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- All Subjects: Culture
- Creators: Department of Psychology
The COVID-19 pandemic has had an international impact since the novel coronavirus first surfaced in late 2019. Since then, different countries have taken different approaches to try and limit transmissions and deaths. While this is seemingly unprecedented in modern day times, many pandemics, or plagues, have happened relatively frequently in history. This paper examines three historical plagues through the lens of social psychologist Geert Hofstede’s six cultural dimensions to distinguish between cultures: power distance, individualism versus collectivism, masculinity versus femininity, uncertainty avoidance, long term orientation and indulgence versus restraint. This paper then applies these dimensions to the modern day U.S. and South Korea, two countries who have had different success in handling the COVID-19 pandemic. Through these dimensions, this paper aims to explain a factor in why South Korea has had better results than the U.S. It also recognizes that Hofstede’s cultural dimensions are not the only factor to affect the pandemic, and explores political influences in America through the lens of Henry David Thoreau and John Dewey. Overall, this paper argues that the U.S. has been unsuccessful in taming the pandemic because of certain cultural dimensions, such as more an individualist and indulgent culture, and its unstable and divisive political climate. Given this, the United States has a hopeful, yet arduous path moving forward with COVID-19 and future pandemics.
Participants were 475 twins and their primary caregivers (mean age=8.48; Primary caregivers: 64% White, 36% Hispanic; 53.8% middle class or above). I found no main effects between parental cultural values and child cortisol outcomes and no main effects between parenting behaviors and child cortisol outcomes. However, when exploring the moderating role of race/ethnicity, it was found that, as compared to children of White primary caregivers, children of Hispanic primary caregivers who had higher levels of parental authoritarianism had steeper PM slopes, indicating more adaptive cortisol outcomes. This suggests that the adaptiveness of certain parenting behaviors may differ across racial/ethnic groups such that what is considered to be “good parenting” may not translate across differing racial/ethnic groups. Ultimately, further research should be conducted in order to further explore the impact of race/ethnicity in the outcomes of our children.
For this thesis, 100 undergraduate and recent college graduates completed online self-report measures. Results of independent t-tests showed that there were no significant differences between South and East Asians in self-improvement, which is consistent with what was hypothesized. There were also no differences between South and East Asians in future self-connectedness or growth mindset. The two Asian groups were then combined and compared to North Americans. Further independent t-tests were run, and results found that while the trend was as expected and Asians exhibited higher levels of self-improvement than North Americans, they did not exhibit significantly higher levels. There were also no significant differences between North Americans and Asians in growth mindset, however, North Americans had significantly higher levels of future self-connectedness than Asians, contrary to expectation. Results of mediation regressions found that neither future self-connectedness nor growth mindset significantly explained the effect of culture on self-improvement.