I came across this interesting theory, research and comparison today and thought about this story:
Research comparing Icelandic and U.S. 12-year olds illustrates this difference in the attention to and importance of an internal, personal self-image (Hart & Edelstein, 1992). Iceland is very culturally homogenous; there has been little immigration for many centuries, and there is a countrywide school curriculum and set of traditional texts. Hart and Fegley (1997) report that when they asked Icelandic youths to describe themselves, using a interview technique widely used with 12-year olds in the United States, the young people often had great difficulty. They report that between 25% and 40% of the Icelandic youths found questions such as, "What are you like?" too strange to answer. Although these children were quite able to describe other people and functioned well both academically and socially, self-scrutiny and self-description were not necessary or culturally valued activities (see also Barth, 1997). Consequently, behaviors intended to defend, self-constructed self-image may be less commonly found in homogenous cultures such as Iceland.
One consequence of the necessity to create and sustain one's own identity independent of the cultural context is that this identity must be continually verified, reexamined, updated, and defended. In the mobile Western society, in which many communities and associations are transitory or short term, individuals must continually reestablish this internal coherence and continuity as they communicate their identities to new associates and acquaintances (Camilleri & Malewska-Peyre, 1997). As a result, Western psychologists have identified a plethora of means whereby individuals protect, defend, verify, and sustain self-images. Self-affirmation, self-verification, self-enhancement, self-serving biases, self-symbolization, self-presentation, self-esteem maintenance, self-categorization, self-consistency, self-deception, self-handicapping - all are processes that Western psychologists have identified as vital for the construction, maintenance, and defense of the self-constructed identity.
- The Handbook of Self and Identity, 27. Cultural Models of the Self, p. 561
A degree is not the same as understanding. Most tests can be passed by rote memorization without the need for comprehension. You'd be better off to buy the textbooks and sit down to study them with the goal of personally comprehending the subject matter, than to read them with the goal of passing the final exam and earning the degree.
Thanks kalmbob. I also strive for coherence in my world-view and do not like the idea that my view of societies can be in such contrast with my view of psyches - or of brains and biology - that there is no reasonable relationship between the two. So, although I can't go into the details of it, I feel this view has a basis in psychology and neuroscience. In particular, there's a paper called Integrated Information Theory: A Provisional Manifesto by Giulio Tononi and Gerald Edelman that characterizes consciousness as a phenomenal map constructed in real-time (or "online") that depends on taking a continuum of phenomena and converting it into a system of related concepts. For example, the retina separates the light-spectrum into three distinct colors which are then recombined to form the color-spectrum. The light-spectrum and the color-spectrum are not the same things, the latter is conscious representation of the former, which appears to have three sharply contrasted primary elements, whereas in the light-spectrum there are no sharply contrasted elements. So too, the brain conceptualizes human identities in similar fashion, basically by perceiving vast differences where no differences actually exist, or by exaggerating small differences in order to carve out one's own identity. And our very sense of self, of 'I', depends on these identities as arbitrary as they are.
So, I generally agree that there are far more similarities among nations than there are differences. Above all since these identities are relative to each other and nothing else they share everything together. The idea that I'm a Canadian would be utterly meaningless if Canada was the only nation in the universe. We can differentiate ourselves as Humans on the premise that there are other species, or even by imagining that there might be Extraterrestrials we can conceive of ourselves as "Earthlings". But if there was only one people in the entire universe within which everyone was exactly identical, then it would be impossible to identify ourselves as anything. I tend to view identity as integral to consciousness and that is why I also view the construction and maintenance of identity as more influential in the world than anything else, and basically what drives everything that goes beyond basic self-preservation behavior.
Anyway, I don't want to say it's a hobby interest, because I think comprehending reality is of utmost and critical importance to any self-conscious being and focus a lot of my efforts on it, but I'm no psychologist.
As a naturally born Canadian citizen I am constantly hearing about how we are better than "those Americans" who also "think they are the end-all and be-all of everything."
