The COVID-19 pandemic has affected 222 countries and territories around the globe. Notably, the speed of COVID-19 spread varies significantly across countries. This cross-cultural research proposes and empirically examines how national culture influences the speed of COVID-19 spread in three studies. Study 1 examines the effects of Hofstede's national cultural dimensions on the speed of COVID-19 spread in 60 countries. Drawing on the GLOBE study (House et al., 2004), Study 2 investigates how GLOBE cultural dimensions relate to the speed of the pandemic's spread in 55 countries. Study 3 examines the effect of cultural tightness in 31 countries. We find that five national cultural dimensions - power distance, uncertainty avoidance, humane orientation, in-group collectivism, and cultural tightness - are significantly related to the speed of COVID-19 spread in the initial stages, but not in the later stages, of the pandemic. Study 1 shows that the coronavirus spreads faster in countries with small power distance and strong uncertainty avoidance. Study 2 supports these findings and further reveals that countries with low humane orientation and high in-group collectivism report a faster spread of the disease. Lastly, Study 3 shows that COVID-19 spreads slower in countries with high cultural tightness.

Historical cultural practices that no longer exist can have modern day effects. Because communism has been linked with distrust of government, it was hypothesized that (a) historical communism would be negatively associated with COVID-19 vaccination rates, and (b) trust in government would mediate the association. Two studies assessed these hypotheses. Study 1 tested the hypotheses among European, Asian, and African countries, while Study 2 focused on East and West Germany within Europe. All samples except Africa found support for an association between historical communism and lower COVID-19 vaccination rates. However, trust in government did not mediate the association in Study 1, though a significant indirect effect did emerge within Germany in Study 2. Associations held controlling for GDP and age of population. Together, the studies suggest that historical communism in Europe and Asia is associated with real-world behavior today, and that trust in government might be partly responsible for the effect within Germany but less likely within Europe as a whole.

To assess whether socio-cultural values are population-level risk factors for health, I sought to predict COVID-19-related mortality between 2 weeks and 6 months after the first COVID-19-related death in a country based on values extracted from the World Values Survey for different country sets, after controlling for various confounding variables. COVID-19-related mortality was increased in countries endorsing political participation but decreased in countries with greater trust in institutions and materialistic orientations. The values were specific to COVID-19-related mortality, did not predict general health outcomes, and values predicting increased COVID-19-related mortality predicted decreased mortality from other outcomes (e.g., environmental-related mortality).

Research indicates that Latino survey respondents are more likely to acquiesce than non-Latino European Americans, thereby decreasing the potential for measurement invariance across cultural groups. In order to better understand what drives this culturally patterned response style, we examined the influence of respondent and interviewer characteristics on acquiescence. Data were obtained from a telephone survey of 400 Mexican American, Puerto Rican, Cuban American, and non-Latino European American respondents and a self-administered survey of 21 interviewers. Higher acquiescence was associated with several respondent characteristics: older age, lower education, stronger Latino cultural orientation, Spanish use, Latino ethnicity, and, among Latinos, Cuban American ethnicity. In contrast, acquiescence was not influenced by respondent-interviewer social distance, social deference, or interviewer characteristics (e.g., education, gender, acculturation, interviewer experience). These findings indicate that acquiescence differs across Latino ethnic subgroups and that respondent and language factors are more influential determinants of acquiescence than survey interviewers.

This article introduces a new dataset of historical family characteristics based on ethnographic literature. The novelty of the dataset lies in the fact that it is constructed at the level of the ethnic group. To test the possibilities of the dataset, we construct a measure of family constraints on women's agency from it and explore its correlation to a number of geographical factors.

We study whether having several siblings decreases the level of educational performance of adolescents and whether this phenomenon can be compensated by other factors such as the economic or cultural resources of the parents. Based on this compensation model, parental resources should be associated with children's educational attainments more strongly in families with a higher rather than a lower number of children. We analyzed the Program for International Student Assessment (PISA) data from 20 Western countries and found that better family wealth, an increased level of parental education, and a higher parental occupational status were associated with increased educational attainments more strongly among 15-year-old children who have siblings than among children without siblings. The same effect was not found in the case of family cultural possessions. Although parental resources may matter more in larger families than in smaller families, some types of resources are more important than others regarding compensation.

We assessed whether mothers' and fathers' self-reports of acceptance-rejection, warmth, and hostility/rejection/neglect (HRN) of their pre-adolescent children differ cross-nationally and relative to the gender of the parent and child in 10 communities in 9 countries, including China, Colombia, Italy, Jordan, Kenya, the Philippines, Sweden, Thailand, and the United States (N = 998 families). Mothers and fathers in all countries reported a high degree of acceptance and warmth, and a low degree of HRN, but countries also varied. Mothers reported greater acceptance of children than fathers in China, Italy, Sweden, and the United States, and these effects were accounted for by greater self-reported warmth in mothers than fathers in China, Italy, the Philippines, Sweden, and Thailand and less HRN in mothers than fathers in Sweden. Fathers reported greater warmth than mothers in Kenya. Mother and father acceptance-rejection were moderately correlated. Relative levels of mother and father acceptance and rejection appear to be country specific.