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Background: Previous studies have shown that national cultural traits, such as collectivism-individualism and tightness-looseness, are associated with COVID-19 infection and mortality rates. However, although East Asian countries have outperformed other countries in containing COVID-19 infections and lowering mortality in the first pandemic waves, no studies to date have examined flexibility-monumentalism, a cultural trait that uniquely distinguishes East Asia from the rest of the world. Moreover, none of the previous studies have explored mechanisms underpinning the association between national culture and COVID-19 mortality. Aims: Our study fills in these gaps by examining the association between flexibility-monumentalism and COVID-19 mortality, adjusting for important covariates and by analyzing mask wearing and fear of COVID-19 during the first weeks of the pandemic as plausible mechanisms underpinning this association. Methods: We constructed and analyzed a dataset including 37 countries that have valid information on flexibility-monumentalism, COVID-19 deaths as of 31 October 2020 (before the start of vaccination campaigns), and relevant covariates including two other national cultural traits (individualism-collectivism and tightness-looseness) and other national characteristics (economic, political, demographic and health). Multiple linear regression with heteroscedasticity-consistent standard errors was used to assess the independent effect of flexibility-monumentalism on COVID-19 mortality. Mediation was assessed by examining the indirect effects of flexibility through mask wearing and fear of COVID-19 and determining the statistical significance through bootstrapping. Graphical and delete-one analysis was used to assess the robustness of the results. Results: We found that flexibility was associated with a significant reduction in COVID-19 mortality as of 31 October 2020, independent of level of democracy, per capita GDP, urbanization, population density, supply of hospital beds, and median age of the population. This association with mortality is stronger and more robust than for two other prominent national cultural traits (individualism-collectivism and tightness-looseness). We also found tentative evidence that the effect of flexibility on COVID-19 mortality may be partially mediated through mask wearing in the first weeks of the pandemic.

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Etic psychometric tools work less well in non-Western than in Western cultures, whereas data collected online in the former societies tend to be of superior quality to those from face-to-face interviews. This represents a challenge to the study of the universality of models of personality and other constructs. If one wishes to uncover the true structure of personality in a non-Western nation, should one study only highly educated, cognitively sophisticated Internet users, and exclude the rest? We used a different approach. We adapted a short Big Five tool, previously tested successfully in 19 countries on all continents, to Mongolian culture. EFA and CFA analyses across a nationally representative sample of 1,500 adult Mongolians recovered the Big Five satisfactorily. A Big Two (plasticity and stability) model was also recovered reasonably well. Correlations between personality traits and age, as well as gender differences, were not different from those reported for Western samples. Respondents with higher education, or higher-than-average socioeconomic status, or urban dwellers, or Internet users, did not yield a clearer Big Five than the whole sample. Our method (tool adaptation to a local cultural context) may be preferable to exclusion of specific demographic groups in Big Five studies of non-Western populations.

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BACKGROUND: Obesity rates have been rising steeply across the globe in recent decades, posing a major threat to global human health. Despite this almost universal increase, differences between countries remain striking, even among equally developed societies. METHODS: We test if two cultural dimensions derived from a revised Hofstede model of culture from Minkov (2018), namely collectivism vs. individualism and monumentalism vs. flexibility, could help explain national variations in prevalence of obesity (BMI ≥ 30) among women and men around the world. We develop a theoretical framework that links these two cultural dimensions with obesity and then test their association empirically in analyses including 51 countries from all regions of the world as well as using imputed data for a total of 155 countries, representing 98% of the global population. RESULTS: In contrast to previous studies, we find that, adjusting for undernourishment and other potential confounds, individualism is associated with higher obesity prevalence in the male population, but not among the female population. We explain these findings by pointing to the different mechanisms through which individualism relates to health behavior, some of which are more gender-specific than others. A further novel finding is that flexibility, a national cultural trait that emphases humility, self-control, and restraint of desires, is a strong negative predictor of obesity in both genders beyond various potential confounds and is highly robust in specification curve analyses. CONCLUSIONS: Our findings suggest that taking national culture into account can enhance our understanding of the obesity pandemic and should thus be considered by policy-makers in their design of interventions.

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Voracek (2004, 2006a, 2006b, 2009) reported that cognitive ability predicts national suicide rates, even after plausible controls. Yet, national IQs were not a significant predictor of suicide rates when regressed with indices of national religiousness and perceptions of personal health.

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