Collective Interdependence Research Articles

Improving health service design and delivery for men: does gender targeting matter?

PurposeConsumer well-being in health-care settings is often undermined by information asymmetries, uncertainty and complex choices. Men are generally less motivated to adopt support tools designed to facilitate shared decision-making (SDM) and increase involvement in health service delivery. This study aims to examine the effects of sports team metaphors in a male-centered decision aid on empowerment and preparedness within a sleep apnea treatment context, a common disease among men. Individual-level factors that influence the decision aid experience are also considered.Design/methodology/approachAn online panel sample of 296 US men was randomly assigned to a generic or gender targeted decision aid. The scenario-based method was used to simulate the decision aid experience. A one-way MANOVA tested the effects of gender targeting on SDM-related outcomes. Structural equation modeling was then undertaken to analyze relationships between self-construal and these outcomes.FindingsParticipants who experienced the gender-targeted decision aid reported higher levels of empowerment and preparedness. The positive relationship between collective interdependence and empowerment was stronger among those who received the targeted decision aid. The positive relationship between empowerment and preparedness was also significantly stronger in the targeted group. Empowerment mediated the effect of self-construal on preparedness.Originality/valueLittle to no research has evaluated the effectiveness of sports team metaphors in improving SDM and facilitating health-care value cocreation. Results provide insight into how to enhance service design and delivery for men facing medical decisions.

The Flickering Torch

Abstract This essay offers an ethnographic analysis of Tanzania's electrical power crisis in 2011 and the national disposition to endure suffering that it seemed to make evident. It shows that in asking citizens to suffer the near-total breakdown of the power supply in good faith, the ruling party, Chama Cha Mapinduzi (CCM, or Party of the Revolution), drew on a cultural-political orientation developed during the socialist era and sustained through a long period of partial neoliberal reform. While some Tanzanians saw this suffering in good faith as an expression of docility and credulity, the essay suggests that it also speaks to the moral power of socialism's underlying vision of collective interdependence, and might be read as a utopian insistence on that vision in an era of growing oligarchy and inequality.

Review: White Utopias: The Religious Exoticism of Transformational Festivals, by Amanda J. Lucia