Because we are neighbors and because Canada's population is 1/10th the population of the United States, this is a perfect opportunity for the Canadian identity to be optimally distinct.
Now, I don't agree that "Canadians are better than Americans". I don't think national identity can be compared as such, but I'm well aware that many of my fellow Canadians think so. A large part of the Canadian Identity seems entwined with denigrating the American identity. Perhaps the single most defining characteristic of the Canadian Identity is this; not American.
What I'm alluding to is that crime-peace metric probably correlates best with a method-of-self-regulation metric or possibly a degree-of-self-consciousness scale.
I believe that the dominant strategies for self-regulation in a given population will be a better predictor crime rates than any religious belief, economic-inequality or anything else. Unfortunately there are no studies, of which I'm aware, that directly measure the dominant self-regulatory strategies employed by a population.
However, it does appear that the dominant self-regulatory strategy in the United States is introjected and based on approval/disapproval of significant others within domains of contingent self-regard. The breakdown of social standards carried over from its past has left American society in a unstable soupy system of ideals that change from one day to the next depending on the shifting direction of the wind. And people are constantly striving to assimilate themselves in the latest and prevailing standards of conduct. Rather than rely on a more objective theory of morality, pro-social or peaceful orientation and belief system, Americans seem largely driven to be seen as a stereotypical embodiment of the latest moral fad.
Another possible contributor resembles the earlier considerations raised by Joshua. There is a strong motive toward "optimal distinctiveness" within a population. People want to belong, but prefer not to belong to a majority, perhaps quite intuitively they prefer to belong to a dominant minority (an elite). Icelanders, being a small group on the world-stage may find solidarity in their national group-identity and feel screened off from the rest of the world in their uniqueness and superiority. Whereas, inside the United States there is much more intranational competition for status and optimal distinctiveness as a feature of its population relative to other nations.
This drive toward optimal distinctiveness seems bound-up in social comparisons. There are multiple levels of social differentiation upon which these comparisons are made; national, geological, ethnic, sex, gender, Socio-Economic Status (Status-Inequality) and so forth. A person may feel optimally distinct as an LGBT-American and feel that only their group of fellow LGBTers are truly compassionate and understanding folk, but feel less optimally distinct on the nationality metric, and feel more homogenized by their American identity.
Historically, I think, the American Identity has been upheld as optimally distinct from the rest of the world. Regarding themselves as harder working, more moral, more considerate, thoughtful and fair. But the United States is one of the largest populations in the world which saturates the uniqueness of this identity, and recent foreign military actions and the rise of the popular "Occupy Movement" that challenges the economic disparity in the US strongly threatens the American Identity as moral, considerate, fair and hard working.
So, there is less opportunity there for optimal distinctiveness on the abstract dimension of national identity. Consequently people are less interested in pursuing the common goals of national progress and are more oriented toward selfish, private goals and establishing an optimal distinct identity in relation to their compatriots - bringing greater conflict within the nation.
Anyway, I don't know, nor do I wish to profess any particular belief on the matter, but it is of some interest to me.
Inconsistent with the explanation offered above, apart from the correlation of Iceland with Peacfulness with belief in Hell, the pattern does not seem to hold for the other nations. Finland and New Zealand are ranked high on peacfulness, but low on belief in Hell.
Granted, this is a pretty complicated subject and there are bound to be innumerable social and economic factors that contribute to all of these metrics.
Consistent with the explanation offered above, Icelanders are more likely to believe in Hell than Heaven. This is unusual, typically there are 40% more people in a given population who believe in heaven and not hell. In Iceland there are 20% more likely to believe in hell and not heaven.
Actually, belief in hell is a greater predictor of peace than any economic metrics.
