University of Sussex
Neither Eastern nor Western: Patterns of independence and interdependence in Mediterranean societies
Social scientific 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. Hence, 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 Western cultural groups. We compared participants from eight Mediterranean societies (Spain, Italy, Greece, Turkey, Cyprus [Turkish Cypriot and Greek Cypriot communities], Lebanon, and Egypt) to participants from East Asian (Korea, Japan) and 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 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 across contexts) and interdependence (closeness to ingroup [vs. outgroup] members, self-construal as connected and committed to close others). We also compared subgroups within the Mediterranean region in terms of their independence and interdependence patterns with a goal to understand which socio-ecological factors might drive similarities between them. Our findings extend previous insights into patterns of social and cognitive orientation beyond commonly examined East-West comparisons to an understudied world region and provide a more nuanced examination of regional differences.
