SELECTED ABSTRACTS
The Motivating Effect of Monetary Over Psychological Incentives Is Stronger in WEIRD Cultures
w/ Diag Davenport, Thomas Talhelm, and Yin Li (Nature Human Behavior, 2024)
Link (Open Access): doi.org/10.1038/s41562-023-01769-5
Motivating effortful behaviour is a problem employers, governments and nonprofits face globally. However, most studies on motivation are done in Western, educated, industrialized, rich and democratic (WEIRD) cultures. We compared how hard people in six countries worked in response to monetary incentives versus psychological motivators, such as competing with or helping others. The advantage money had over psychological interventions was larger in the United States and the United Kingdom than in China, India, Mexico and South Africa (N = 8,133). In our last study, we randomly assigned cultural frames through language in bilingual Facebook users in India (N = 2,065). Money increased effort over a psychological treatment by 27% in Hindi and 52% in English. These findings contradict the standard economic intuition that people from poorer countries should be more driven by money. Instead, they suggest that the market mentality of exchanging time and effort for material benefits is most prominent in WEIRD cultures.
Worldwide Divergence of Values
w/ Joshua C. Jackson (Nature Communications, 2024)
Link (Open Access): https://doi.org/10.1038/s41467-024-46581-5
Has modernization brought a global consensus on what people value as important and just? We use survey data from 1981–2022 (n= 406,185) to test whether social values have become more similar (converged) or dissimilar (diverged) across 76 national cultures. We find evidence of global value divergence. Values emphasizing tolerance and openness have diverged most sharply, and wealthy Western countries have developed values that are especially dissimilar from the rest of the world. We also find that countries with similar levels of wealth have held similar values over the last 40 years. Over time, however, geographic proximity has emerged as an increasingly strong correlate of value similarity between countries, indicating that values have diverged globally but converged regionally. Worldwide value divergence could exacerbate the WEIRD problem in behavioral science and may be co-evolving with anti-Western sentiment in parts of Asia, Africa, and Eastern Europe.
Some other projects I have been working on are described here.
w/ Diag Davenport, Thomas Talhelm, and Yin Li (Nature Human Behavior, 2024)
Link (Open Access): doi.org/10.1038/s41562-023-01769-5
Motivating effortful behaviour is a problem employers, governments and nonprofits face globally. However, most studies on motivation are done in Western, educated, industrialized, rich and democratic (WEIRD) cultures. We compared how hard people in six countries worked in response to monetary incentives versus psychological motivators, such as competing with or helping others. The advantage money had over psychological interventions was larger in the United States and the United Kingdom than in China, India, Mexico and South Africa (N = 8,133). In our last study, we randomly assigned cultural frames through language in bilingual Facebook users in India (N = 2,065). Money increased effort over a psychological treatment by 27% in Hindi and 52% in English. These findings contradict the standard economic intuition that people from poorer countries should be more driven by money. Instead, they suggest that the market mentality of exchanging time and effort for material benefits is most prominent in WEIRD cultures.
Worldwide Divergence of Values
w/ Joshua C. Jackson (Nature Communications, 2024)
Link (Open Access): https://doi.org/10.1038/s41467-024-46581-5
Has modernization brought a global consensus on what people value as important and just? We use survey data from 1981–2022 (n= 406,185) to test whether social values have become more similar (converged) or dissimilar (diverged) across 76 national cultures. We find evidence of global value divergence. Values emphasizing tolerance and openness have diverged most sharply, and wealthy Western countries have developed values that are especially dissimilar from the rest of the world. We also find that countries with similar levels of wealth have held similar values over the last 40 years. Over time, however, geographic proximity has emerged as an increasingly strong correlate of value similarity between countries, indicating that values have diverged globally but converged regionally. Worldwide value divergence could exacerbate the WEIRD problem in behavioral science and may be co-evolving with anti-Western sentiment in parts of Asia, Africa, and Eastern Europe.
Some other projects I have been working on are described here.