The early 2020s have already fostered reckonings with the institutionalized legacies of colonialist practices. Conference presenters dutifully acknowledge land ownership to indigenous peoples. Social media users circulate abolitionist readings and lectures. Organizational personnel investigate diversity and equity complaints. In these ways, progressives have started grappling with entrenched white supremacy, misogyny, and class warfare. Will these changes deepen, given conservative backlash and growing socioeconomic inequalities?White Utopias presciently anticipates this tumultuous moment with its study of the gatherings of “spiritual, but not religious” white yoga enthusiasts. As Amanda Lucia explains, these privileged persons gather at yoga retreats as a respite from the overwork of consuming careers and the ennui of anomic communities. Bonding over spiritual practices and values drawn from Indic and indigenous cultures, they find personal meaning through perfecting their bodies. Through their blissed-out communion in spatially and racially segregated settings, these yoga enthusiasts reproduce earlier, white colonialist acts of domination, extraction, and racial valuation.Using participant observation and interviews with participants, Lucia explores the exclusionary spaces created and dominated by whites. Starting in 2011, she conducted 129 days of field research at festivals and events at remote destinations, from New Zealand to India to the Nevada Black Rock Desert. These included five Bhakti Fests, five Shakti Fests, six Wanderlusts, three Lightning in a Bottles, and four Burning Mans, as well as fifty-two days of “ethnocultural” festivals, including Kumbh Mela in India. Lucia focuses on yogic activities at such sites, arguing that these endeavors hamper more expansive possibilities, such as collective social change. The religious studies professor immerses readers in spaces hosted by white yoga gurus who cater to the affluent, as well as events that draw a wider socio-economic cross-section. In observing these events in their natural environs, she reveals participants’ experiences, both emotional and physical. The latter include bodily horrors (such as Lucia’s allergic reaction to the alkaline desert and a disfiguring sty acquired during travel) that mar the idylls of moneyed, ascetic devotion. Lucia also captures the affective wonder of collective effervescence, as well as anguished confessionals of wounding exclusion, such as one experienced by a Black friend and his wife attempting to enjoy a performance at Burning Man.In portraying how people can wield spirituality as divisive rather than unifying forces, this research contributes to a deeper understanding of what is lost when groups invest their transformational energies into activities that not all persons can access. By depicting the cost of centuries of colonialism reproduced in contemporary times, Lucia’s criticisms bridge territories for practitioners and scholars to consider how more inclusionary spiritual communities could emerge.This book’s critical perspective on whiteness, spirituality, and festivals should appeal to a variety of readers, including advanced undergraduates and graduate students, as well as general readers. Its approach of “studying up” such jet-setting community-seekers adds to existing studies of white elites and their milieus by sociologists Brooke Harrington (2020), Rachel Sherman (2019), and Shamus Khan (2012). Qualitative researchers will appreciate the text’s excerpts from field notes and quotes from interlocuters, all evidence of the sweat of a seasoned ethnographer. That said, a curious sense of ahistoricity does crop up at times. For instance, the book characterizes organizers’ efforts to distinguish Burning Man from conventional festivals as “recent”—these concerns actually surfaced as early as the 1990s, as documented in my own research (2009). Tensions over whose interests are being supported have deeper roots than conveyed by such descriptions, and nostalgia only obscures that fact.Such details aside, Lucia’s research points to possible futures in which transcendence does not involve erasing nonwhite cultures or glossing over existing power imbalances. Her cautionary analyses highlight how transcendence requires reimagining existing institutions in ways that promote authentic liberation and everyday connection. Recent events have underscored this need for dramatically different organizational approaches. For instance, the pandemic’s throttling of mass in-person gatherings—as well as the tragic consequences of premature celebrations evident in the second wave of deaths and illness engulfing India as of 2021—underscore how interconnected societies and individuals are. Clearly, meditative retreats and transgressive festivals offer limited interventions into resolving world issues of climate change and inequality.Realizations that segregated self-care and communion prolong inequalities have started to permeate wider awareness, particularly as inadequate pandemic responses by governments ensure continued unequal status quos. Individual and group actions can recognize, or deny, collective interdependence, with consequences for all. To that end, the Burning Man organization made the financially challenging, but socially responsible, decision to cancel its 2021 face-to-face gathering of more than 80,000 campers. For some, these times might elicit rethinking of how to engage in spiritual practices and the societal consequences of these.

Reflections on the COVID moment and life beyond neoliberalism

The COVID pandemic has demonstrated the weakness of neoliberalism by showing the importance of public services, workers’ need for security, and a heightened awareness of collective interdependence. Economic theory recognises the deficiencies of depending on market forces by accepting certain grounds for public intervention, including public and collective goods and negative externalities. Acceptance of the human contribution to climate change has massively increased their importance. The pandemic has had similar effects. The very rich may be able to escape to safe places, but the great mass of us are dependent on the support of each other, often through a mobilisation of resources that only states can organise. While much of the community that was rediscovered during the pandemic was highly local, damage to the climate and the spread of disease cannot be contained within national boundaries; cooperation has to be cross-national. It is therefore incompatible with an obsession with national sovereignty. For Europeans the institutions of the EU are central.

Mask Wearing as Cultural Behavior: An Investigation Across 45 U.S. States During the COVID-19 Pandemic.

