The singularity effect of identifiable victims refers to people's greater willingness to help a single concrete victim compared with a group of victims experiencing the same need. We present 3 studies exploring values and cultural sources of this effect. In the first study, the singularity effect was found only among Western Israelis and not among Bedouin participants (a more collectivist group...

Mothers and children between the ages of 7 and 12, from individualist (Western European) and collectivist (Egyptian, Iranian, Indian, and Pakistani) backgrounds, completed assessments of children's self-esteem, maternal authoritarianism, and mothers' thoughts and feelings about their children. Collectivist mothers endorsed authoritarian parenting more than did individualist mothers but did not ...

We construct a model of revolution and transition to democracy under individualistic and collectivist cultures. The main result is that, despite facing potentially larger collective action problems, countries with an individualistic culture are more likely to end up adopting democracy earlier than countries with a collectivist culture. Our empirical analysis suggests a strong and robust associa...

Persuasive technology is defined as “any interactive product designed to change attitudes or behaviours by making desired outcomes easier to achieve”. It can take the form of interactive web applications, hand held devices, and games. To date there has been limited research into persuasive technology outside of America. Cross-cultural research shows that in order for persuasion to be most effec...

People need to understand why an instance of suffering occurred and what purpose it might have. One widespread account of suffering is a repressive suffering construal (RSC): interpreting suffering as occurring because people deviate from social norms and as having the purpose of reinforcing the social order. Based on the theorizing of Emile Durkheim and others, we propose that RSC is associate...

A body of work in ethics and epistemology has advanced a collectivist view of virtues. Collectivism holds that some social groups can be subjects in themselves which can possess attributes such as agency or responsibility. Collectivism about virtues holds that virtues (and vices) are among those attributes. By focusing on two different accounts, I argue that the collectivist virtue project has ...

this paper reports on a behavioral study that explores the role of culture and gender in the recognition of emotional speech in an under investigated cultural context (a collectivist society: i.e., iran). participants were asked to recognize the emotional prosody of a set of validated emotional vocal portrayals (including the five basic emotions). findings of the experiment were then compared w...

This paper reports on a behavioral study that explores the role of culture and gender in the recognition of emotional speech in an under investigated cultural context (a collectivist society: i.e., Iran). Participants were asked to recognize the emotional prosody of a set of validated emotional vocal portrayals (including the five basic emotions). Findings of the experiment were then comp...