"...the proportion of people who believe in hell negatively predicts national crime rates whereas belief in heaven predicts higher crime rates. These effects remain after accounting for a host of covariates, and ultimately prove stronger predictors of national crime rates than economic variables such as GDP and income inequality." - Divergent Effects of Beliefs in Heaven and Hell on National Crime Rates, Azim F. Shariff1*, Mijke Rhemtulla2
Other research shows that belief in one's own immortality negatively correlates with self-conscious thought and emotions that are integral to most self-regulatory strategies. Whereas, belief in one's own mortality correlates positively with increases in self-conscious thought and emotions (e.g., shame, guilt, pride, embarrassment, etc..) and orients one more toward seeking social status and the approval of others.
It's kind of a catch-22 because on the one hand self-conscious thought and emotion interferes with one's ability to perform a task efficiently, and provides the motive for deception of others and of oneself. Self-conscious thought and emotion is positively linked to increases in risky behavior, such as drug-use, unprotected sex, alcoholism and violence. It is also responsible for negative sociological outcomes like scapegoating, passing the buck, stereotyping and all other forms of prejudice. Self-conscious thought and emotion has a strong influence on one's thought-processes and biases them toward self-serving explanations and rationalizations of one's own behavior. It negatively correlates with critical self-awareness. However, there may be a another option besides extreme self-consciousness - the kind that drives every woman to disguise herself beneath layers of cosmetics, and every man to put on a phony personality in-front of women - and the alternate extreme of never giving a damn about anyone or anything.
The really sad thing is that both Heaven and Hell are relevant only to the self, and are capable of influencing behavior in such ways purely by threat of punishment or promise of reward to oneself. This egotism is the core of our problem as self-conscious beings.
I think I was a teenager when the music industry first began complaining about piracy. Metallica was complaining about profits, and it was around that time that my friends stopped listening to Metallica. I still enjoy two of their albums and actually have two copies of both albums on CD. I think the additional copies were my friend's that he didn't want anymore.
When Napster first came online I started downloading music like Johnny 5 from the Short-Circuit movies read books. I had maybe 20,000 random tracks that included good recordings of songs I liked, multiple bad recordings of the same songs, thousands of comedy sketches, and music that I wouldn't otherwise waste my time on. Sifting through all the crap to find the songs I liked and spending hours upon hours generating Winamp playlists eventually burnt me out.
Now, I pretty much stick to a small youtube playlist of music, but because youtube frequently crashes the computer I'm considering ripping the songs from my CDs instead. I have most of the CDs for the music I like and generally buy CDs to support the bands. I like to check out small bands with little to no fan-base and make a point to buy their CDs if I find myself listening to them regularly.
I want to be a non-conformist like everybody else, medium/black
Also check out: "My Super Sweet 16" if you want to see a bunch of spoiled brats.
Link: http://www.youtube.com/results?q=my+super+sweet+16&oe=utf-8&aq=t&rls=org.mozilla:en-US:official&client=firefox-a&um=1&ie=UTF-8&sa=N&tab=w1&gl=CA
Research comparing Icelandic and U.S. 12-year olds illustrates this difference in the attention to and importance of an internal, personal self-image (Hart & Edelstein, 1992). Iceland is very culturally homogenous; there has been little immigration for many centuries, and there is a countrywide school curriculum and set of traditional texts. Hart and Fegley (1997) report that when they asked Icelandic youths to describe themselves, using a interview technique widely used with 12-year olds in the United States, the young people often had great difficulty. They report that between 25% and 40% of the Icelandic youths found questions such as, "What are you like?" too strange to answer. Although these children were quite able to describe other people and functioned well both academically and socially, self-scrutiny and self-description were not necessary or culturally valued activities (see also Barth, 1997). Consequently, behaviors intended to defend, self-constructed self-image may be less commonly found in homogenous cultures such as Iceland.
One consequence of the necessity to create and sustain one's own identity independent of the cultural context is that this identity must be continually verified, reexamined, updated, and defended. In the mobile Western society, in which many communities and associations are transitory or short term, individuals must continually reestablish this internal coherence and continuity as they communicate their identities to new associates and acquaintances (Camilleri & Malewska-Peyre, 1997). As a result, Western psychologists have identified a plethora of means whereby individuals protect, defend, verify, and sustain self-images. Self-affirmation, self-verification, self-enhancement, self-serving biases, self-symbolization, self-presentation, self-esteem maintenance, self-categorization, self-consistency, self-deception, self-handicapping - all are processes that Western psychologists have identified as vital for the construction, maintenance, and defense of the self-constructed identity.
