Culture, Work Attitudes, and Job Search: Evidence from the Swiss Language Border

Eugster, Beatrix; Lalive, Rafael; Steinhauer, Andreas; Zweimüller, Josef

doi:10.1093/jeea/jvw024

Cited by 92 publications

(71 citation statements)

References 33 publications

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“…Utilizing empirical strategies analogous to ours, researchers have shown the substantial effect of culture on women's labor force participation and fertility (Contreras and Plaza 2010;Fernández and Fogli 2006;Fernández 2007;Fernández and Fogli 2009), unemployment (Brügger et al 2009), self-employment (Marcén 2014), the search for a job (Eugster et al 2016), on living arrangements (Giuliano 2007), divorce (Furtado et al 2013), on the math gender gap (Nollenberger et al 2016), and even on the fertility behavior of teen women (Bellido et al 2016). We contribute to these lines of research by extending the analysis on the impact of culture on the number children born.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 96%

The effect of culture on the fertility decisions of immigrant women in the United States

2018

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This paper examines whether culture plays a role in the number of children born. To explore this issue, we use data on immigrant women who arrived in the United States under 6 years old. Since all these women are resident in the same country from their early lives, and grew up under the same laws, institutions, and economic conditions, then the differences between them by country of origin may be due to cultural differences, as the epidemiological approach suggests. Following that approach, we identify the cultural effect, exploiting variations in the mean number of children born by country of origin, using data from the Integrated Public Use Microdata Series International that allows us to measure more precisely the cultural proxy by age, education level, and employment status. Results show that the home-country mean number of children born has a positive and statistically significant relationship to the number of children born of immigrants living in the US, suggesting that culture is important. Our findings are robust to the introduction of several home country variables, and to the use of different subsamples. Our results are maintained when we control for unobservable characteristics by country of origin. Additionally, we extend this work to an analysis of both the decision to have children and the number of children born, finding again that culture appears to play a significant role.

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Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 96%

The effect of culture on the fertility decisions of immigrant women in the United States

2018

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“…The overall pattern is one of limited variation within groups and potentially considerable variation between groups [10]. Most importantly, this pattern might persist even amid the constant flow of cultural information across group boundaries [11]. Genetic transmission cannot do & 2017 The Author(s) Published by the Royal Society.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Behavioural homogenization with spillovers in a normative domain

Efferson

Vogt

2018

Proc. R. Soc. B.

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The importance of culture for human social evolution hinges largely on the extent to which culture supports outcomes that would not otherwise occur. An especially controversial claim is that social learning leads groups to coalesce around group-typical behaviours and associated social norms that spill over to shape choices in asocial settings. To test this, we conducted an experiment with 878 groups of participants in 116 communities in Sudan. Participants watched a short film and evaluated the appropriate way to behave in the situation dramatized in the film. Each session consisted of an asocial condition in which participants provided private evaluations and a social condition in which they provided public evaluations. Public evaluations allowed for social learning. Across sessions, we randomized the order of the two conditions. Public choices dramatically increased the homogeneity of normative evaluations. When the social condition was first, this homogenizing effect spilled over to subsequent asocial conditions. The asocial condition when first was thus alone in producing distinctly heterogeneous groups. Altogether, information about the choices of others led participants to converge rapidly on similar normative evaluations that continued to hold sway in subsequent asocial settings. These spillovers were at least partly owing to the combined effects of conformity and self-consistency. Conformity dominated self-consistency when the two mechanisms were in conflict, but self-consistency otherwise produced choices that persisted through time. Additionally, the tendency to conform was heterogeneous. Females conformed more than males, and conformity increased with the number of other people a decision-maker observed before making her own choice.

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“…For example, if 75% of the people in a reference group exhibit a certain behavior, a conformist adopts this same behavior with a probability greater than 0.75. Such a tendency has the interesting property that it can stabilize differences between cultural groups [12–14] even in the face of persistent contact between the groups in question. Genes cannot do this, and for this reason conformity has figured repeatedly in the protracted, on-going, and acrimonious debate about the special role of culture in shaping the evolution of human cooperation [1, 2, 15–25].…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

The Evolution of Facultative Conformity Based on Similarity

et al. 2016

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Conformist social learning can have a pronounced impact on the cultural evolution of human societies, and it can shape both the genetic and cultural evolution of human social behavior more broadly. Conformist social learning is beneficial when the social learner and the demonstrators from whom she learns are similar in the sense that the same behavior is optimal for both. Otherwise, the social learner’s optimum is likely to be rare among demonstrators, and conformity is costly. The trade-off between these two situations has figured prominently in the longstanding debate about the evolution of conformity, but the importance of the trade-off can depend critically on the flexibility of one’s social learning strategy. We developed a gene-culture coevolutionary model that allows cognition to encode and process information about the similarity between naive learners and experienced demonstrators. Facultative social learning strategies that condition on perceived similarity evolve under certain circumstances. When this happens, facultative adjustments are often asymmetric. Asymmetric adjustments mean that the tendency to follow the majority when learners perceive demonstrators as similar is stronger than the tendency to follow the minority when learners perceive demonstrators as different. In an associated incentivized experiment, we found that social learners adjusted how they used social information based on perceived similarity, but adjustments were symmetric. The symmetry of adjustments completely eliminated the commonly assumed trade-off between cases in which learners and demonstrators share an optimum versus cases in which they do not. In a second experiment that maximized the potential for social learners to follow their preferred strategies, a few social learners exhibited an inclination to follow the majority. Most, however, did not respond systematically to social information. Additionally, in the complete absence of information about their similarity to demonstrators, social learners were unwilling to make assumptions about whether they shared an optimum with demonstrators. Instead, social learners simply ignored social information even though this was the only information available. Our results suggest that social cognition equips people to use conformity in a discriminating fashion that moderates the evolutionary trade-offs that would occur if conformist social learning was rigidly applied.

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Culture, Work Attitudes, and Job Search: Evidence from the Swiss Language Border

Cited by 92 publications

References 33 publications

The effect of culture on the fertility decisions of immigrant women in the United States

The effect of culture on the fertility decisions of immigrant women in the United States

Behavioural homogenization with spillovers in a normative domain

The Evolution of Facultative Conformity Based on Similarity

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