Abstract
For the last several decades, Chinese society has experienced transformative changes. How are these changes understood among Chinese people? To examine this question, Part 1 in this research solicited folk beliefs of cultural change from a group of Chinese participants in an open-ended format, and the generated folk beliefs were rated by another group of participants in Part 2 to gage each belief's level of agreement. Part 3 plotted the folk beliefs retained in Part 2 using the Google Ngram Viewer in order to infer the amount of intellectual interests that each belief has received cross-temporarily. These analyses suggested a few themes in Chinese folk beliefs of cultural change (1) rising perceived importance of materialism and individualism in understanding contemporary Chinese culture and Chinese psychology relative to those of the past (2) rising perceived importance of freedom, democracy and human rights and (3) enduring perceived importance of family relations and friendship as well as patriotism. Interestingly, findings from Parts 2 and 3 diverged somewhat, illuminating possible divergence between folk beliefs and intellectual interests especially for issues related to heritage of Confucianism.
Highlights
During the last few decades, Chinese society has experienced a tremendous transformation driven by policy changes and rapid economic growth
In Kashima et al (2009), folk beliefs of cultural changes among participants in Australia were found to resemble one influential theory of cultural change in social science—modernization theory—which postulates that societal changes triggered by economic growth induce systematic changes in cultural and psychological processes
We anticipate that Chinese folk beliefs of cultural changes will resemble the modernization theory
Summary
During the last few decades, Chinese society has experienced a tremendous transformation driven by policy changes and rapid economic growth. That is the current research investigates folk beliefs of cultural changes (Kashima et al, 2009) among Chinese. ON THE GOOGLE NGRAM VIEWER AND ITS USE IN PSYCHOLOGICAL RESEARCH The Google Ngram Viewer (https://books.google.com/ngrams/) plots the usage frequency of words/characters of interest based on Google’s digitalized book archive, consisting of those books that were given to Google by partner publishers or from partner libraries. By entering “psychology” into the Google Ngram Viewer, it searches for all instances for which “psychology” is mentioned in the database, computes its occurrence for a particular year relative to a total number of all words that were used in all books published in that year that are archived in the database, and plots this percentage across years. Twenge and colleagues plotted the usage of words associated with individualism among contemporary Americans (e.g., “unique,” “all about me,” “I am the best”) and found that the usage of these words has increased in the American corpus since 1960 (Twenge et al, 2012). Greenfield (2013) analyzed the usages of words associated with psychological adaptation to urban environments (e.g., “choose” as opposed to “obliged” or “get” as opposed to “give”)—these words were chosen because “choose” is a defining attribute of individualism, while “obliged” is an important component of traditional collectivistic forms of living. Greenfield (2013) found increasing usages of these words in the American corpus between 1800 and 2000. (See Oishi et al, 2013, for another usage of Ngram Viewer in inferring cultural changes)
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