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
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 people’s needs best.
• Concurrently, cross-cultural psychology hit the big time in
the USA with the Markus & Kitayama’s (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?
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 Man’s burden” or Social
Darwinism would have reason to question to what
extent the claim of universality is description
versus prescription.
Cultural Specificity and the
Dimensions of Cultural Variation
• Markus and Kitayama (1991) reduced one the
dimensions of cultural variation identified by crosscultural psychologist Geert Hofstede (1980) in
Culture’s Consequences to a dichotomy that could
be used as an independent variable in laboratory
experiments: IND-COL -> 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.
CULTURAL DIMENSIONS: PROTOTYPICAL STRUCTURE
HARMONY
Unity With Nature
World at Peace
EMBEDDEDNESS
Social Order, Obedience
Respect for Tradition
EGALITARIANISM
Social Justice
Equality
HIERARCHY
Authority
Humble
INTELLECTUAL
AUTONOMY
Broadmindedness
Curiosity
MASTERY
AFFECTIVE
AUTONOMY
Pleasure
Exciting Life
Ambition
Daring
COMPARATIVE CULTURAL PROFILE OF 60 NATIONAL GROUPS IN 1990s (based on teachers)
HARMONY
EMBEDDEDNESS
ITA*
* SLOVN
*CHIL
*CYP
EST*
CZE*
SLOVK*
BOL*
EGALITARIANISM
NOR*
F IN*
ETH*
POL*
RUS*
SPA*
* FRA
* SWE
DEN * *WGER
*AUST
BULTK*
*TUR *GEOR
POR*
VEN*
HUN*
* BRAZ
AUSL*
*ARG
MEX*
* S ING
* PH I
* INDO
MAC*
BUL*
* TA IW
*NEP
GHA*
*MALAY *THAI
INTELLECTUAL
NETH*
AUTONOMY *SWIFr *EGER
* CAN
* IRE
*NWZ
ENG*
HKG*
*UGA
USA*
* JAP
I SRJEW*
*I SRARAB
*NAM
GRE*
* N IG
*Z IM
*I ND IA
HIERARCHY
AFFECTIVE
AUTONOMY
MASTERY
*CHI
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
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.,
Hofstede’s 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
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 one’s country
Most Important Events in World History
according to East Asian Samples (JCCP, 2005)
Rank
Japan
(N=75)
Pct
Taiwan
(N=646)
Hong Kong
(N=119)
Pct
1
WWII
52%
WW II
69%
WWII
81%
2
WW I
29%
WW I
60%
WW I
52%
3
French Revolution
23%
Man on the Moon
25%
Tien An Men
45%
4
Industrial Rev
17%
Industrial Rev
23%
Sino-Japanese War
39%
5
Vietnam War
17%
American Indep
22%
USSR Breakup
23%
6
Cold War
12%
Discov. of Americas
20%
Cultural Revolution
19%
7
Crusades
11%
USSR Breakup
15%
German Reunification
16%
8
Atomic Bombing
9%
Crusades
15%
Gulf War
15%
9
Discov. of Americas
9%
Renaissance
14%
American Indep
14%
10
Korean War
American Indep
7%
7%
French Revolution
10%
French Revolution
14%
Rank
Singapore
(N=196)
Pct
Philippines
(N=272)
Pct
Malaysia
(N=145)
Pct
1
WWII
94%
WWII
68%
WWII
60%
2
WW I
84%
WW I
54%
WW I
60%
3
Gulf War
32%
Gulf War
23%
Industrial Rev
28%
4
Cold War
24%
French Rev
16%
Rise of Islam
23%
5
Great Depression
22%
Industrial Rev
15%
Atomic Bombing
17%
6
Industrial Rev
19%
Nazism
15%
Chinese history
14%
7
Vietnam War
11%
Renaissance
15%
Islam v.Christian Wars
13%
8
USSR Breakup
10%
People Power (EDSA)
14%
Opium War
12%
9
Rise of Communism
10%
Atomic Bombing
13%
Renaissance
12%
10
French Revolution
9%
Man on the Moon
11%
Japanese colonialism
11%
German Reunification
9%
World History Survey
• Moving from open-ended nominations to closedended 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
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
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.
Evaluation of Most Imp Events in WH
Data Samples: 30 societies, N=5800
Country
N
Australia
Austria
Belgium
Brasil
Bulgaria
Canada
China
Colombia
Fiji
Germany
Hong Kong
Hungary
India
Indonesia
Italy
Japan
Korea
Malaysia
Mexico
Netherlands
New Zealand
Norway
Philippines
Portugal
Russia
Singapore
Switzerland
Taiwan
Tunisia
USA
183
195
141
212
239
196
186
159
196
151
152
185
202
199
142
113
224
198
198
201
161
181
330
198
214
220
145
291
135
253
Σ = 5800
Gender
Female
138
113
115
156
202
133
103
78
102
78
98
119
100
93
78
60
123
159
100
163
-118
218
135
101
162
107
140
109
145
Age
Male
45
82
24
56
36
62
83
81
94
73
51
65
102
106
64
53
101
39
98
38
-62
112
63
113
58
37
151
24
108
27,26 (12,10)
25,06 (4,62)
20,53 (4,409
24,11 (7,51)
19,4 (1,1)
19,55 (4,61)
19,76 (1,17)
21,26 (2,86)
22,19 (3,00)
23,92 (3,31)
-21,36 (2,21)
21,24 (2,83)
20,68 (2,38)
24,22 (7,75)
21,06 (1,52)
20,98 (2,37)
23,64 (4,37)
20,19 (2,04)
19,74 (2,91)
-22,43 (3,54)
18,96 (1,65)
19,87 (2,67)
20,97 (3,61)
20,89 (1,45)
21,41 (3,44)
20,66 (1,84)
22,61 (5,18)
19,67 (1,22)
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.