- The Handbook of Self and Identity, 27. Cultural Models of the Self, p. 561
Thanks kalmbob. I also strive for coherence in my world-view and do not like the idea that my view of societies can be in such contrast with my view of psyches - or of brains and biology - that there is no reasonable relationship between the two. So, although I can't go into the details of it, I feel this view has a basis in psychology and neuroscience. In particular, there's a paper called Integrated Information Theory: A Provisional Manifesto by Giulio Tononi and Gerald Edelman that characterizes consciousness as a phenomenal map constructed in real-time (or "online") that depends on taking a continuum of phenomena and converting it into a system of related concepts. For example, the retina separates the light-spectrum into three distinct colors which are then recombined to form the color-spectrum. The light-spectrum and the color-spectrum are not the same things, the latter is conscious representation of the former, which appears to have three sharply contrasted primary elements, whereas in the light-spectrum there are no sharply contrasted elements. So too, the brain conceptualizes human identities in similar fashion, basically by perceiving vast differences where no differences actually exist, or by exaggerating small differences in order to carve out one's own identity. And our very sense of self, of 'I', depends on these identities as arbitrary as they are.
So, I generally agree that there are far more similarities among nations than there are differences. Above all since these identities are relative to each other and nothing else they share everything together. The idea that I'm a Canadian would be utterly meaningless if Canada was the only nation in the universe. We can differentiate ourselves as Humans on the premise that there are other species, or even by imagining that there might be Extraterrestrials we can conceive of ourselves as "Earthlings". But if there was only one people in the entire universe within which everyone was exactly identical, then it would be impossible to identify ourselves as anything. I tend to view identity as integral to consciousness and that is why I also view the construction and maintenance of identity as more influential in the world than anything else, and basically what drives everything that goes beyond basic self-preservation behavior.
Anyway, I don't want to say it's a hobby interest, because I think comprehending reality is of utmost and critical importance to any self-conscious being and focus a lot of my efforts on it, but I'm no psychologist.
Because we are neighbors and because Canada's population is 1/10th the population of the United States, this is a perfect opportunity for the Canadian identity to be optimally distinct.
Now, I don't agree that "Canadians are better than Americans". I don't think national identity can be compared as such, but I'm well aware that many of my fellow Canadians think so. A large part of the Canadian Identity seems entwined with denigrating the American identity. Perhaps the single most defining characteristic of the Canadian Identity is this; not American.
What I'm alluding to is that crime-peace metric probably correlates best with a method-of-self-regulation metric or possibly a degree-of-self-consciousness scale.
I believe that the dominant strategies for self-regulation in a given population will be a better predictor crime rates than any religious belief, economic-inequality or anything else. Unfortunately there are no studies, of which I'm aware, that directly measure the dominant self-regulatory strategies employed by a population.
However, it does appear that the dominant self-regulatory strategy in the United States is introjected and based on approval/disapproval of significant others within domains of contingent self-regard. The breakdown of social standards carried over from its past has left American society in a unstable soupy system of ideals that change from one day to the next depending on the shifting direction of the wind. And people are constantly striving to assimilate themselves in the latest and prevailing standards of conduct. Rather than rely on a more objective theory of morality, pro-social or peaceful orientation and belief system, Americans seem largely driven to be seen as a stereotypical embodiment of the latest moral fad.
Another possible contributor resembles the earlier considerations raised by Joshua. There is a strong motive toward "optimal distinctiveness" within a population. People want to belong, but prefer not to belong to a majority, perhaps quite intuitively they prefer to belong to a dominant minority (an elite). Icelanders, being a small group on the world-stage may find solidarity in their national group-identity and feel screened off from the rest of the world in their uniqueness and superiority. Whereas, inside the United States there is much more intranational competition for status and optimal distinctiveness as a feature of its population relative to other nations.
