When guiding principles do not guide: The moderating effects of cultural tightness on value-behavior links.

OBJECTIVE: Ample research documented the effects of guiding principles in people's lives, as reflected in personal values, on a variety of behaviors. But do these principles universally guide behaviors across all cultural contexts? To address this question, we investigated the effect of cross-cultural differences in the strength of social norms (i.e., tightness-looseness) on value-behavior relationships. METHOD: Using the archival data from the World Value Survey for 24 nations (N = 38,924; 51.40% female; Mage  = 44.98, SD = 16.87), a multi-level analysis revealed that cultural tightness moderated the effects of individual differences in personal values on behaviors from different life-domains. RESULTS: As hypothesized, the relationships between self-transcendence values with civic involvement and pro-environmental behaviors, and between conservation values with religious behavior were significantly stronger in loose cultures that have weak norms and were almost nonexistent in tight cultures that have strong norms, even when controlling for individualism-collectivism or GDP. CONCLUSIONS: Thus, despite the common belief that people behave in line with their guiding principles, our findings suggest this might not be the case in cultural contexts that put a strong emphasis on norms.

Accessibility is a matter of trust: Dispositional and contextual distrust blocks accessibility effects.

Distrust poses a challenge to human cognition because it signals that information from the environment should not be taken at face value. Accordingly, in the present research, we argue and show that distrust, both as a chronic disposition and as a contextual factor, blocks accessibility effects. We report five studies in which distrust is either measured (Studies 2 and 3) or manipulated (Studies 1, 4 and 5), and test the "distrust-blocks-accessibility hypothesis" on both verbal and non-verbal accessibility effects. We first elucidate the nature of the distrust mindset and show that distrust inherently entails the activation of alternatives to the original accessible concept thus undermining the preeminence of the prime (Study 1). We then show that distrust blocks accessibility using the "Donald" task (Study 2), the "Halo Effect" task (Study 3), an embodiment paradigm (Study 4), and an applied context of web advertising (Study 5). We conclude that the human mind is sensitive and flexible enough to block any influence from the environment if it seems unreliable. We discuss the novel implications of this perspective for both distrust and accessibility research.

Integrating content and structure aspects of the self: traits, values, and self-improvement.

Research on the structure of the self has mostly developed separately from research on its content. Taking an integrative approach, we studied two structural aspects of the self associated with self-improvement--self-discrepancies and perceived mutability--by focusing on two content areas, traits and values. In Studies 1A-C, 337 students (61% female) reported self-discrepancies in values and traits, with the finding that self-discrepancies in values are smaller than in traits. In Study 2 (80 students, 41% female), we experimentally induced either high or low mutability and measured perceived mutability of traits and values. We found that values are perceived as less mutable than traits. In Study 3, 99 high school students (60% female) reported their values, traits, and the extent to which they wish to change them. We found that values predict the wish to change traits, whereas traits do not predict the wish to change values. In Study 4, 172 students (47.7% female) were assigned to one of four experimental conditions in which they received feedback denoting either uniqueness or similarity to others, on either their values or their traits. The results indicated that feedback that one's values (but not traits) are unique affected self-esteem. Integrating between theories of content and structure of the self can contribute to the development of both.