Greater traditionalism predicts COVID-19 precautionary behaviors across 27 societies.

People vary both in their embrace of their society's traditions, and in their perception of hazards as salient and necessitating a response. Over evolutionary time, traditions have offered avenues for addressing hazards, plausibly resulting in linkages between orientations toward tradition and orientations toward danger. Emerging research documents connections between traditionalism and threat responsivity, including pathogen-avoidance motivations. Additionally, because hazard-mitigating behaviors can conflict with competing priorities, associations between traditionalism and pathogen avoidance may hinge on contextually contingent tradeoffs. The COVID-19 pandemic provides a real-world test of the posited relationship between traditionalism and hazard avoidance. Across 27 societies (N = 7844), we find that, in a majority of countries, individuals' endorsement of tradition positively correlates with their adherence to costly COVID-19-avoidance behaviors; accounting for some of the conflicts that arise between public health precautions and other objectives further strengthens this evidence that traditionalism is associated with greater attention to hazards.

Majnun or Mental Disorders: Between Cultural Traditions and Western Psychology in Jordan.

Mental disorders or altered psychological states are prevalent in all populations, regardless of race or ethnic origin, while at the same time, culture also shapes the conceptions of mental disorders. Religion is deeply rooted in the daily life of the Muslim-majority countries, while Arab countries are affected by an ongoing modernization. Thus, how does the traditional religious conception of mental disorders interact with Western psychological conceptions in contemporary Arab-Muslim society? This study explores the conceptions of mental disorders and their causes among Muslims in contemporary Jordan. By employing cognitive anthropological method (free listing), forty participants were asked to provide three lists of (a) typical names of mental disorders, (b) causes of mental disorders and (c) determining features of mental disorders. Collected qualitative data have been quantitatively analysed and interpreted in the context of relevant ethnographic and interview data. While Western terms of mental disorders are well known among young and educated Jordanians, the study demonstrates that Jordanians employ cultural and religious notions alongside. This co-existence of different conceptions confirms an importance of Islamic notion in the modern rendering of mental health. As a result, despite rapid modernization, mental health is still highly stigmatized.

The Einstein effect provides global evidence for scientific source credibility effects and the influence of religiosity.

People tend to evaluate information from reliable sources more favourably, but it is unclear exactly how perceivers' worldviews interact with this source credibility effect. In a large and diverse cross-cultural sample (N = 10,195 from 24 countries), we presented participants with obscure, meaningless statements attributed to either a spiritual guru or a scientist. We found a robust global source credibility effect for scientific authorities, which we dub 'the Einstein effect': across all 24 countries and all levels of religiosity, scientists held greater authority than spiritual gurus. In addition, individual religiosity predicted a weaker relative preference for the statement from the scientist compared with the spiritual guru, and was more strongly associated with credibility judgements for the guru than the scientist. Independent data on explicit trust ratings across 143 countries mirrored our experimental findings. These findings suggest that irrespective of one's religious worldview, across cultures science is a powerful and universal heuristic that signals the reliability of information.

The weirdness of belief in free will.

It has been argued that belief in free will is socially consequential and psychologically universal. In this paper we look at the folk concept of free will and its critical assessment in the context of recent psychological research. Is there a widespread consensus about the conceptual content of free will? We compared English "free will" with its lexical equivalents in Lithuanian, Hindi, Chinese and Mongolian languages and found that unlike Lithuanian, Chinese, Hindi and Mongolian lexical expressions of "free will" do not refer to the same concept free will. What kind people have been studied so far? A review of papers indicate that, overall, 91% of participants in studies on belief in free will were WEIRD. Thus, given that free will has no cross-culturally universal conceptual content and that most of the reviewed studies were based on WEIRD samples, belief in free will is not a psychological universal.

For Whom Does Determinism Undermine Moral Responsibility? Surveying the Conditions for Free Will Across Cultures.

Philosophers have long debated whether, if determinism is true, we should hold people morally responsible for their actions since in a deterministic universe, people are arguably not the ultimate source of their actions nor could they have done otherwise if initial conditions and the laws of nature are held fixed. To reveal how non-philosophers ordinarily reason about the conditions for free will, we conducted a cross-cultural and cross-linguistic survey (N = 5,268) spanning twenty countries and sixteen languages. Overall, participants tended to ascribe moral responsibility whether the perpetrator lacked sourcehood or alternate possibilities. However, for American, European, and Middle Eastern participants, being the ultimate source of one's actions promoted perceptions of free will and control as well as ascriptions of blame and punishment. By contrast, being the source of one's actions was not particularly salient to Asian participants. Finally, across cultures, participants exhibiting greater cognitive reflection were more likely to view free will as incompatible with causal determinism. We discuss these findings in light of documented cultural differences in the tendency toward dispositional versus situational attributions.