Anger and disgust shape judgments of social sanctions across cultures, especially in high individual autonomy societies.

When someone violates a social norm, others may think that some sanction would be appropriate. We examine how the experience of emotions like anger and disgust relate to the judged appropriateness of sanctions, in a pre-registered analysis of data from a large-scale study in 56 societies. Across the world, we find that individuals who experience anger and disgust over a norm violation are more likely to endorse confrontation, ostracism and, to a smaller extent, gossip. Moreover, we find that the experience of anger is consistently the strongest predictor of judgments of confrontation, compared to other emotions. Although the link between state-based emotions and judgments may seem universal, its strength varies across countries. Aligned with theoretical predictions, this link is stronger in societies, and among individuals, that place higher value on individual autonomy. Thus, autonomy values may increase the role that emotions play in guiding judgments of social sanctions.

Perceptions of the appropriate response to norm violation in 57 societies.

Norm enforcement may be important for resolving conflicts and promoting cooperation. However, little is known about how preferred responses to norm violations vary across cultures and across domains. In a preregistered study of 57 countries (using convenience samples of 22,863 students and non-students), we measured perceptions of the appropriateness of various responses to a violation of a cooperative norm and to atypical social behaviors. Our findings highlight both cultural universals and cultural variation. We find a universal negative relation between appropriateness ratings of norm violations and appropriateness ratings of responses in the form of confrontation, social ostracism and gossip. Moreover, we find the country variation in the appropriateness of sanctions to be consistent across different norm violations but not across different sanctions. Specifically, in those countries where use of physical confrontation and social ostracism is rated as less appropriate, gossip is rated as more appropriate.

The Relation Between Gender Egalitarian Values and Gender Differences in Academic Achievement.

Gender differences in achievement exhibit variation between domains and between countries. Much prior research has examined whether this variation could be due to variation in gender equality in opportunities, with mixed results. Here we focus instead on the role of a society's values about gender equality, which may have a more pervasive influence. We pooled all available country measures on adolescent boys' and girls' academic achievement between 2000 and 2015 from the Program for International Student Assessment (PISA) and Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study (TIMSS) assessments of math, science, and reading. We then analyzed the relation between gender differences and country levels of gender egalitarian values, controlling for country levels of living standards and indicators of gender equality in opportunities. Gender egalitarian values came out as the most important predictor. Specifically, more gender egalitarian values were associated with improved performance of boys relative to girls in the same countries. This pattern held in reading, where boys globally perform substantially worse than girls, as well as in math and science where gender differences in performance are small and may favor either boys or girls. Our findings suggest a previously underappreciated role of cultural values in moderating gender gaps in academic achievement.

Learned fear to social out-group members are determined by ethnicity and prior exposure.

Humans, like other animals, have a tendency to preferentially learn and retain some associations more readily than others. In humans, preferential learning was originally demonstrated for certain evolutionary prepared stimuli, such as snakes and angry faces and later extended to human social out-groups based on race (Olsson et al., 2005). To address the generality of this social learning bias, we examined if this learning bias extended to two separate classes of social out-groups represented by neutral Black and Middle-Eastern faces in 38 White (Swedish) participants. We found that other-ethnicity alone was not sufficient to induce an out-group learning bias; it was observed for Black, but not Middle-Eastern, out-group faces. Moreover, an exploratory analysis showed that growing up in an ethnically diverse environment was inversely related to the learning bias toward Middle-Eastern, but not Black, out-groups faces, suggesting that learned fears toward Middle-Eastern faces might be more permeable to environmental factors. Future research should address how both the quantity and quality of inter-group contact modulate out-group learning.