Neither Eastern nor Western: Patterns of Independence and Interdependence in Mediterranean Societies

• DOI: 10.31234/osf.io/efzrn
• Publication Date: 2023-02-25T05:00:51Z
• Authors: Ayse Uskul; Alexander Kirchne...; Vivian Vignoles; Rosa Rodriguez-Ba...; Vanessa A Castillo; Susan E. Cross; Meral Gezici-Yalçın; charles harb; Shenel Husnu; Keiko Ishii; Shuxian Jin; Panagiota Karamaouna; Konstantinos Kafe...; Evangelia Kateri; Juan Matamoros-Lima; Daqing Liu; Rania Miniesy; Jinkyung Na; Zafer Özkan; Stefano Pagliaro; Charis Psaltis; Dina Rabie; Manuel Teresi; Yukiko Uchida
• Keywords: : Mediterranean societies; Mediterranean societies; interdependence; self-construal; social orientation; cognitive style; self-construal; Social Psychology; Emotions; Racial Groups; 05 social sciences; 150; United States; United Kingdom; Self Concept; cognitive style; social orientation; Japan; Humans; 0501 psychology and cognitive sciences; Mediterranean societies; 10. No inequality; Social Behavior; interdependence

Social science research has highlighted ‘honor’ as a central value driving social behavior in Mediterranean societies, which requires individuals to develop and protect a sense of their personal self-worth and their social reputation, through assertiveness, competitiveness, and retaliation in the face of threats. We predicted that members of Mediterranean societies may exhibit a distinctive combination of independent and interdependent social orientation, self-construal, and cognitive style, compared to more commonly studied East Asian and Anglo-Western cultural groups. We compared participants from eight Mediterranean societies (Spain, Italy, Greece, Turkey, Cyprus [Turkish Cypriot and Greek Cypriot communities], Lebanon, Egypt) to participants from East Asian (Korea, Japan) and Anglo-Western (UK, US) societies, using six implicit social orientation indicators, an eight-dimensional self-construal scale, and four cognitive style indicators. Compared with both East Asian and Anglo-Western samples, samples from Mediterranean societies distinctively emphasized several forms of independence (relative intensity of disengaging [vs. engaging] emotions, happiness based on disengaging [vs. engaging] emotions, dispositional [vs. situational] attribution style, self-construal as different from others, self-directed, self-reliant, self-expressive, and consistent) and interdependence (closeness to ingroup [vs. outgroup] members, self-construal as connected and committed to close others). Our findings extend previous insights into patterns of cultural orientation beyond commonly examined East-West comparisons to an understudied world region.