did not show evidence of successful up- or down-regulation of LPP responses. This work confirms and extends preliminary findings of cultural variation in emotion regulation abilities. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2021 APA, all rights reserved).

Family Matters: Rethinking the Psychology of Human Social Motivation.

What motives do people prioritize in their social lives? Historically, social psychologists, especially those adopting an evolutionary perspective, have devoted a great deal of research attention to sexual attraction and romantic-partner choice (mate seeking). Research on long-term familial bonds (mate retention and kin care) has been less thoroughly connected to relevant comparative and evolutionary work on other species, and in the case of kin care, these bonds have been less well researched. Examining varied sources of data from 27 societies around the world, we found that people generally view familial motives as primary in importance and mate-seeking motives as relatively low in importance. Compared with other groups, college students, single people, and men place relatively higher emphasis on mate seeking, but even those samples rated kin-care motives as more important. Furthermore, motives linked to long-term familial bonds are positively associated with psychological well-being, but mate-seeking motives are associated with anxiety and depression. We address theoretical and empirical reasons why there has been extensive research on mate seeking and why people prioritize goals related to long-term familial bonds over mating goals. Reallocating relatively greater research effort toward long-term familial relationships would likely yield many interesting new findings relevant to everyday people's highest social priorities.

How Will We React to the Discovery of Extraterrestrial Life?

How will humanity react to the discovery of extraterrestrial life? Speculation on this topic abounds, but empirical research is practically non-existent. We report the results of three empirical studies assessing psychological reactions to the discovery of extraterrestrial life using the Linguistic Inquiry and Word Count (LIWC) text analysis software. We examined language use in media coverage of past discovery announcements of this nature, with a focus on extraterrestrial microbial life (Pilot Study). A large online sample (N = 501) was asked to write about their own and humanity's reaction to a hypothetical announcement of such a discovery (Study 1), and an independent, large online sample (N = 256) was asked to read and respond to a newspaper story about the claim that fossilized extraterrestrial microbial life had been found in a meteorite of Martian origin (Study 2). Across these studies, we found that reactions were significantly more positive than negative, and more reward vs. risk oriented. A mini-meta-analysis revealed large overall effect sizes (positive vs. negative affect language: g = 0.98; reward vs. risk language: g = 0.81). We also found that people's forecasts of their own reactions showed a greater positivity bias than their forecasts of humanity's reactions (Study 1), and that responses to reading an actual announcement of the discovery of extraterrestrial microbial life showed a greater positivity bias than responses to reading an actual announcement of the creation of man-made synthetic life (Study 2). Taken together, this work suggests that our reactions to a future confirmed discovery of microbial extraterrestrial life are likely to be fairly positive.