Imagine two workshops. Both admire excellent work. In one, trying a new method and failing is forgivable. In the other, the failed attempt follows you for years. They can share a value and produce very different habits.
Values take effect through rewards, sanctions, and expectations about other people. To explain a practice, study that combination. Admiring excellent work means something different when the route to excellence puts your standing at risk.
I organise the relevant expectations into six building blocks: trust, agency, resources, status, change cost, and power. Each draws on established research. The claim I want to test is that their interactions explain behaviour better than descriptions of a group's values alone.
What the blocks describe
A culture here is a pattern of learned expectations and practices within a specified group, domain, and period. A workplace, a religious community, and a country are different units of analysis. Even the same people can treat authority differently at work and at home. A national average cannot stand in for every person in it.
The blocks describe connected parts of a culture. Status Currency contains several sources of esteem; Agency Location separates personal from collective capacity. Institutions and material conditions shape these expectations, and the expectations help sustain or challenge those arrangements.
The value of the framework rests on its predictions. Below, I commit to one interaction, specify a test, and name the result that would count against it. The six-block framework as a whole is unvalidated.
The six blocks
1. Trust Radius
How far does the expectation of fair dealing extend beyond people you know personally?
Someone may trust relatives, unfamiliar members of a community, or strangers without a shared affiliation. That matters when deciding whom to trade with, hire, lend to, or organise alongside. But trust in strangers and confidence in a particular institution are separate judgments. You can distrust your government without assuming every stranger is dishonest.
Fukuyama's Trust and the wider social-capital literature supply much of the background. Delhey, Newton, and Welzel's work on the radius of trust tackles a measurement problem directly: when someone answers a question about “most people,” which people do they mean? Banfield and Greif offer accounts of how particular trust arrangements relate to cooperation and institutions.
A causal account must distinguish trust that enables cooperation from trust that reliable institutions have made reasonable. A correlation between trust and prosperity cannot do that work.
2. Agency Location
Who is thought capable of changing an outcome, and through what action?
Personal and collective agency belong here separately. “I can do something” and “we can do something together” can both be strong, both weak, or pull apart. A worker might feel powerless alone and effective through a union. A founder might feel the reverse. Neither belongs halfway along a line between individualism and fate.
Rotter's locus of control concerns expectations about control over outcomes. Bandura's work on collective efficacy gives the group question its own footing. Attribution studies, including Miller and Morris & Peng, ask how people explain behaviour. Those explanations are related evidence, not interchangeable measures of agency.
The instrument represents perceived personal and collective capacity separately. It leaves the explanations for low capacity open. A belief in fate, an accurate assessment of political repression, and a lack of confidence may produce similar answers for very different reasons.
3. Resource Model
In the situation at hand, are gains expected to come from creating value or taking it from someone else?
Foster's “image of limited good” describes a worldview in which desirable things are treated as finite. Chinoy and colleagues measure zero-sum thinking and examine its relationship to political views and family histories. Mokyr and McCloskey argue that changes in how people regarded commerce and improvement helped make sustained growth possible. Chinoy and colleagues
Mistaking an opportunity for mutual gain for a contest can prevent useful cooperation. But some contests really do have a fixed prize. There is only one vacancy; both candidates cannot get it. A good resource model recognises opportunities to create value without pretending distributional conflicts disappear.
So ask about a domain. The same person can believe trade creates wealth and that the fight over a particular piece of land is zero-sum.
4. Status Currency
What earns esteem here?
Wealth, skill, piety, courage, family standing, seniority, and service can each buy respect. Several can circulate in the same group. A wealthy outsider and a respected elder may have different kinds of standing, with neither able to turn theirs into the other's.
The question requires a profile. Religious learning and business success can both be achieved. They reward different work. Honour can involve conduct as well as ancestry. The instrument therefore lets several currencies coexist without adding them into a score.
Schwartz's values research helps identify what people prize. Henrich and Gil-White distinguish prestige from dominance as routes to status; Nisbett and Cohen examine honour; Weber distinguishes social honour from market position. These traditions ask different questions. What a group praises, who actually receives esteem, and who can compel obedience should be measured separately.
5. Change Cost
What does it cost to depart from an established practice?
Gelfand's tightness–looseness research studies norm strength and tolerance of deviance. It is the closest established construct here. The costs include disapproval, exclusion, career damage, and formal punishment. Their weight depends on which norm is being challenged and by whom.
My prediction is that reducing penalties for failed experiments encourages attempts. Reducing penalties for falsifying results undermines the value of those attempts. Treating every norm as an equal obstacle to innovation misses the distinction. A research group can be permissive about methods and strict about reporting honestly.
The instrument asks about departure from the practice being considered. A single national score would conceal too much of that context.
6. Power Distance
How readily is unequal authority accepted, and how much justification does it owe the people below it?
Hofstede's power distance and Schwartz's hierarchy–egalitarianism orientation are the closest predecessors. Here I use the block for the legitimacy of hierarchy. The actual concentration of power needs its own evidence. People may resent a hierarchy they have no means to change.
This differs from Status Currency. A group can esteem expertise while allowing juniors to challenge an expert. It can also concentrate authority in people whose status comes from birth or office. Ask what earns respect, then ask what rights that respect is understood to confer.
One interaction worth testing
Return to the workshops. My hypothesis is that rewarding improvements produces more experimentation when unsuccessful attempts carry a low social penalty. Rewards pull people towards the possible gain; sanctions make them weigh what happens if they fail. Either variable alone could miss the effect of the other.
I would test it as follows. Give comparable teams the same task, time, and materials, then randomly assign two conditions independently: whether recognition goes to people who find improvements, and whether an unsuccessful trial carries an explicit reputational penalty. That produces four combinations.
