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.

Appropriateness ratings of everyday behaviors in the United States now and 50 years ago.

Introduction: A crucial aspect of social norms pertains to determining which behaviors are considered appropriate. Here we consider everyday behaviors. Some everyday behaviors are rated as more appropriate than others, and ratings of the appropriateness of a given behavior may vary over time. The objective of this study is to elucidate the reasons behind variation in appropriateness ratings of everyday behaviors in the United States. Our theory focuses on how the evaluation of the appropriateness of a behavior is influenced by its potential for externalities and internalities, and how this influence may cause a change in norms over time. Method: Employing a preregistered design, we asked American participants to rate 37 different everyday behaviors based on their appropriateness in a range of common situations, as well as their potential negative externalities (e.g., being loud, being aggressive, taking up space) and positive internalities (e.g., pleasurability). Changes over time were calculated as the difference between mean ratings obtained in this study and ratings of the same behavior in a similar study conducted 50 years ago. Results: As expected, overall appropriateness ratings of everyday behaviors are associated both with their externalities and their internalities, so that the least appropriate behaviors tend to have considerable potential for negative externalities and little potential for positive internalities. Moreover, behaviors that have considerable potential for negative externalities are perceived as less appropriate now than 50 years ago. Discussion: By describing how social norms for everyday behaviors depend on the externalities and internalities of behaviors, this study contributes to theories about the emergence and change of social norms.

Cognitive ability and ideology join forces in the culture war: A model of opinion formation.

We propose a model of moral policy opinion formation that integrates both ideology and cognitive ability. The link from people's ideology to their opinions is assumed to go via a semantic processing of moral arguments that relies on the individual's cognitive ability. An implication of this model is that the relative quality of arguments that justify supporting vs. opposing a moral policy-the policy's "argument advantage"-is key to how opinions will be distributed in the population and develop over time. To test this implication, we combine polling data with measures of the argument advantage for 35 moral policies. Consistent with the opinion formation model, the argument advantage of a moral policy accounts for how public opinion moves over time, and how support for the policy ideologies varies across different ideological groups and levels of cognitive ability, including a strong interaction between ideology and cognitive ability.

Gender differences in competitiveness and fear of failure help explain why girls have lower life satisfaction than boys in gender equal countries.

Among 15-year-olds, boys tend to report higher life satisfaction than girls. Recent research has shown that this gender gap tends to be larger in more gender-egalitarian countries. We shed light on this apparent paradox by examining the mediating role of two psychological dispositions: competitiveness and fear of failure. Using data from the 2018 PISA study, we analyze the life satisfaction, competitiveness, and fear of failure of more than 400,000 15-year-old boys and girls in 63 countries with known levels of gender equality. We find that competitiveness and fear of failure together mediate more than 40 percent of the effects on life satisfaction of gender and its interaction with gender equality. Thus, interventions targeting competitiveness and fear of failure could potentially have an impact on the gender gap in life satisfaction among adolescents in gender equal countries.

Acculturation of hygiene norms among immigrants to Sweden.

Hygiene norms in Sweden are generally loose compared to most other countries. Does this looseness affect the hygiene norms among people who immigrate to Sweden from other countries? In a study of hygiene norms among immigrants to Sweden, the change in the physical environment and material living conditions, acculturation to Swedish culture and norms, and selection effects were all expected to lead immigrant hygiene norms to be closer to Swedish looseness. However, in a sample of 447 immigrants from 12 different countries, immigrants reported hygiene norms that were even stricter than those found in their countries of origin. We propose an explanation based on a combination of uncertainty about prevailing hygiene norms and the social risk and stigma associated with being perceived as unhygienic. We conclude that acculturation processes may rely on mechanisms that are domain specific.

The social values of newly arrived immigrants in Sweden.

Concerns have been raised that immigrants coming to Europe bring fundamentally different social values, affecting the more liberal receiving societies negatively. However, the topic of immigrants' social values is understudied, and much research studies only one issue at a time, lacking a systematic approach to compare immigrants and native-born across issues. We study the social values of immigrants in Sweden using a large sample of newly arrived immigrants and their opinions on 35 different moral issues. Our results indicate a large heterogeneity across different issues, with, on average, a general tendency towards liberal social values among immigrants. We find that individual characteristics are more important than characteristics of the country of origin in explaining variation of social values between immigrants. Religiosity has the largest effect, with more religious individuals having more conservative stances. Using external data sources, we compare immigrants with native-born regarding both average positions on different issues, and the correlation between issue positions. Compared with the native-born, immigrants have, on average, somewhat more conservative values, but the underlying values structure is the same.

