•  
  •  
 

Bulletin of Chinese Academy of Sciences (Chinese Version)

Keywords

Belt and Road; individualism; trust; social media

Document Type

Article

Abstract

It has been highly stressed that national characters play a critical role in regional cooperation across "Belt and Road" countries or areas. However, the traditional method is often unworkable, because of the vast territory, multiple nations, and the complexity of geopolitics, economics, and cultural traditions along "Belt and Road". From the perspective of cultural psychology and big data analytics, the present research was an attempt to explore cultural and cooperative patterns along "Belt and Road", using the individualism index (independent vs.interdependent self construal) based on the Twitter dataset and the prediction model of social trust (generalized vs. particularized). The results show that there are big differences in individualism among "Belt and Road" countries or areas, which are mainly explained by the variation of their colonial histories and religious traditions. Furthermore, generalized trust (related to strangers and foreigners) and particularized trust (related to family and acquaintances) are found to be significantly predicted by individualism on Twitter. In conclusion, the current findings demonstrate the cultural diversity of self construal and social trust across "Belt and Road" countries or areas, suggesting that the new approach based on social media should be concerned in exploring national characters and behavioral patters in this regional cooperation.

First page

298

Last Page

307

Language

Chinese

Publisher

Bulletin of Chinese Academy of Sciences

References

宋周莺, 车姝韵, 张薇.我国与"一带一路"沿线国家贸易特征研究.中国科学院院刊, 2017, 32(4):363-369.

Zheng Y, Zhang C. The Belt and Road Initiative and China's Grand Diplomacy. China International Studies, 2016, (1):52-63.

郑永年.边疆、地缘政治和中国的国际关系研究.外交评论, 2011, 28(6):12-29.

郑永年.中国的海洋地缘政治与陆地地缘政治.外交评论, 2014, (1):1-11.

Hofstede G J, Jonker C M, Verwaart T. Individualism and Collectivism in Trade Agents. In: Nguyen N T, Borzemski L, Grzech A, et al (eds). New Frontiers in Applied Artificial Intelligence. IEA/AIE 2008. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 5027. Berlin, Heidelberg: Springer, 2008.

Markus H R, Kitayama S. Culture and the self:Implications for cognition, emotion and motivation. Psychological Review, 1991, 98(2):224-253.

Nisbett R E, Peng K, Choi I, et al. Culture and systems of thought:Holistic versus analytic cognition. Psychological Review, 2001, 108(2):291-310.

Zeng R, Greenfield P M. Cultural evolution over the last 40 years in China:Using the Google Ngram Viewer to study implications of social and political change for cultural values. International Journal of Psychology, 2015, 50(1):47-55.

Greenfield P M. The changing psychology of culture from 1800 through 2000. Psychological Science, 2013, 24(9):1722-1731.

Varnum E M W, Kitayama S. What's in a name? Popular names are less common on frontiers. Psychological Science, 2011, 22(2):176-183.

Cohen A B, Singel J I, Rozin P. Faith versus practice:different bases for religiosity judgments by Jews and Protestants. European Journal of Social Psychology, 2012, 33(2):287-295.

Cohen A B, Wu M S, Miller J. Religion and culture:Individualism and collectivism in the east and west. Journal of Cross-Cultural Psychology, 2016, 47(9):1236-1249.

Oyserman D, Coon H M, Kemmelmeier M. Rethinking individualism and collectivism:Evaluation of theoretical assumptions and meta-analyses. Psychological Bulletin, 2002, 128(1):3-72.

Welzel C. How selfish are self-expression values? A civicness test. Journal of Cross-Cultural Psychology, 2010, 41(2):152-174.

Gheorghiu M A, Vignoles V L, Smith P B. Beyond the United States and Japan:Testing Yamagishi's emancipation theory of trust across 31 nations. Social Psychology Quarterly, 2009, 72(4):365-383.

Freitag Markus, Traunmüller R. Spheres of trust:An empirical analysis of the foundations of particularized and generalized trust. European Journal of Political Research, 2009, 48(6):782-803.

Inglehart R, Baker W E. Modernization, cultural change, and the persistence of traditional values. American Sociological Review, 2000, 65(1):19-51.

Greenwald A G, Banaji M R. Implicit social cognition:Attitudes, self-esteem, and stereotypes. Psychological Review, 1995:102(1):4-27.

喻丰, 彭凯平, 郑先隽.大数据背景下的心理学:中国心理学的学科体系重构及特征.科学通报, 2015, 60(5):520-533.

薛婷, 陈浩, 赖凯声, 等.心理信息学:网络信息时代下的心理学新发展.心理科学进展, 2015, 23(2):325-337.

Bollen J, Pepe A, Mao H. Modeling public mood and emotion:Twitter sentiment and socio-economic phenomena. Computer Science, 2009, 44(12):2365-2370.

Kashima E S, Kashima Y. Culture and language:The case of cultural dimensions and personal pronoun use. Journal of CrossCultural Psychology, 1998, 29(3):461-486.

Twenge J M, Campbell W K, Gentile B. Changes in pronoun use in American books and the rise of individualism, 1960-2008. Journal of Cross-Cultural Psychology, 2013, 44(3):406-415.

Yamagishi T, Yamagishi M. Trust and commitment in the United States and Japan. Motivation and Emotion, 1994, 18(2):129-166.

Kearns M, Ron D. Algorithmic stability and sanity-check bounds for leave-one-out cross-validation. Neural Computation, 2006, 11(6):1427-1453.

Download
Request a Copy

Share

COinS