Horita Yutaka, Takezawa Masanori
Department of Psychology, Teikyo University, Tokyo, Japan.
Department of Behavioral Science, Hokkaido University, Sapporo, Japan.
Front Psychol. 2018 Oct 11;9:1921. doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2018.01921. eCollection 2018.
The severity of the environment has been found to have played a selective pressure in the development of human behavior and psychology, and the historical prevalence of pathogens relate to cultural differences in group-oriented psychological mechanisms, such as collectivism and conformity to the in-group. However, previous studies have also proposed that the effectiveness of institutions, rather than pathogen stress, can account for regional variation in group-oriented psychological mechanisms. Moreover, previous studies using nations as units of analysis may have suffered from a problem of statistical non-independence, namely, Galton's problem. The present study tested whether or not regional variation in pathogen stress, rather than government effectiveness, affected collectivism and conformity to social norms by adjusting the effect of global regions using hierarchical Bayesian estimation. We found that the overall effect of pathogen stress remained significant in only one out of the four indices of the regional variability of conformity, and the effects of the government effectiveness also disappeared. Instead, we found that significant effects of both pathogen stress and government effectiveness in specific regions of the world, but these effects were not stable across the measurements. These results indicate that both the effects of pathogen stress and government effectiveness need further reevaluation.
研究发现，环境的严峻程度在人类行为和心理发展过程中起到了选择性压力的作用，病原体的历史流行率与集体主义和对群体的从众等群体导向心理机制中的文化差异有关。然而，先前的研究也提出，制度的有效性而非病原体压力，可以解释群体导向心理机制的区域差异。此外，先前以国家为分析单位的研究可能存在统计非独立性问题，即高尔顿问题。本研究通过使用分层贝叶斯估计来调整全球区域的影响，检验了病原体压力的区域差异而非政府有效性是否影响集体主义和对社会规范的从众性。我们发现，在从众性区域变异性的四个指标中，只有一个指标中病原体压力的总体影响仍然显著，而且政府有效性的影响也消失了。相反，我们发现病原体压力和政府有效性在世界特定地区都有显著影响，但这些影响在不同测量中并不稳定。这些结果表明，病原体压力和政府有效性的影响都需要进一步重新评估。
