Cultural Psychologist, China Scholar & World Traveler
Joined February 2022
- Tweets 194
- Following 53
- Followers 59
- Likes 255
5 Photos and videos
AlexEnglish_Psych retweeted
Mar 20
Credit to @AlexEngPsych for leading the project and the massive longitudinal data collection! 👏
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AlexEnglish_Psych retweeted
The rice theory would predict higher collectivism in rice-farming areas, but check it out. Thirty years ago, it's not significant. Uh oh!
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AlexEnglish_Psych retweeted
My team created a collectivism index uses data on living alone, living with extended family, divorce rates, and other factors. @NaturePortfolio nature.com/articles/s41597-0…
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AlexEnglish_Psych retweeted
Census data to the rescue! Researchers have used Census data to estimate collectivism, and we can get data in China going back to the 1980s. Perfect!
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AlexEnglish_Psych retweeted
Northern and southern China have different cultures (I think) because rice required more labor and coordination than wheat in northern China. That could explain why southern China has tighter social norms and more nepotism. pnas.org/doi/abs/10.1073/pna… @AlexEngPsych @PNASNews
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AlexEnglish_Psych retweeted
That sounds logical, but I have a hard time squaring that with this. I analyzed rice-wheat cultural differences within China over time...
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AlexEnglish_Psych retweeted
Is this political? Maybe it has something to do with geo-political rivalries and politicians fanning the flames of culture wars.
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AlexEnglish_Psych retweeted
People around the world used to agree more about things like the morality of suicide and the importance of teaching children perseverance. Now people agree less than they used to.
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AlexEnglish_Psych retweeted
But there's some evidence that cultural differences are actually becoming larger! 🧐 For example, if we look at all 40 values questions in the World Values Survey going back to the 1980s, cultures have become *more different*, not more similar. Weird! nature.com/articles/s41467-0…
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AlexEnglish_Psych retweeted
...and that's making cultures more similar.
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AlexEnglish_Psych retweeted
People have the strong intuition that modernization is erasing cultural differences. The idea is that people around the world have Netflix and Starbucks now...
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AlexEnglish_Psych retweeted
New study out in PNAS Nexus! 🚨Is modernization driving cultures farther apart?? Here it is in 60 seconds. 🧵 academic.oup.com/pnasnexus/a…
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New Pub: With Dr. Agnes Szabo: Understanding cultural identity processes and pathways to psychological adaptation for foreign residents in China
sciencedirect.com/science/ar…
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AlexEnglish_Psych retweeted
Credit to my hard-working co-authors! @liuqing_wei @AlexEngPsych 👏
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AlexEnglish_Psych retweeted
The full text is available without a paywall. Have at it! nature.com/articles/s41597-0…
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AlexEnglish_Psych retweeted
Fellow researchers: Use my data! 📢 The whole point of the journal Scientific Data is to validate and share datasets for other researchers to use. It's all available on the Open Science Framework: doi.org/10.17605/OSF.IO/DX9J…
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AlexEnglish_Psych retweeted
And here's a taste of the types of analyses you can do with this data. Why are some places more collectivistic than others? If you know me, you guessed it--a history of rice farming! 🌾
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AlexEnglish_Psych retweeted
But wait, is this just measuring economic development? After all, people need money to live on their own (and get divorced). It *is* correlated with GDP per capita, but not as strongly as people might think. It's just r = .04 in the latest province data! 😮
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AlexEnglish_Psych retweeted
We also compared the collectivism index to the words people use on Weibo (China's Twitter). That comes from a recent study I did with researchers at @upenn. Good to see more converging evidence! ✅nature.com/articles/s41599-0… @upennnlp @sharathguntuku
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AlexEnglish_Psych retweeted
Is it actually valid? Does it actually measure collectivism? We compared our new index to external markers like rates of visiting family for Chinese New Year and family ownership of companies. It checks out! ✅
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