Mark William Henshaw wrote:

> Mark wrote:

> 6. Uncertainty Avoidance in a culture; high Uncertainty Avoiding
> cultures being described as Xenophobic, emotionally expressive, and
> highly regulated, with feelings of stress and confusion in ambiguous
> situations. Uncertainty Avoidance also correlates strongly with the
> percentage of its citizenry which is Catholic; Protestants are less
> Uncertainty Avoiding.
>
> ams: Wow, this certainly leads to a chicken-or-egg question.

Yes.


> I'd
> *really* like to see a h^2 estimate for Uncertainty Avoidance.

Again, that's not a very easy question to answer. A bunch of individuals who
were all uncertainty avoiding might not create a society high on uncertainty
avoidance. Case in point - African societies are relatively collectivistic, yet
they're generally extroverted. For another example, perhaps people who live
their lives in tolerant and even reckless ways need to make up for this as a
society by creating strict rules? Culture is not simply the aggregated
personality characteristics of the people in the culture.


> The
> world's most UA culture may be the Haredim (fundamentalist Jews).

Judging by their strict, legalistic religion, that seems quite likely. I've
noticed from Kevin MacDoland's chart on the differences between gentile and
Jewish societies that Jewish cultural origins smack of collectivism,
masculinity, power distance, and especially uncertainty avoidance.


> It
> seems as though every detail of their existence, private as well as
> public, is highly regulated. The Talmud regulates them more tightly
> than the Mosaic Law does, and that's saying quite a bit. Of course
> they are (in)famous for their xenophobia/ethnocentrism. Another high
> UA culture was Confucianist China. The Confucianists were very
> concerned with precise rules of social propriety, and China is
> another
> culture famous for its xenophobia. Ditto Japan.

Japan has the highest UAI and MAS ratings I can think of - both are in the 90's.
(Note that individual Japanese do not seem very masculine at all - though they
do seem quite uncertainty avoiding...)

> Amish and Old Order
> Mennonites also have very regulated societies. They don't blindly
> reject new technology, but are highly selective, following
> agreed upon
> written regulations for what innovations may used, where, and when;
> and the Amish have a reputation for being highly impenetrable to
> outsiders, including law enforcement.

Based on what I've *read*, I'd draw the line on the Amish. The Amish seem
collectivistic but friendly; I think being impenetrable to outsiders is a result
of their extremely low IND. Interestingly, I'll bet that they would score quite
high on PDI, even though their society is rather egalitarian in actual practice.


> But does UA lead to rules or do rules lead to UA? Did RC's,
> compared to Prots, become less UA after Vatican II?

I think they were always higher UA, as does McCrae.


> Do people accustomed to living by detailed social regulations
> simply feel uncomfortable without them? (For that matter, how
> does a low UA individual feel when inserted into a high UA
> culture with whose rules and expectations he is unfamiliar?
> If he seeks to avoid such situations, is this reverse-uncertainty
> avoidance?) Can the imposition of a common code of regulations
> for everyday life make a society more xenophobic? Can reducing
> or abandoning these rules make it less xenophobic? In the 1960's,
> the Boomers coined phrases like "Do your own thing," and "Let it
> all hang out." That was also the decade that gave us the civil
> rights movemnent and a new, easy-going immigration law based on
> family reunification rather than the half century old
> country-of-origin/racial balance ideal.

I think that's increasing IND and decreasing PDI much more than decreasing UAI.
As a relevant aside, one of the things I've noticed about myself and everyone
else who ever discusses these things is that we have the tendency to zero in one
one factor to try to explain everything we're interested in. In my experience,
that usually turns out to be wrong, and I think this is one of those instances -
UAI is only one of the four general factors of culture (not counting the fifth,
"confucian orientation," which I disregard as being basically just
"Individualism part II").

Neuroticism is known to have been increasing during precisely the time when you
suggest that UAI was falling. Maybe this means that a society begins to feel
uncomfortable with insufficient UAI for its constituents' needs, but this
doesn't seem right, given that UAI is positively correlated with Neuroticism.
(Wouldn't high UAI cultures be more likely to give their citizens enough or even
more regulation than they needed?) If anything, I get the impression that UAI
has been increasing - there seemed to be much less bureaucratic strictness and
general uptightness back in the 50's than today.


> one theme of Dean Kelley's _Why Conservative Churches Are Growing_
> was that social strictness, once lost, was very difficult to regain.

Why do you think that is?


--Mark

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