magazine issue 1 2015 / Issue 24

On kissing in elevators and flirting in the office: A cross-cultural perspective on normative behavior.

• written by Marieke van Egmond
• edited by Diana Onu

Interestingly, the countries that are listed here are not commonly clustered in the same category when it comes to other cultural psychological dimensions. This short list of Ukraine, Hungary, the Netherlands and the United States actually includes countries from three different and distinct cultural ‘clusters’ when it comes to value orientations. A large body of research within cross-cultural psychology examines the cultural and universal aspects of people’s value orientations around the world (e.g., Schwartz & Bilsky, 1987; Schwartz & Boehnke, 2004). To give one example, this approach holds that European countries such as Germany, the Netherlands, Norway, Sweden and Denmark form a 'Protestant European' value cluster, because part of the variation in the values that people in these countries hold is explained by the Protestant tradition that these countries share and that has shaped these societies to a significant extent (Inglehart & Welzel, 2010). Despite the fact that this cultural 'cluster' approach explains a good percentage of the variance in value orientations and is currently one of the dominant theories to explain cultural variation, it is less able to predict the degree to which people adhere to social norms (Gelfand et al., 2011).

Facebook founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg is known to wear a simple T-Shirt or sweater, be it to public events or a meeting with investors. The degree to which we adhere to social norms in our everyday lives as adults is instilled in us as children. Just like the degree to which parents socialize their children to be competitive, respectful towards older people, and express themselves, parents around the world differ in the degree to which they raise their children to be obedient, cautious, dutiful and able to self-monitor and self-regulate their behavior (Greenfield, Keller, Fuligni & Maynard, 2003; Keller et al., 2006). The cultural environments in which we grow up, thus, influence our psychological development. On this psychological level, people who grow up in more tight cultural contexts are, for example, more likely than people from looser environments to agree with statements such as “I choose my words with care”, “I am very careful to avoid making mistakes” and “I stick to the rules”. Moreover, if it is more common to adjust your own behavior to the expectations of others within a certain situation, as is the case for tighter cultures, it is functional for people to develop a high degree of self-control. If you are able to monitor and restrain your impulses so that they are in accordance with the social norms that govern the situation, you limit the likelihood of being criticized for inappropriate behavior by others. In contrast, if your society is characterized by primarily weak situations, you will have less of a need to develop such self-restraint and are thus likely to be lower in self-control more generally. This relationship between the societal strength of social norms and self-control was, for example, found for the degree to which people indicate to keep their emotions under control and to resist temptations, such as over-eating. Emerging research in the field of cultural neuroscience suggests that there might even be a genetic component to the development of greater societal tightness in the sense that a relationship has been found between genetic variation and social/cultural variables, including tightness (Mrazek, Chiao, Blizinsky, Lun, & Gelfand, 2013).