The authors assess and compare preferred interpersonal distances over 42 countries. Environmental and sociopsychological factors are tested in order to explain variability in interpersonal distance across cultures. The authors seek to go beyond previous studies and better understand cultural differences and similarities in proxemic behaviors.

The authors assess and compare preferred interpersonal distances over 42 countries. Environmental and sociopsychological factors are tested in order to explain variability in interpersonal distance across cultures. The authors seek to go beyond previous studies and better understand cultural differences and similarities in proxemic behaviors.

The authors assess and compare preferred interpersonal distances over 42 countries. Environmental and sociopsychological factors are tested in order to explain variability in interpersonal distance across cultures. The authors seek to go beyond previous studies and better understand cultural differences and similarities in proxemic behaviors.

This book examines population growth rate and its correlates by testing 274 hypotheses (derived from multiple theories) with an 18-society sample. Forty-one of these hypotheses were significant at the .05 level, leading the author to accept these relationships as reflective of the real world. The 274 hypotheses are grouped into 51 broader hypotheses, and marked by (*) where relationships are significant as designated by the author or by significance p < 0.05.

This research examines how national culture influences the speed of COVID-19 spread in different countries. Three studies were conducted, and five national cultural dimensions were found to be significantly related to the speed of COVID-19 spread in the initial stages of the pandemic. These dimensions are power distance, uncertainty avoidance, humane orientation, in-group collectivism, and cultural tightness. The research found that COVID-19 spreads faster in countries with small power distance and strong uncertainty avoidance, low humane orientation and high in-group collectivism, and slower in countries with high cultural tightness.

The authors propose that societies with a tradition of rice farming are less likely to develop a democracy than societies with a tradition of wheat farming. They base their predictions on the theory that wheat farming, as opposed to rice farming, does not require extensive community collaboration and promotes individualism, which then in turn promotes democracy. Their findings were robustly consistent with their predictions. The authors used multiple controls in their analyses, including religion, economic development, geography, and local democratic practices.

Reputations are an important aspect of human social interactions and cooperation, but much of the research on reputations has focused on a narrow range of domains such as prosociality and aggressiveness. This study aims to provide an empirical view of reputation domains across different cultures by analyzing ethnographic texts on reputations from 153 cultures. The findings suggest that reputational domains vary across cultures, with reputations for cultural conformity, prosociality, social status, and neural capital being widespread. Reputation domains are more variable for males than females, and certain reputation domains are interrelated. The study highlights the need for future research on the evolution of cooperation and human sociality to consider a wider range of reputation domains and their variability across different social and ecological contexts and genders.

Inter-group variation is greater in humans than in any other animal, and scholars continue to debate the cause of this diversity. Two competing explanatory models of human variation emphasize either (1) ecological differences and "evoked" culture or (2) population-level effects of cultural transmission. The former emphasizes mechanisms that operate within a single generation, while the latter emphasizes cumulative cultural history operating over many generations. To test these competing models, the authors measured the relative power of ecological variables as compared to culture history to predict behavioral variation in 172 western North American tribes. Culture history is subdivided into culture phylogeny (based on language phylogeny) and spatial distance.

Using a sample of 80 countries and political regions, the present study examines the effect parasite stress has on people's trust towards ingroup and outgroup members. The findings do not offer support of there being a concave relationship between parasite stress and ingroup member trust. The results do indicate that there is a U-correlation between trusting outgroup members and parasite stress.

Drawing from risk sharing theory, this paper used data from 89 countries to examine the relationship between historic rainfall variation (before 1900) and the emergence of collectivism in, assumed to be, preindustrial societies. Contemporary values of individualistic responsibilities were used under the assumption that they will reflect preindustrial values. Findings support the hypothesis that countries with greater rainfall variation will have less individualism than countries with less rainfall variation. The author then examined rainfall variation and individual responsibility as a proposed catalyst for economic development. Support was found that as individualism increased, so did the economic development of a country.