Although masks (face coverings) are a prime tool in fighting airborne pathogens, during the COVID-19 pandemic in the United States the use of masks encountered resistance based on existing patterns of cultural division. We argue that mask wearing must be understood basis on existing cultural frames assessed at both the individual level and the state level. We relied on prominent frameworks in cultural psychology: individualism-collectivism as well as independent and interdependent self-construals, the tightness-looseness framework, U.S. honor cultures, and political orientation as predictors. Using multilevel modeling, in a sample of 633 respondents from 45 U.S. states we investigated mask-wearing behavior, masks' perceived utility, implications for well-being, and the social meaning attributed to masks. Conservatism was linked to lower mask wearing, and consistently unfavorable perceptions of mask wearing. Collective interdependence predicted favorable perceptions of masks, as did state-level differences in collectivism; both constructs were linked with viewing mask wearing to be normative. Independent self-construal predicted a greater intent to wear masks, even though masks were also evaluated less favorably. Mediation analyses revealed that a single mediator, the perceived utility of mask wearing, was implicated in translating the effects of different cultural predictors into behavior. Additional findings highlighted that in tightener (vs. looser) states masks wearing was conceived of as a civic duty, whereas in U.S. honor states mask were seen as spoiling one's public image. Our discussion focuses on the cultural and political context of mask wearing, argues that different communities in the U.S. respond to its symbolic and social meaning, and suggest strategies to increase mask wearing among those who are otherwise reluctant to do so.

Evolution of cooperation driven by collective interdependence on multilayer networks

Group interactions, formulated in terms of a public goods game, can not be deduced by the corresponding sum of pairwise interactions. This study proposes a collective interdependence characterizing the functioning of interdependent groups between subnetworks. Via the establishment of global group interactions across subnetwork layers, we show a double-edged sword of collective interdependence in promoting cooperation. Enhancement of collective interdependence hinders the evolution of cooperation whenever global synergy factor is small, while an optimal collective interdependence emerges most favoring the evolution of cooperation for high global synergy factors. However, for such high global synergy factors a low level of interdependence puts cooperators to a most disadvantaged place. A combination of low levels of collective interdependence and high local synergy factors shows that a moderate global synergetic effect most favors the evolution of cooperation. Our work reveals that collective interdependence impacts interdependent network reciprocity significantly and highlights the importance of network reciprocity in enhancing the evolution of cooperation.

The possibility of care-full cities

In this paper I explore the possibility of the feminist ethic of care to enhance urban theory by placing emphasis upon our collective interdependence and responsibility to one another. As an ethics, care has the potential to maintain, continue, repair and transform our worlds. As a practice, care is often hidden from view despite the integral role care plays in ensuring survival in our worlds of both human and non-human others. As a performative act attuned to the possibility of care in the city I discuss how care was manifest in this space of care by drawing on research undertaken at The Women’s Library, Newtown which is located in Sydney, Australia. I reflect upon care-full practices that maintain, continue and repair our worlds within and beyond the library. Following this, I propose three ways we might continue to pay attention to/with care in urban theory. I argue that paying attention to/with care may assist us in understanding the role of maintenance and repair in creating more caring and just cities; emphasise our collective inter-dependence and responsibility for one another; and reveal silences, injustices and neglect in a way that provokes action.

