Costs and benefits of developing a global language of historical symbols

1. 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 Costs and benefits of developing a global language of historical symbols

2. 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?

3. 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.

4. Cultural Specificity and the Dimensions of Cultural Variation • Markus and Kitayama (1991) reduced one the dimensions of cultural variation identified by cross-cultural 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.

7. 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

8. 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

9. 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

10. Rank Japan Pct Taiwan Hong Kong Pct (N=75) (N=646) (N=119) 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 7% French Revolution 10% French Revolution 14% American Indep 7% Rank Singapore Pct Philippines Pct Malaysia Pct (N=196) (N=272) (N=145) 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% Most Important Events in World History according to East Asian Samples (JCCP, 2005)

11. World History Survey • Moving from open-ended nominations to closed-ended 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

12. 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

13. 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.

14. Evaluation of Most Imp Events in WH

15. Data Samples: 30 societies, N=5800

16. 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.

17. Initial 2 Dimensional Solution

18. 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

19. PosNeg by Modernization (Western)

20. PosNeg by Western Hegemony (non-Western1)

21. 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.

22. A cross-culturally reliable historical events scale: Calamities

23. Less Agreement on Progress and Resistance to Oppression

24. 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.

25. Impact on Willingness to Fight, a critical aspect of Political Culture

26. Country level Data: Western countries don’t want to fight and see Calamities as horrific

27. 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

28. 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.