How does political discussion frequency impact political moral opinions? The moral argument theory of opinion dynamics.

Discussions of political issues may influence people's opinions. Is there any systematic difference in opinions between those who discuss frequently and those who do not? We measured the association between self-reported discussion frequency and the probability of holding the more liberal opinion on moral issues, using data from the General Social Survey (81 issues, n = 4,395) and the American National Election Studies (27 issues, n = 17,653). This association looked different among liberals and among conservatives. Having more frequent discussions is associated with a higher probability of holding more liberal opinions among liberals, while there is little association between discussion frequency and opinions among conservatives. These findings can be explained by the moral argument theory, which is an account of the long-term liberalization of public opinion on moral issues as an outcome of repeated discussions. The key assumption of this theory is that opinions that are justified by the kinds of arguments that only conservatives accept have a disadvantage compared to opinions that are justified by the kinds of arguments that everyone accepts. Consistent with this theory, we find that the effect of discussion frequency is stronger for moral opinions that have a bigger argument advantage.

The Liberal Social Values of Swedish Healthcare Providers in Women's Healthcare: Implications for Clinical Encounters in a Diversified Sexual and Reproductive Healthcare.

Objectives: Women's healthcare is a potential source of cross-cultural conflicts. Diverging values between healthcare providers and patients challenges the provision of culturally sensitive care and meeting migrant women's needs. The aim is to investigate healthcare providers' values in relation to sexual and reproductive rights, gender equality, migration and religion in Swedish sexual and reproductive healthcare. Methods: A national cross-sectional study was carried out. The questionnaire was distributed through a non-probability sample to midwives or other nurses, gynaecologists and obstetricians, and hospital social workers (n = 1,041). Through descriptive statistics, we mapped their values, comparing healthcare provider data to external representative population survey data. Results: Healthcare providers in sexual and reproductive healthcare displayed homogeneous liberal social values, being permissive towards sexual and reproductive rights and restrictive against gender-based violence. They were for gender equality, expressed low anti-immigrant sentiments, and had even more liberal values than the Swedish population and a demographically comparative sub-population. Conclusion: Individuals with very liberal values are selected to work in Swedish sexual and reproductive healthcare. Healthcare providers need self-reflexivity to avoid conflicts in clinical encounters in a diversified society.

Predicting how US public opinion on moral issues will change from 2018 to 2020 and beyond.

The General Social Survey, conducted every 2 years, measures public opinion on a wide range of moral issues. The data from the 2020 survey are expected to be released in mid-October 2021. In advance of this data release, we make predictions for how public opinion will have shifted since 2018. We also predict further public opinion shifts for the coming decade up until the year 2030. These predictions are based on the theory that an opinion will become more popular over time if it holds an argument advantage, that is, if it is better justified by generally accepted kinds of arguments than the opposite opinion is. While this theory has successfully accounted for historical opinion trends, this is the first time it is used to predict future shifts. To assess the accuracy of our forecast we will compare it with the benchmark forecast that predicts the same public opinion in 2020 as in 2018.

Global sex differences in hygiene norms and their relation to sex equality.

Strict norms about hygiene may sometimes have health benefits but may also be a burden. Based on research in the United States, it has been suggested that women traditionally shoulder responsibility for hygiene standards and therefore tend to have stricter views on hygiene. However, there is little systematic research on sex differences in hygiene norms at the global scale. We set up two hypotheses: (1) Stricter hygiene norms among women than among men is a global phenomenon. (2) The size of this sex difference varies across nations with the level of sex equality. We examine these hypotheses using data from a recent international survey (N = 17,632). Participants in 56 countries were asked for their views of where it is not appropriate for people to spit and in which situations people should wash their hands. As a measure of sex equality, we use an existing country-level measure of attitudes to equality between the sexes, available for 49 nations in the study. Stricter hygiene norms among women than among men are observed almost everywhere, but there are a few exceptions (most notably Nigeria and Saudi Arabia). The size of the sex difference in hygiene norms varies strongly with the level of sex equality, but in a non-linear way. The sex difference is most pronounced in moderately egalitarian countries with the highest recorded difference being in Chile. In more egalitarian parts of the world, more sex equality is associated with a smaller sex difference in hygiene norms. In the less egalitarian parts of the world, the opposite relation holds. We offer an interpretation in terms of what different levels of sex equality mean for the content of sex roles.