Inhuman, All Too Human: Virginia Woolf and the Anthropocene

Inhuman, All Too Human: Virginia Woolf and the Anthropocene Emma Brush (bio) The idea that we are living in a time of crisis may be less contentious than the claim that we find ourselves in the Anthropocene— a new geological era defined by human impact— but the two often go hand in hand. Dipesh Chakrabarty’s four theses on the “current planetary crisis of climate change” offer one view of the ways in which crisis and Anthropocene have combined to characterize, and disrupt, modern life and understanding.1 According to Chakrabarty, climate change and the accompanying Anthropocene formulation together trouble not only the scale of human history and the scope of what it means to be human but also the potential for a legible future altogether. The need to internalize these conceptual ruptures becomes as urgent as it is difficult— we can no more experience the full force of global impact than we can the life of the species nor the possibility of its extinction. As a result, the Anthropocene concept emerges as a formal challenge and imperative— to come to terms with the facts of planetary crisis, collective interdependence, and the potential elision of futurity— for the sake of living on.2 But however novel, as an environmental condition, the Anthropocene as discourse owes to a longer conceptual lineage— and a particular inheritance, I argue, from literary and artistic modernism— that complicates these claims. The comparison might begin with the rhetoric of newness (the “structural principle of radical rupture,” to quote Susan Stanford Friedman) that reenacts in a different century the modernist imperative to “make it new.”3 The Anthropocene’s “turn toward epochal time” similarly appears in the modernists’ fascination [End Page 69] with the prehistoric, the primeval, and the primordial.4 Indeed, the species thinking prevalent in Anthropocene discourse originates in evolutionary theory, the provocations of which feature prominently in early twentieth-century thought and literature. The millenarian posture of contemporary environmental discourse, meanwhile, evokes a modernist temporality, in which the “past, present, and future exist in a relationship of crisis” in response to perceived decline and looming catastrophe, both increasingly out of control and of humanity’s making.5 Technological advance and the social structures underpinning it play a central role in this narrative of decline and rupture, just as they do for the modernists. As Sarah Cole writes in her study of modernism and violence, “The precariousness of humanity, in the face of a bewildering array of powers— mass violence, totalitarianism, bureaucracy, technology, the onslaught of visuality— is one of the primary morals of the twentieth century.”6 Cole’s framing suggests that the Anthropocene’s basic motif— the impotence of the human faced with the force of humanity’s collective work— derives much from the social and political disruptions of the first half of the twentieth century and the modernist articulations forged in response. Without question, climate change brings unprecedented scientific and technological challenges and beckons perilous social, political, and environmental consequences. But the Anthropocene, as a rhetorical response to climate change and other anthropogenic activity, does not authorize any self-evident ethical or political answers. Modernism’s example “as a discourse of diagnosis and protest, an artistic response to a social problem,” serves as a reminder that such projects need not serve democratic governance nor equitable outcomes.7 A shadow side of modernism was an often-racist reification of nature and place, an offshoot of Darwinism and imperialism that manifested most directly in the form of eugenics and fascism, but also in a wide range of misanthropic, chauvinistic, and primitivist formulations that continue to trouble scholars of the period.8 Anthropologist Andrew Bauer has argued that the Anthropocene might similarly promote “a regressive environmental politics based on romanticized notions of nature,” essentialized versions of humanity, and inequitable forms of knowledge production.9 The larger work of this essay will be to begin to contextualize the figural and rhetorical work performed by the Anthropocene concept within the modernist canon and legacy, in an effort to sharpen [End Page 70] its use and articulate its hazards, with an eye, ultimately, toward better navigating the material conditions the term succeeds in calling into view. As a...

Grandiose and Vulnerable Narcissism in Relation to Life Satisfaction, Self-Esteem, and Self-Construal

Abstract. A growing body of research suggests the viability of the distinction between grandiose and vulnerable narcissism. Each subtype of narcissism reveals distinct associations with life satisfaction, self-esteem, and self-construal. The goal of the present study ( N = 253) is to apply this distinction to replicate the results of previous studies with respect to life satisfaction and self-esteem and to extend the perspective by focusing on several components of self-construal: independent and interdependent (cf. Singelis, 1994 ). In addition, interdependent self-construal is either relational-interdependent or collective-interdependent (cf. Cross, Hardin, & Gercek-Swing, 2011 ). Specifically, four hypotheses are examined which have in common the assumption that grandiose and vulnerable narcissism diverge systematically in their implications for life satisfaction, self-esteem, and self-construal. Grandiose narcissism is expected to correlate positively with life satisfaction, self-esteem, independent self-construal, and collective-interdependent self-construal. In contrast, vulnerable narcissism is assumed to correlate negatively with self-esteem and life satisfaction and positively with interdependent and relational self-construal. The results, which confirm these hypotheses, underscore the necessity to differentiate between grandiose and vulnerable narcissism. Remarkably, both subtypes of narcissism are related to distinct dimensions of interdependent self-construal. Whereas grandiose narcissism is anchored in collective interdependence, vulnerable narcissism is embedded in relational interdependence.

Gender Moderates the Influence of Self-Construal Priming on Fairness Considerations.

