Summary: A large cross-cultural study suggests people around the globe share more similar everyday experiences than previously believed.
Source: UCR
The foundation of discrimination often rests on the assumption that people from other races or countries live and react to situations in fundamentally different ways.
What if empirical evidence showed that assumption is largely incorrect?
A new study led by researchers at the University of California, Riverside (UCR) indicates that the world’s population may be far more alike in how people experience everyday situations than many expect.
“Although people within the same country tend to report more similar experiences than those in different countries, the differences are very small,” said Daniel Lee, the paper’s lead author, in the report recently published in the Journal of Personality. “Overall, the world appears more unified and similar than we once assumed.”
Lee described the study as the most extensive examination of everyday situations to date, involving collaborators in 62 countries. The project’s goal was to determine whether people across the globe experience daily life in similar ways or whether situational experiences vary widely by country.
“This project is unprecedented,” said Lee, a doctoral researcher working with UCR Distinguished Professor David Funder. “Very few international investigations compare more than two countries, much less 62.” The published article is titled “Situational Experience Around the World: A Replication and Extension in 62 Countries.”
In this research, the term “situation” refers to any event or context people encounter: watching television with family, getting sunburned, sitting in an overly warm room, or attending a social gathering where you might meet a romantic interest. The team asked whether people in different countries report similar emotional and situational reactions to these everyday contexts.
The dataset included responses from 15,318 university and college community members—10,771 identified as female, 4,468 as male, and 79 who did not select a gender—mostly young adults in their early to mid-20s. Participants completed a 90-item assessment based on the Riverside Situational Q-Sort, an instrument previously developed by Funder’s lab to capture how people perceive and remember specific situations.
This new study is an expanded replication of a 2015 project from the same lab called “The World at 7:00: Comparing the Experience of Situations Across 20 Countries,” which asked participants what they were doing at 7 p.m. the previous evening and then analyzed how those moments were experienced. Both investigations reached similar conclusions: cross-country differences in situational experience are smaller than expected, and variation within countries is often greater than variation between them.
For the 62-country replication, participants were asked instead to describe a situation from the previous day that they remembered well. Across both studies, most situational reports were classified as mildly positive, meaning that, on average, people tended to describe ordinary experiences in a slightly positive light. This pattern contradicts some prior memory research suggesting negative events are more memorable than neutral or positive ones.
There were, however, some differences in which countries resembled each other most closely. The 2015 study found the U.S. and Canada to be most alike; in the current study, the U.S. and Australia showed the greatest similarity. Earlier analyses identified South Korea and Denmark as particularly different from each other; the new research found Malaysia and Jordan to be the most dissimilar pair. Where Canada was previously highlighted as most representative of worldwide experience, the expanded data tied Canada with Australia, Chile, and the U.S. as most similar to the global average.
The studies also differed in within-country homogeneity. In 2015, Japan appeared most homogeneous internally; in the current 62-country study, the Netherlands ranked highest for internal similarity while Japan ranked much lower (56th out of 62), a surprising result the authors note requires further investigation. The country whose citizens showed the greatest internal diversity shifted from South Korea in the earlier study to Singapore in the current one.
“We can only hope that recognizing our shared experiences, especially during global challenges like the COVID-19 pandemic, will encourage a stronger sense of global community,” Lee said.
This report is the first publication to emerge from the International Situations Project led by Funder. The project aims to map how situational experience varies across cultures and to make data from these international studies available for further research.
Coauthors on the paper include Erica Baranski and Gwendolyn Gardiner, both doctoral researchers in Funder’s lab. For those interested in experiencing the same survey, the study website is ispstudy.ucr.edu; on the site select the U.S. flag, use study ID USA1.ENG and participant ID C2NAX99 to view the questionnaire as it was administered.
About this neuroscience research article
Source:
UCR
Media Contacts:
John Warren – UCR
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The image is credited to UCR.
Original Research: Closed access. Title: “Situational Experience around the World: A Replication and Extension in 62 Countries” by Daniel I. Lee et al., published in the Journal of Personality (DOI: 10.1111/jopy.12558).
Abstract
Situational Experience around the World: A Replication and Extension in 62 Countries
Objective
This study aimed to replicate and extend key findings from The World at 7:00 (Guillaume et al., 2016), which examined psychological experience of situations in 20 countries.
Method
Researchers collected data from 15,318 participants in 62 countries, recruited via universities and local collaborators. The study was administered online using a platform translated into 42 languages.
Results
Many results from the earlier study were replicated. Across countries, the average situational experience was mildly positive. Patterns of similarity between countries were broadly consistent with prior findings (r = .60 for overlapping countries). Although situational experiences were more homogeneous within countries than between them, the between-country differences were small. A previously reported exploratory result—that negative elements of situations vary more across countries than positive elements—did not replicate. Correlations between situational aspects and country-level values, personality, and demographic metrics were largely similar to the original study.
Conclusion
These findings emphasize the value of cross-cultural situational research and the importance of replication, while highlighting the nuanced relationship between culture and situational experience.
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