Count distinct methods attempted and measure the quality of the finished work separately. The prediction concerns an interaction: the increase in experimentation from rewarding improvements should be larger when the penalty for failed trials is low. Check that participants actually understood the reward and penalty arrangements. Otherwise a null result could simply mean the intended conditions never took hold.
If the reward produces the same increase under both penalty conditions, this proposed interaction hasn't earned its place. If teams try more things but do worse work, the account may explain experimentation while failing to justify it. If material resources explain the field pattern better than the cultural measures do, that rival account deserves the win.
A positive result would establish this mechanism in the task. Generalising it to workplaces or countries requires evidence that the relationship survives different settings and longer periods.
Measure the cause separately from the outcome
Reuse existing instruments where they fit, and be explicit where they don't. A related research tradition does not automatically supply a valid scale for a new construct.
- Trust Radius: ask about expectations of fair dealing across specified relationships, using the radius-of-trust work as a starting point. Keep firm size, corruption, and contract performance as possible outcomes or contextual variables, not ingredients in the trust score used to explain them.
- Agency Location: measure perceived personal capacity and collective capacity for the same task. Use locus-of-control and collective-efficacy research without pretending they measure the same thing. Collect explanations of powerlessness separately.
- Resource Model: use domain-specific zero-sum questions. Check the actual payoff structure before calling an answer a bias.
- Status Currency: ask who receives esteem and for what. Compare answers with honours, promotion decisions, and peer nominations. Personal values questionnaires are related evidence, not a direct census of a group's status system.
- Change Cost: use norm-strength and sanction questions about specified departures. Keep reported sanctions separate from the innovation rate you hope to explain.
- Power Distance: ask about the legitimacy of unequal authority and the acceptability of challenging it. Measure the distribution of decision rights separately.
For comparisons between groups, check that the questions mean the same thing to respondents. Specify the sample and period, retain within-group variation, and test predictions on observations that weren't used to choose the model. Six headings are no achievement if the measures beneath them need endless adjustment to fit each new case.
Better at what?
I judge cultural arrangements by material security, room to choose a life, and the ability to discover and correct mistakes. Arrangements that reliably improve those outcomes are better by those standards. Longevity, popularity, and a sponsor's profit don't substitute for them.
But those judgments need an outcome and a beneficiary. More experiments don't guarantee better products. A profitable firm can impose costs on its workers or neighbours. Strong coordination can accomplish something admirable or something appalling. Survival of a practice is evidence that something sustains it, not that its participants benefit.
The instrument has no overall score and no ideal shape. Its fictional examples let you consider combinations, including ones that cut across a simple traditional-to-modern story. Treat them as prompts for an explanation.
The claim I'm making
Hofstede, Schwartz, and other comparative frameworks describe cultural variation. Cultural-evolution research studies how practices are learned, retained, and changed. I use those traditions to ask a practical question: which combination of expectations keeps this behaviour in place?
For the workshops, my answer is the interaction between recognition for improvement and punishment for failure. That answer tells a reformer where to intervene and a researcher what to test.
Six is a working arrangement. Keep or change it according to what it explains and predicts. Time horizons, for example, deserve another block if they improve predictions enough to justify the extra complexity.
If you want experimentation, praising achievement is only half the job. Change what happens to the person whose experiment fails.
References
- Bandura, A. (2000). Exercise of Human Agency Through Collective Efficacy. Current Directions in Psychological Science, 9(3), 75–78.
- Banfield, E. C. (1958). The Moral Basis of a Backward Society.
- Boyd, R., & Richerson, P. J. (1985). Culture and the Evolutionary Process.
- Chinoy, S., Nunn, N., Sequeira, S., & Stantcheva, S. Zero-Sum Thinking and the Roots of US Political Differences. NBER Working Paper 31688, first issued 2023; subsequently revised.
- Delhey, J., Newton, K., & Welzel, C. (2011). How General Is Trust in “Most People”? Solving the Radius of Trust Problem. American Sociological Review, 76(5), 786–807.
- Foster, G. M. (1965). Peasant Society and the Image of Limited Good. American Anthropologist, 67(2), 293–315.
- Fukuyama, F. (1995). Trust: The Social Virtues and the Creation of Prosperity.
- Gelfand, M. J., et al. (2011). Differences Between Tight and Loose Cultures: A 33-Nation Study. Science, 332(6033), 1100–1104. Paper.
- Greif, A. (1994). Cultural Beliefs and the Organization of Society. Journal of Political Economy, 102(5), 912–950.
- Henrich, J., & Gil-White, F. J. (2001). The Evolution of Prestige. Evolution and Human Behavior, 22(3), 165–196.
- Hofstede, G. (2001). Culture's Consequences, 2nd ed.
- McCloskey, D. N. (2010). Bourgeois Dignity; Mokyr, J. (2016). A Culture of Growth.
- Miller, J. G. (1984). Culture and the Development of Everyday Social Explanation. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 46(5), 961–978.
- Morris, M. W., & Peng, K. (1994). Culture and Cause. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 67(6), 949–971.
- Nisbett, R. E., & Cohen, D. (1996). Culture of Honor.
- Rotter, J. B. (1966). Generalized Expectancies for Internal Versus External Control of Reinforcement. Psychological Monographs, 80(1), 1–28.
- Schwartz, S. H. (1992). Universals in the Content and Structure of Values. Advances in Experimental Social Psychology, 25, 1–65; and (2006), A Theory of Cultural Value Orientations. Comparative Sociology, 5(2–3), 137–182.
- Weber, M. (1922). Economy and Society, on class, status, and authority.
The companion essays cover deliberate attempts to change these expectations and the transmission of ideas and practices.