Prosocial behavior and the motivation behind it have been dominant topic and core concern of numerous studies across array of different social science disciplines. Nevertheless, the prevailing research approach is still mainly focused on prosocial behavior observed in terms of situational and individual aspects and less in terms of cultural and group tendencies and orientations. This research tried to explain prosocial behavior among 79 different countries focusing on cultural dimension of uncertainty avoidance. According to Hofstede, uncertainty avoidance (UAI) reflects how society deals with the uncertainty that future brings and with the level of anxiety brought by the outcome of this ambiguity. The amount to which the participants of a culture feel threatened by ambiguous or unfamiliar situations and shape views and institutions to avoid them are reflected in UAI score. Since charity is closely intertwined with economic, social and personal resources which in turn are closely linked with uncertainty avoidance, we successfully postulated how lower uncertainty avoidance is related with higher prosocial behavior which we ultimately supported by our research results.

In two studies, the authors predicted and found that Uyghur-Chinese are more independent and interdependent than Han-Chinese in explicit and implicit measurements: (a) Uyghur-Chinese are more independent in explicit beliefs and show strong dispositional bias and express more socially disengaging emotion and more relational mobility. Their independence could partially mediate the relationship between culture and dispositional bias and socially disengaging emotion and relational mobility. (b) At the same time, Uyghur-Chinese are more interdependent in explicit beliefs and show strong situational bias and express more socially engaging emotion and more holistic thinking style. Their interdependence could partially mediate the relationship between culture and situational bias and socially engaging emotion and holism. The results suggest that Uyghur-Chinese may have a unique self-construal pattern different from the eastern-western paradigm.

Unmerited authorship is a practice common to many countries around the world, but are there systematic cultural differences in the practice? We tested whether scientists from collectivistic countries are more likely to add unmerited coauthors than scientists from individualistic countries. We analyzed archival data from top scientific journals (Study 1) and found that national collectivism predicted the number of authors, which might suggest more unmerited authors. Next, we found that collectivistic scientists were more likely to add unmerited coauthors than individualistic scientists, both between cultures (Studies 2–3) and within cultures (Study 4). Finally, we found that priming people with collectivistic self-construal primes made them more likely to endorse questionable authorship attitudes (Study 5). These findings show that culture collectivism is related to unmerited authorship.

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