Research in social and cultural psychology has identified that self-construal, or the way the self is defined in relation to others, plays an important role in social decision-making processes. Yet it remains difficult to isolate the effect of self-construal in a comparative approach. Therefore, we used priming methodology in three studies to induce either an independent or interdependent mindset to test direct consequences on fairness considerations. Specifically, we asked whether participants would accept an unfair ultimatum game offer: a split of 10 euros, where the participant is allocated the marginal share of 3 and the proposer 7. If the participant refuses, neither gets paid. In the first study, we used the well-known similarities and differences prime. Here, activating an interdependent mindset decreased rejection of the unfair offer compared to the independent mindset and control condition, but only in females. The prime did not affect males. In the second and third study we modified our university's mission statement to instead include either independent or interdependent values. Females displayed a similar direction of effects; in males however, activating an interdependent mindset increased rejection. Taken together, the results show that whether participants accept or reject an unfair offer depends on both their gender and the self-construal prime. The results were interpreted using the distinction between relational independence that has been associated with females, and collective interdependence, that has been associated with males. Possible consequences for future studies are discussed.

Offshoring or Overbalancing: A Preliminary Empirical Analysis of the Effect of U.S. Troop Presence on the Political Behavior of Regional Partners

Policy discussions on the future of land power often address the utility of U.S. troop deployments as a tool of influence. Analysis in the field of international relations offers analytical and prescriptive discussion of the utility of land forces, but empirical analysis of the effect of the stationing of U.S. troops on the foreign policy orientation of the states in which they are stationed is lacking. The notions of “over-the-horizon” capabilities and “offshore balancing” on one hand, and of “overbalancing” or “onshore balancing” on the other, offer rival conceptions of the relationship between troop positioning and political behavior among states in which the troops are positioned. This essay attempts to deal systematically and empirically with the generally opposing but occasionally complementary claims made by authors articulating these two approaches. Using panel data covering the years 1950-2011 for both Europe and East Asia, I develop and test a theory that a policy-relevant variable, the number of U.S. troops stationed in a particular country, provides a useful (if only partial) explanation for the extent to which states align with the United States politically and strategically. I find that the more troops are stationed in a state, the more likely that state is to display a foreign policy orientation that is aligned with that of the United States. This phenomenon appears to be related to the influence that the U.S. acquires in stationing troops, rather than being a result of collective action problems, economic interdependence, or domestic political institutions, as much of the political economy literature on alliance and alignment suggests; or as a result of responses to threats, as the international security literature suggests. The association does, however, differ significantly between East Asia and Europe, and over time. I find evidence for this argument by assessing the correlation between the number of troops stationed in a particular state, and the proximity of the foreign policy orientation of that state to that of the United States, as expressed by alignment in the United Nations General Assembly.

Are Women More Loyal Customers than Men? Gender Differences in Loyalty to Firms and Individual Service Providers

Prevailing wisdom assumes that female consumers are more loyal than male consumers. The authors report conditions under which the reverse is found, depending on the object of customer loyalty. For example, whereas female consumers tend to be more loyal than male consumers to individuals, such as individual service providers, this difference is reversed when the object of loyalty is a group of people. The authors find a similar crossover interaction effect for loyalty to individual employees versus loyalty to companies. This effect is mediated by self-construal in terms of relational versus collective interdependence. The authors discuss the managerial and theoretical implications of these gender differences.

Are Women More Loyal Customers Than Men? Gender Differences in Loyalty to Firms and Individual Service Providers

Prevailing wisdom assumes that female consumers are more loyal than male consumers. The authors report conditions under which the reverse is found, depending on the object of customer loyalty. For example, whereas female consumers tend to be more loyal than male consumers to individuals, such as individual service providers, this difference is reversed when the object of loyalty is a group of people. The authors find a similar crossover interaction effect for loyalty to individual employees versus loyalty to companies. This effect is mediated by self-construal in terms of relational versus collective interdependence. The authors discuss the managerial and theoretical implications of these gender differences.