This drive toward optimal distinctiveness seems bound-up in social comparisons. There are multiple levels of social differentiation upon which these comparisons are made; national, geological, ethnic, sex, gender, Socio-Economic Status (Status-Inequality) and so forth. A person may feel optimally distinct as an LGBT-American and feel that only their group of fellow LGBTers are truly compassionate and understanding folk, but feel less optimally distinct on the nationality metric, and feel more homogenized by their American identity.
Historically, I think, the American Identity has been upheld as optimally distinct from the rest of the world. Regarding themselves as harder working, more moral, more considerate, thoughtful and fair. But the United States is one of the largest populations in the world which saturates the uniqueness of this identity, and recent foreign military actions and the rise of the popular "Occupy Movement" that challenges the economic disparity in the US strongly threatens the American Identity as moral, considerate, fair and hard working.
So, there is less opportunity there for optimal distinctiveness on the abstract dimension of national identity. Consequently people are less interested in pursuing the common goals of national progress and are more oriented toward selfish, private goals and establishing an optimal distinct identity in relation to their compatriots - bringing greater conflict within the nation.
Anyway, I don't know, nor do I wish to profess any particular belief on the matter, but it is of some interest to me.
Granted, this is a pretty complicated subject and there are bound to be innumerable social and economic factors that contribute to all of these metrics.
(http://micpohling.wordpress.com/2007/05/27/world-religiosity-iii-belief-in-heaven-and-hell/)
"...the proportion of people who believe in hell negatively predicts national crime rates whereas belief in heaven predicts higher crime rates. These effects remain after accounting for a host of covariates, and ultimately prove stronger predictors of national crime rates than economic variables such as GDP and income inequality." - Divergent Effects of Beliefs in Heaven and Hell on National Crime Rates, Azim F. Shariff1*, Mijke Rhemtulla2
Other research shows that belief in one's own immortality negatively correlates with self-conscious thought and emotions that are integral to most self-regulatory strategies. Whereas, belief in one's own mortality correlates positively with increases in self-conscious thought and emotions (e.g., shame, guilt, pride, embarrassment, etc..) and orients one more toward seeking social status and the approval of others.
It's kind of a catch-22 because on the one hand self-conscious thought and emotion interferes with one's ability to perform a task efficiently, and provides the motive for deception of others and of oneself. Self-conscious thought and emotion is positively linked to increases in risky behavior, such as drug-use, unprotected sex, alcoholism and violence. It is also responsible for negative sociological outcomes like scapegoating, passing the buck, stereotyping and all other forms of prejudice. Self-conscious thought and emotion has a strong influence on one's thought-processes and biases them toward self-serving explanations and rationalizations of one's own behavior. It negatively correlates with critical self-awareness. However, there may be a another option besides extreme self-consciousness - the kind that drives every woman to disguise herself beneath layers of cosmetics, and every man to put on a phony personality in-front of women - and the alternate extreme of never giving a damn about anyone or anything.
The really sad thing is that both Heaven and Hell are relevant only to the self, and are capable of influencing behavior in such ways purely by threat of punishment or promise of reward to oneself. This egotism is the core of our problem as self-conscious beings.
When Napster first came online I started downloading music like Johnny 5 from the Short-Circuit movies read books. I had maybe 20,000 random tracks that included good recordings of songs I liked, multiple bad recordings of the same songs, thousands of comedy sketches, and music that I wouldn't otherwise waste my time on. Sifting through all the crap to find the songs I liked and spending hours upon hours generating Winamp playlists eventually burnt me out.
Now, I pretty much stick to a small youtube playlist of music, but because youtube frequently crashes the computer I'm considering ripping the songs from my CDs instead. I have most of the CDs for the music I like and generally buy CDs to support the bands. I like to check out small bands with little to no fan-base and make a point to buy their CDs if I find myself listening to them regularly.