Immorality and Bu Daode, Unculturedness and Bu Wenming

In contemporary Western moral philosophy literature that discusses the Chinese ethical tradition, it is a commonplace practice to use the Chinese term daode 道德 as a technical translation of the English term moral. The present study provides some empirical evidence showing a discrepancy between the terms moral and daode. There is a much more pronounced difference between prototypically immoral and prototypically uncultured behaviors in English (USA) than between prototypically bu daode 不道德 and prototypically bu wenming 不文明 behaviors in Mandarin Chinese (Mainland China). If the Western concept of immorality is defined in contraposition to things that are matters of etiquette or conventional norms and thus tied to a more or less tangible moral / conventional distinction, then we are dealing with a different structure in Mandarin Chinese – the prototypically bu daode and bu wenming behaviors seem to largely overlap. We also discuss whether bu lunli 不倫理 and bu hefa 不合法 can be considered adequate candidates for translation of immorality and we answer in the negative

A many-analysts approach to the relation between religiosity and well-being

The relation between religiosity and well-being is one of the most researched topics in the psychology of religion, yet the directionality and robustness of the effect remains debated. Here, we adopted a many-analysts approach to assess the robustness of this relation based on a new cross-cultural dataset (N = 10, 535 participants from 24 countries). We recruited 120 analysis teams to investigate (1) whether religious people self-report higher well-being, and (2) whether the relation between religiosity and self-reported well-being depends on perceived cultural norms of religion (i.e., whether it is considered normal and desirable to be religious in a given country). In a two-stage procedure, the teams first created an analysis plan and then executed their planned analysis on the data. For the first research question, all but 3 teams reported positive effect sizes with credible/confidence intervals excluding zero (median reported beta = 0.120). For the second research question, this was the case for 65% of the teams (median reported beta = 0.039). While most teams applied (multilevel) linear regression models, there was considerable variability in the choice of items used to construct the independent variables, the dependent variable, and the included covariates.</p

Psychological essentialism in selecting the 14th Dalai Lama: An alternative account

common-sense psychological essentialism as applied to objects could explain the selection process for the 14 th Dalai Lama in Tibet. Specifically, they argued that Tibetan bureaucrats represent the Dalai Lama’s personal objects as imbued with his essence. Because of this, they claimed, Tibetan bureaucrats test whether candidates are the reincarnation of the Dalai Lama based on whether the candidates can correctly identify, from a number of items, the one that belonged to the 13 th Dalai Lama. In this article, we draw on knowledge of the Tibetan Buddhist selection process to argue that Bloom and Gelman have overlooked the important role that the continuity of personal memories plays in the process of selecting the Dalai Lama. Finally, we propose that assumptions about the continuity of qualities for persons, rather than objects, drive the selection procedures. In our view, Bloom and Gelman’s claim that continued memory does not play a role in the object-identification task because some of the items are identical is not warranted. First, though some of the objects may appear to be identical to ordinary folk, they are not assumed to be identical to the Dalai Lama, who is supposed to have intimate familiarity with those he owned and this is exactly the point of the task. Second, when candidates are asked to identif

The Einstein effect: global evidence for scientific source credibility effects and the influence of religiosity

People tend to evaluate information from reliable sources more favourably, but it is unclear exactly how perceivers' worldviews interact with this source credibility effect. In a large and diverse cross-cultural sample (N = 10; 195 from 24 countries), we presented participants with obscure, meaningless statements attributed to either a spiritual guru or a scientist. We found a robust global source credibility effect for scientific authorities, which we dub `the Einstein effect': across all 24 countries scientists hold greater authority than spiritual source, even among highly committed religious people, who are relatively also more credulous of nonsense from scientists than they are of nonsense from spiritual gurus. Additionally, individual religiosity predicted a weaker relative preference for the statement from the scientist vs. the spiritual guru, and was more strongly associated with credibility judgments for the guru than the scientist. Independent data on explicit trust ratings across 143 countries mirrored the experimental patterns. These findings suggest that irrespective of religious worldview, science is a powerful and universal heuristic that signals the reliability of information