Kusano Kodai, Kemmelmeier Markus
Interdisciplinary Social Psychology Ph.D. Program, University of Nevada, Reno, NV, United States.
Front Psychol. 2018 Jun 12;9:954. doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2018.00954. eCollection 2018.
Many countries around the world embrace freedom and democracy as part of their political culture. However, culture is at least in part a human response to the ecological challenges that a society faces; hence, it should not be surprising that the degree to which societies regulate the level of individual freedom is related to environmental circumstances. Previous research suggests that levels of societal freedom across countries are systematically related to three types of ecological threats: prevalence of pathogens, climate challenges, and natural disaster threat. Though their incidence overlaps, the literature has not yet provided a competitive test. Drawing upon the ecocultural framework, we tested five rival hypotheses, alternately focused on the above ecological factors and their interactions with economic wealth in explaining country variations in socio-political freedom. Focusing on data from 150 countries, we performed a series of linear mixed-effects regressions predicting freedom in the domains of politics, media, and economy. We found that countries with higher pathogen prevalence were more likely to suppress democracy and media freedom. Economic wealth, however, moderated the effect of pathogen prevalence on economic freedom, with the main effect being only found among wealthy countries, but not among poor countries. In contrast, natural disaster threat predicted political freedom and press freedom only among poor countries, consistent with the idea that disaster threat accompanied by poor resources promote socio-political freedom as a means of increasing collective survival. Throughout our analyses, we found no support for hypotheses based on climatic challenges. In addition, our multilevel approach revealed that country scores for socio-political freedom were highly clustered within world regions, accounting for substantial portions of variance. Overall, the present research offers a nuanced view of the interplay between ecology and wealth in the emergence of socio-political freedom. We discuss new directions in future research considering methodological and theoretical contributions of the present findings.
世界上许多国家都将自由和民主作为其政治文化的一部分。然而，文化至少在一定程度上是人类对社会所面临的生态挑战的一种反应；因此，社会对个人自由水平的规范程度与环境状况相关也就不足为奇了。先前的研究表明，各国的社会自由水平与三种生态威胁系统相关：病原体的流行、气候挑战和自然灾害威胁。尽管它们的发生率有重叠，但文献尚未提供竞争性检验。借鉴生态文化框架，我们检验了五个相互竞争的假设，这些假设交替关注上述生态因素及其与经济财富的相互作用，以解释国家在社会政治自由方面的差异。以150个国家的数据为重点，我们进行了一系列线性混合效应回归，预测政治、媒体和经济领域的自由。我们发现，病原体流行率较高的国家更有可能压制民主和媒体自由。然而，经济财富缓和了病原体流行对经济自由的影响，主要影响仅在富裕国家中发现，而在贫穷国家中未发现此影响。相比之下，自然灾害威胁仅在贫穷国家中预测了政治自由和新闻自由，这与资源匮乏伴随的灾害威胁促进社会政治自由作为增加集体生存手段的观点一致。在我们的整个分析中，我们没有找到基于气候挑战的假设的支持。此外，我们的多层次方法表明，国家在社会政治自由方面的得分在世界区域内高度聚集，占方差的很大一部分。总体而言，本研究提供了一个关于生态与财富在社会政治自由出现过程中相互作用的细致入微的观点。我们讨论了考虑到本研究结果的方法学和理论贡献的未来研究的新方向。