The Advent of the COVID-19 Epidemic Did Not Affect Americans' Endorsement of Moral Foundations.

Prior work has suggested that existential threats in the form of terror attacks may shift liberals' reliance on moral foundations to more resemble those of conservatives. We therefore hypothesized that endorsement of these moral foundations would have increased when the COVID-19 epidemic became a salient threat. To examine this hypothesis we conducted a longitudinal study with 237 American participants across the liberal-conservative spectrum, in which their endorsement of various moral foundations were measured before and after the advent of the pandemic. We did not find evidence of any systematic change in the endorsement of any moral foundation, neither in general nor specifically among liberals or specifically among those who perceived the greatest threat from COVID-19. We conclude that the threat from the pandemic does not seem to have had any substantial effect on the moral foundations that people rely on. We discuss how this finding relates to other longitudinal studies of the effect of the COVID-19 pandemic on measures related to conservatism.

Different Populations Agree on Which Moral Arguments Underlie Which Opinions.

People often justify their moral opinions by referring to larger moral concerns (e. g., "It is unfair if homosexuals are not allowed to marry!" vs. "Letting homosexuals marry is against our traditions!"). Is there a general agreement about what concerns apply to different moral opinions? We used surveys in the United States and the United Kingdom to measure the perceived applicability of eight concerns (harm, violence, fairness, liberty, authority, ingroup, purity, and governmental overreach) to a wide range of moral opinions. Within countries, argument applicability scores were largely similar whether they were calculated among women or men, among young or old, among liberals or conservatives, or among people with or without higher education. Thus, the applicability of a given moral concern to a specific opinion can be viewed as an objective quality of the opinion, largely independent of the population in which it is measured. Finally, we used similar surveys in Israel and Brazil to establish that this independence of populations also extended to populations in different countries. However, the extent to which this holds across cultures beyond those included in the current study is still an open question.

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.

Generosity pays: Selfish people have fewer children and earn less money.

Does selfishness pay in the long term? Previous research has indicated that being prosocial (or otherish) rather than selfish has positive consequences for psychological well-being, physical health, and relationships. Here we instead examine the consequences for individuals' incomes and number of children, as these are the currencies that matter most in theories that emphasize the power of self-interest, namely economics and evolutionary thinking. Drawing on both cross-sectional (Studies 1 and 2) and panel data (Studies 3 and 4), we find that prosocial individuals tend to have more children and higher income than selfish individuals. An additional survey (Study 5) of lay beliefs about how self-interest impacts income and fertility suggests one reason selfish people may persist in their behavior even though it leads to poorer outcomes: people generally expect selfish individuals to have higher incomes. Our findings have implications for lay decisions about the allocation of scarce resources, as well as for economic and evolutionary theories of human behavior. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2020 APA, all rights reserved).

The connection between moral positions and moral arguments drives opinion change.

Liberals and conservatives often take opposing positions on moral issues. But what makes a moral position liberal or conservative? Why does public opinion tend to become more liberal over time? And why does public opinion change especially fast on certain issues, such as gay rights? We offer an explanation based on how different positions connect with different kinds of moral arguments. Based on a formal model of opinion dynamics, we predicted that positions better connected to harm and fairness arguments will be more popular among liberals and will become more popular over time among liberals and conservatives. Finally, the speed of this trend will be faster the better the position connects to harm and fairness arguments. These predictions all held with high accuracy in 44 years of polling on moral opinions. The model explains the connection between ideology and moral opinions, and generates precise predictions for future opinion change.

Social learning may lead to population level conformity without individual level frequency bias.

A requirement of culture, whether animal or human, is some degree of conformity of behavior within populations. Researchers of gene-culture coevolution have suggested that population level conformity may result from frequency-biased social learning: individuals sampling multiple role models and preferentially adopting the majority behavior in the sample. When learning from a single role model, frequency-bias is not possible. We show why a population-level trend, either conformist or anticonformist, may nonetheless be almost inevitable in a population of individuals that learn through social enhancement, that is, using observations of others' behavior to update their own probability of using a behavior in the future. The exact specification of individuals' updating rule determines the direction of the trend. These results offer a new interpretation of previous findings from simulations of social enhancement in combination with reinforcement learning, and demonstrate how results of dynamical models may strongly depend on seemingly innocuous choices of model specifications, and how important it is to obtain empirical data on which to base such choices.