Constitutions for Local Collective Action and Institutional Interdependence

Collective action can take place at a plurality of levels. It has to be based on a constitution which defines the basic rules of interaction. Here, we are concerned with the problem of the constitutional setting of “bottom-up” formal institutions with a “club” nature. The pressure to improve the efficiency of services pushes local administrations to co-ordinate to produce public goods. This process has stimulated the birth of different forms of agencies or private companies with a “club” nature. The aim of this paper is to discuss the effects of institutional interdependence on the efficiency of this kind of collective action. In order to shed some light on this problem, the paper first discusses the problem of the relativity of efficiency to the institutional setting. A framework of analysis is then discussed to identify the main factors affecting collective action. Finally some evidence will be provided by a comparative institutional analysis performed on some case studies concerning local associational forms among communes in north-eastern Italy.

Empathy, Ways of Knowing, and Interdependence as Mediators of Gender Differences in Attitudes Toward Hate Speech and Freedom of Speech

Women are more intolerant of hate speech than men. This study examined relationality measures as mediators of gender differences in the perception of the harm of hate speech and the importance of freedom of speech. Participants were 107 male and 123 female college students. Questionnaires assessed the perceived harm of hate speech, the importance of freedom of speech, empathy, relational and collective interdependence, and connected and separate ways of knowing. Gender differences were found for the harm of hate speech, freedom of speech, empathy, and separate learning as a way of knowing. Women were more negative regarding the harm of hate speech and regarded freedom of speech as less important than men. Additionally, the perceived harm of hate speech was positively associated with empathy, connected knowing, and interdependence, and freedom of speech was positively associated with separate learning and negatively with empathy. Empathy mediated gender differences in the perceived harm of hate speech, and separate learning mediated gender differences in the importance of freedom of speech.

Are there "his" and "hers" types of interdependence? The implications of gender differences in collective versus relational interdependence for affect, behavior, and cognition.

In a recent review, S. E. Cross and L. Madson (1997) forwarded that many gender differences in social experience and behavior may be better understood through consideration of gender differences in independence and interdependence. In the current studies an expansion of the model to include both relational and collective aspects of interdependence was investigated (see R. F. Baumeister & K. L. Sommer, 1997). On the basis of the literature regarding gender differences in affect, behavior, and cognition, it was hypothesized that women would focus more on the relational aspects of interdependence, whereas men would focus more on the collective aspects of interdependence. Five studies in which gender differences in self-construals, emotional experience, selective memory, and behavioral intentions were examined supported the expansion of the model to include both relational and collective aspects of interdependence.

From Ethnocentrism to Collective Protest: Responses to Relative Deprivation and Threats to Social Identity

This experiment examined the hypotheses that both collective relative deprivation (CRD) and perceived thr eat to social identity increase the intention to engage in collective protest actions and expressions of ethnocentrism. Fifty-three pairs of female student groups developed a position on whether women should be encouraged to apply for. high-status, responsible jobs-an issue they felt was important. Feedback supposedly giving the other group's position on the issue either did or did not threaten the subjects' social identity, Then each group evaluated the other's position. False evaluations met or unfairly violated the expectation that approximately $10 per group member would be paid for experimental participation, manipulating CRD. The hypothesis for collective relative deprivation was supported. In particular, results from a series of hierarchical regression analyses suggest that the relationship between expectancy violation and collective action was mediated by feelings of dissatisfaction, discontent, and unfairness (the affective component of CRD), as collective relative deprivation theory would predict. The threat-to-identity manipulation generally had weaker and more ambiguous effects. However, the analyses supported the hypothesis that the relationship between strength of group identify and intergroup differentiation is stronger under circumstances that heighten the collective interdependence of the group (the deprived conditions). The implications of these results for studying the escalation of intergroup conflict om a social psychological perspective are discussed.

The Migrating Sect: An Illustration from Early Norwegian Immigration

Migrating sects are frequently disorganized, making them very unlike the ideal-typical, stationary, sect, a cohesive body of intimate personal fellowship. It is suggested that: (1) the sect's cohesion is based on value-consensus, not collective interdependence, (2) valueconsensus is insufficient to hold together a migrating sect, and (3) intense value-consensus may even contribute to the sect's disorganization by: (a) minimizing the importance of subsistence problems inevitable in the migration setting, thus making less likely their solution. and (b) moving sectarians to define conflicts in ideological terms, thus leading to schism and defection. The argument is illustrated from early Norwegian immigration.