Charles Harb

Doha Institute for Graduate Studies · Department of Psychology

The 17 October 2019 uprising in Lebanon marked a pivotal period of economic crisis and discontent with the ruling elite. We examined social cohesion post‐uprising by exploring political polarization between “anti‐ruling parties” citizens and “partisan/unaligned” citizens, in two surveys with a community sample (Study 1, N = 357) and a nationally re...

We examined the relationship between socioeconomic status (SES) and endorsement of honor. We studied the SES-honor link in 5 studies (N = 13,635) with participants recruited in different world regions (the Mediterranean and MENA, East Asian, South-East Asian, and Anglo-Western regions) using measures that tap into various different facets of honor....

This study examines collective action intentions in Lebanon, a country characterized by fragmented demographics and recent sociopolitical turmoil. Through a nationally representative survey of 1200 Lebanese individuals conducted just before national elections, we explore the impact of sociopolitical orientations, emotions, and social cohesion facto...

In the present work, we addressed the relationship between parental leave policies and social norms. Using a pre‐registered, cross‐national approach, we examined the relationship between parental leave policies and the perception of social norms for the gender division of childcare. In this study, 19,259 students (11,924 women) from 48 countries in...

An ageing population is increasingly recognised as a critical concern in the social sciences, especially in regard to the issue of ageism. The literature suggests that older people are subject to ambivalent and paternalistic judgements. However, this does not consider diversity within the older population and that cultures may differ in how they pe...

Mediterranean societies are often labelled as “honor cultures”, in contrast with presumed “dignity” and “face" cultures of Anglo-Western and East Asian societies. We measured these cultural logics in two large-scale surveys (Study 1&3: N = 2,942 students from 11 societies; Study 2: N = 5,471 adults from 14 societies). Middle Eastern and North Afric...

We examined differences and similarities between groups sampled from the Mediterranean region in social orientation, cognitive style, self-construal, and honor, face, dignity values and concerns using a large battery of tasks and measures. We did this by conducting secondary data set analyses focusing on comparisons between nine pairs of samples re...

Greater “emotional fit” with one’s cultural group is often associated with positive psychological and relational outcomes. However, the few empirical studies on this link have been limited to the comparison of Anglo-Western, independent, and East Asian, interdependent cultural contexts. In the current paper, we conceptually replicated findings from...

Social science research has highlighted “honor” as a central value driving social behavior in Mediterranean societies, which requires individuals to develop and protect a sense of their personal self-worth and their social reputation, through assertiveness, competitiveness, and retaliation in the face of threats. We predicted that members of Medite...

Foundational studies of political behavior find that university education facilitates the development of political attitudes and shapes socialization outcomes. But in unconsolidated democracies where identity is politically salient and ethnic political parties dominate, education may play a different role in shaping mass politics. In this paper, we...

Despite global commitments and efforts, a gender‐based division of paid and unpaid work persists. To identify how psychological factors, national policies, and the broader sociocultural context contribute to this inequality, we assessed parental‐leave intentions in young adults (18–30 years old) planning to have children (N = 13,942; 8,880 identifi...

Introduction. People’s psychological tendencies are attuned to their socio-cultural context and culture-specific ways of being, feeling, and thinking are believed to assist individuals in successfully navigating their environment. Supporting this idea, stronger “fit” with one’s cultural environment has often been linked to positive psychological ou...

Introduction People's psychological tendencies are attuned to their sociocultural context and culture-specific ways of being, feeling, and thinking are believed to assist individuals in successfully navigating their environment. Supporting this idea, stronger “fit” with one's cultural environment has often been linked to positive psychological outc...

This chapter examines the history, challenges, and future of political psychology research in the Arab region, and argues that lack of attention to such regions is detrimental not only for these regions, but also for Western research and for the discipline as a whole.

This study examined factors underlying collective action tendencies in a context of severe disadvantage and high repression. Drawing on the Social Identity Model of Collective Action (SIMCA; van Zomeren, Postmes, & Spears, 2008), we tested the roles of group-based anger, participative efficacy, group identity—SIMCA variables—but also fear. Although...

Autobiographical memories are relevant to many areas of psychological functioning. So far, however, there is no evidence whether personal memories can also be instrumental for self-affirmation. We conducted two experiments, varying national identity threat among U.S. Americans recruited through MTurk. In Study 1, participants spontaneously recalled...

Foundational political behavior scholarship posits that institutions of higher education foster the types of attitudes and patterns of civic engagement that sustain liberal democracy. Yet throughout the developing world, authoritarian, ethnosectarian, and clientelist political parties often intervene in university politics, particularly through com...