The Origins and Maintenance of Female Genital Modification across Africa : Bayesian Phylogenetic Modeling of Cultural Evolution under the Influence of Selection.

We present formal evolutionary models for the origins and persistence of the practice of Female Genital Modification (FGMo). We then test the implications of these models using normative cross-cultural data on FGMo in Africa and Bayesian phylogenetic methods that explicitly model adaptive evolution. Empirical evidence provides some support for the findings of our evolutionary models that the de novo origins of the FGMo practice should be associated with social stratification, and that social stratification should place selective pressures on the adoption of FGMo; these results, however, are tempered by the finding that FGMo has arisen in many cultures that have no social stratification, and that forces operating orthogonally to stratification appear to play a more important role in the cross-cultural distribution of FGMo. To explain these cases, one must consider cultural evolutionary explanations in conjunction with behavioral ecological ones. We conclude with a discussion of the implications of our study for policies designed to end the practice of FGMo.

How feedback biases give ineffective medical treatments a good reputation.

BACKGROUND: Medical treatments with no direct effect (like homeopathy) or that cause harm (like bloodletting) are common across cultures and throughout history. How do such treatments spread and persist? Most medical treatments result in a range of outcomes: some people improve while others deteriorate. If the people who improve are more inclined to tell others about their experiences than the people who deteriorate, ineffective or even harmful treatments can maintain a good reputation. OBJECTIVE: The intent of this study was to test the hypothesis that positive outcomes are overrepresented in online medical product reviews, to examine if this reputational distortion is large enough to bias people's decisions, and to explore the implications of this bias for the cultural evolution of medical treatments. METHODS: We compared outcomes of weight loss treatments and fertility treatments in clinical trials to outcomes reported in 1901 reviews on Amazon. Then, in a series of experiments, we evaluated people's choice of weight loss diet after reading different reviews. Finally, a mathematical model was used to examine if this bias could result in less effective treatments having a better reputation than more effective treatments. RESULTS: Data are consistent with the hypothesis that people with better outcomes are more inclined to write reviews. After 6 months on the diet, 93% (64/69) of online reviewers reported a weight loss of 10 kg or more while just 27% (19/71) of clinical trial participants experienced this level of weight change. A similar positive distortion was found in fertility treatment reviews. In a series of experiments, we show that people are more inclined to begin a diet with many positive reviews, than a diet with reviews that are representative of the diet's true effect. A mathematical model of medical cultural evolution shows that the size of the positive distortion critically depends on the shape of the outcome distribution. CONCLUSIONS: Online reviews overestimate the benefits of medical treatments, probably because people with negative outcomes are less inclined to tell others about their experiences. This bias can enable ineffective medical treatments to maintain a good reputation.

The hard problem of cooperation.

Based on individual variation in cooperative inclinations, we define the "hard problem of cooperation" as that of achieving high levels of cooperation in a group of non-cooperative types. Can the hard problem be solved by institutions with monitoring and sanctions? In a laboratory experiment we find that the answer is affirmative if the institution is imposed on the group but negative if development of the institution is left to the group to vote on. In the experiment, participants were divided into groups of either cooperative types or non-cooperative types depending on their behavior in a public goods game. In these homogeneous groups they repeatedly played a public goods game regulated by an institution that incorporated several of the key properties identified by Ostrom: operational rules, monitoring, rewards, punishments, and (in one condition) change of rules. When change of rules was not possible and punishments were set to be high, groups of both types generally abided by operational rules demanding high contributions to the common good, and thereby achieved high levels of payoffs. Under less severe rules, both types of groups did worse but non-cooperative types did worst. Thus, non-cooperative groups profited the most from being governed by an institution demanding high contributions and employing high punishments. Nevertheless, in a condition where change of rules through voting was made possible, development of the institution in this direction was more often voted down in groups of non-cooperative types. We discuss the relevance of the hard problem and fit our results into a bigger picture of institutional and individual determinants of cooperative behavior.