What Chinese people believe about the world they inhabit: A social scientific approach to lay epistemology

Prof. Michael Harris Bond
Ph.D., Stanford University
Department of Psychology,
The Chinese University of Hong Kong

Abstract

Social scientists typically use the concept of values, viz., what is regarded as good, to describe and explain the differences among persons of different cultures. This presentation will instead provide information on how the cultural groups of our world may be compared through the concept of beliefs, viz., what is true. Five pan-cultural dimensions of belief about the world have been identified - social cynicism, social complexity, reward for application, fate control, and religiosity. I will describe the initial work in Hong Kong identifying these dimensions of belief, and then the extension of this work into 40 nations, enabling us to locate the beliefs of Chinese people in multi-national, social psychological space. I will also speculate about the function that these beliefs serve and how they combine with more traditional personality concepts to generate behavior.