Initial 2 Dimensional Solution
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
PosNeg by Modernization (Western)
0.25
IsraelE
AtomE
WarmE
WW1E
westrot1
TerrorE
0.00
TsunE
WW2E
IraqWarE
HolocE
VietNmE
ColdE
DeprE
CrusadesE
ColonE
IslamE
MoonE
EUE
IndRevE
AmIndyE
WomenE UNE
RenaisE
AncCivE CreatEvE
CultRevE
PrintE
AbolSlavE
FrRevE
-0.25
-0.25
0.00
westrot2
0.25
PosNeg by Western Hegemony (nonWestern1)
0.25
HolocE
TerrorE
IraqWarE
VietNmE
AtomE
ColdE
WW1E
DeprE
nonwestrot1
TsunE
IsraelE
WarmE
WW2E
CrusadesE
0.00
CultRevE
ColonE
IslamE
FrRevE
AmIndyE
IndRevE
CreatEvE
WomenE
EUE
MoonE
RenaisE
AncCivE
UNE
AbolSlavE
PrintE
-0.25
-0.20
0.00
nonwestrot2
0.20
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.
A cross-culturally reliable historical
events scale: Calamities
Table 5 Overall Factor Loadings, Cronbach’s alpha, mean inter-item correlation,
and Tucker’s Phi for “Historical Calamities”, “Historical Progress”, and”
Historical Resistance to Oppression”
Factor 1
Factor 2
Factor 3
Event
“Historical Calamities” (αoverall = .85; αwestern = .82, αnon-western1 = .82; αnon-western2
= .84 overall mean inter-item correlation= .32; Tucker’s Phi = 1.00, 1.00, .99)
World War I
0.01
0.06
0.74
World War II
0.04
0.04
0.73
Atomic Bombings
0.01
-0.05
0.62
Vietnam War
0.00
-0.04
0.58
Terrorism (terror bombings)
-0.21
-0.04
0.57
Cold War
-0.02
0.13
0.56
Israeli-Palestinian Conflict
-0.03
-0.14
0.56
Iraq War (2005)
0.05
-0.09
0.55
Asian Tsunami (2004)
-0.19
-0.07
0.55
Global Warming
-0.03
-0.16
0.53
Holocaust
0.02
-0.21
0.51
Great Depression (1930s)
-0.14
0.10
0.46
Less Agreement on Progress and
Resistance to Oppression
“Historical Progress” (αoverall = .65; αwestern = .65, αnon-western1 = .65; αnon-western2 =
.65; overall mean inter-item correlation=,.24; Tucker’s Phi = .99, .98, .96)
Digital Age (Computers, Internet)
0.03
-0.07
0.71
Man on the Moon / Space Travel
-0.06
0.05
0.64
Creation/Evolution of Humanity
-0.07
0.19
0.54
Industrial Revolution
0.03
0.31
0.53
Rise of European Union
-0.03
0.18
0.53
Foundation of United Nations
-0.13
0.21
0.44
“Historical Resistance to Oppression” (αoverall = .59; αwestern = .50, αnon-western1 =
.56; αnon-western2 = .57; overall mean inter-item correlation= .19;Tucker’s Phi =
.99, .97, .96)
American Civil War
0.28
-0.07
0.55
American (war of) Independence
0.06
0.22
0.54
th
Abolition of Slavery (19 c)
-0.20
0.05
0.51
th
Renaissance (15 c)
-0.10
0.19
0.51
Fall of Berlin Wall/End of USSR
-0.05
0.21
0.50
Decolonization
-0.15
0.12
0.50
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.
Impact on Willingness to Fight, a
critical aspect of Political Culture
Table 6. Coefficients for the fixed and random components of nested multilevel
models assessing the effects of historical evaluations on willingness to fight for one’s
country across cultures.
Fixed part
Random part
γ
se
t
u
χ2
Step 1
Intercept
WWII
September 11th
4.10
.08
-.03
.16
.03
.02
25.13*
2.83*
-1.43
.78
.01
.01
1467.32*
89.37*
40.33
Step 2
Intercept
WWII
September 11th
Historical Calamities
Historical Resistance
Historical Progress
4.14
-.01
-.04
.27
.01
.21
.16
.03
.03
.11
.04
.04
25.68*
-.22
-1.49
2.56*
.36
4.96*
.76
.01
728.05*
48.52*
50.53*
131.39*
44.30
62.88*
.21
.01
.04
Country level Data: Western countries don’t
want to fight and see Calamities as horrific
2,75
Malaysia
Hong Kong
Fiji
China
India
South Korea
Taiwan
2,50
Mexico
Tunisia
Philippines
Historical Calamities
Russia
Colombia
Singapore
Japan
2,25
Indonesia
Canada
Brasil
Portugal
USA
2,00
Australia
New Zealand
Norway
Netherlands
Austria
1,75
Switzerland
2,00
Belgium
Germany
Bulgaria
Italy
Hungary
4,00
Willingness to Fight
6,00
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: Women’s Emancipation,
Terrorism, Colonization, etc
• But both Historical Calamities and Progress
contribute independently to Willingness to Fight,
and important aspect of Political Culture
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.