People’s control over their sexual lives and choices is in turn shaped by gender-related values and norms defining masculinity and femininity. These culturally-defined gender values and norms evolve through a process of socialization starting from an early stage of infancy. They determine and reinforce themselves through traditional practices such as wife sharing, widowhood related rituals, ear...

Gender norms—or social expectations for appropriate behaviors, rights, and responsibilities of men as compared to women—are integral to the cultural fabric of any society. Growing evidence indicates, however, that inequitable gender norms may pose a risk to the health and well-being of both boys/men and girls/women. In Kenya, some traditional gender norms may be linked to the challenges that gi...

Moral competence is an increasingly recognized challenge and goal for human–robot interaction and robotic design. For autonomous robots, the question is how they can arrive at and execute the best action in a certain context. This paper explores how a computational system could best decide and act given the practical, logistical, and cultural constraints involved. We argue that in ethically cha...

Cross-cultural research is dominated by the use of values despite their mixed empirical support and their limited theoretical scope. This article expands the dominant paradigm in cross-cultural research by developing a theory of cultural tightness-looseness (the strength of social norms and the degree of sanctioning within societies) and by advancing a multilevel research agenda for future rese...

Personal naming practices exist in all human groups and are far from random. Rather, they continue to reflect social norms and ethno-cultural customs that have developed over generations. As a consequence, contemporary name frequency distributions retain distinct geographic, social and ethno-cultural patterning that can be exploited to understand population structure in human biology, public he...

Resum Most often, both agents and human societies use norms to coordinate their on-going activities. Nevertheless, choosing the ?right? set of norms to regulate these societies constitutes an open problem. Firstly, intrinsic norm relationships may lead to inconsistencies in the chosen set of norms. Secondly, and more importantly, there is an increasing demand of including ethical considerations...

Worldwide more food than ever is produced these days. It would be enough to feed everybody by far. However, only a limited group of the global population enjoys an adequate food supply. About 854 million people are undernourished worldwide. The global situation shows that hunger cannot be fought by just producing enough food. The socio-cultural complex of nutrition and food habits cannot be red...

Data relating to the stability and variation in the norms for the Raven's Progressive Matrices Test (a well-validated measure of basic cognitive functioning) for different cultural, ethnic, and socioeconomic groups on a worldwide and within-country basis are first summarized. Subsequent sections deal with variation over time. A possible explanation for the variation in norms over time and betwe...

Mathematical norms are important cultural knowledge of mathematical activities. This paper reports an analysis of mathematical norms in ten consecutive lessons taught by an eighth-grade Japanese teacher. The lessons were located in the unit of simultaneous linear equations. The videotapes of the lessons, their transcripts, and the interview data were analyzed qualitatively. Several major mathem...