The article Does organizational formalization facilitate voice and helping organizational citizenship behaviors? It depends on (national) uncertainty norms, written by Ronald Fischer, Maria Cristina Ferreira, Nathalie Van Meurs, Kubilay Gok, Ding-Yu Jiang, Johnny R J Fontaine, Charles Harb, Jan Cieciuch, Mustapha Achoui, Ma Socorro D Mendoza, Arif...

proposing survey instrument and methodology to assessing intergroup relations and potentials for conflict across the Arab region. Reviews current approaches to "social cohesion" research and highlights challenges and obstacles in conducting survey research in Arab countries. UNDP publication

Prosocial work behaviors in a globalized environment do not operate in a cultural vacuum. We assess to what extent voice and helping organizational citizenship behaviors (OCBs) vary across cultures, depending on employees’ perceived level of organizational formalization and national uncertainty. We predict that in contexts of uncertainty, cognitive...

Self-continuity – the sense that one’s past, present, and future are meaningfully connected – is considered a defining feature of personal identity. However, bases of self-continuity may depend on cultural beliefs about personhood. In multilevel analyses of data from 7287 adults from 55 cultural groups in 33 nations, we tested a new tripartite theo...

Researchers are making increasing use of the distinction between cultural logics emphasizing dignity, face, and honor. Students from eight nations including two from Latin America rated items tapping the extent to which they believed that most persons in their nation endorsed these types of mindset. Their ratings did not accord with prior beliefs a...

Recent research has shown that positive intergroup contact can undermine social change efforts among disadvantaged group members. We extend past this finding by investigating how frequent positive contact relates to both violent and nonviolent collective action, among both advantaged and disadvantaged groups, over and above outgroup attitudes. We e...

Variations in acquiescence and extremity pose substantial threats to the validity of cross-cultural research that relies on survey methods. Individual and cultural correlates of response styles when using 2 contrasting types of response mode were investigated, drawing on data from 55 cultural groups across 33 nations. Using 7 dimensions of self-oth...

Markus and Kitayama's (1991) theory of independent and interdependent self-construals had a major influence on social, personality, and developmental psychology by highlighting the role of culture in psychological processes. However, research has relied excessively on contrasts between North American and East Asian samples, and commonly used self-r...

Parochial altruism is manifested in the most violent of conflicts. Although it makes evolutionary sense for kin, many non-kin groups also behave parochially altruistically in response to threat from out-groups. It is possible that such non-kin groups share a sense of “fictive” kinship which encourages them to behave parochially altruistically for e...

There is hardly any cross-cultural research on the measurement invariance of the Brief Multidimensional Students’ Life Satisfaction Scales (BMSLSS). The current article evaluates the measurement invariance of the BMSLSS across cultural contexts. This cross-sectional study sampled 7,739 adolescents and emerging adults in 23 countries. A multi-group...

Several theories propose that self-esteem, or positive self-regard, results from fulfilling the value priorities of one’s surrounding culture. Yet, surprisingly little evidence exists for this assertion, and theories differ about whether individuals must personally endorse the value priorities involved. We compared the influence of four bases for s...

Several theories propose that self-esteem, or positive self-regard, results from fulfilling the value priorities of one's surrounding culture. Yet, surprisingly little evidence exists for this assertion, and theories differ about whether individuals must personally endorse the value priorities involved. We compared the influence of four bases for s...

We critically examine the three papers on terrorism and jihad in Indonesia contained in this issue. First, we argue that thorough discussion and definition of key terms (including religious violence and jihad) would have led to a much stronger framework for understanding the voices of the activists and their supporters. Second, the authors could ha...

Data provided by 7380 middle managers from 60 nations are used to determine whether demographic variables are correlated with managers’ reliance on vertical sources of guidance in different nations and whether these correlations differ depending on national culture characteristics. Significant effects of Hofstede’s national culture scores, age, gen...

Beliefs about personhood are understood to be a defining feature of individualism-collectivism (I-C), but they have been insufficiently explored, given the emphasis of research on values and self-construals. We propose the construct of contextualism, referring to beliefs about the importance of context in understanding people, as a facet of cultura...

Beliefs about personhood are understood to be a defining feature of individualism-collectivism (I-C), but they have been insufficiently explored, given the emphasis of research on values and self-construals. We propose the construct of contextualism, referring to beliefs about the importance of context in understanding people, as a facet of cultura...

Beliefs about personhood are understood to be a defining feature of individualism-collectivism (I-C), but they have been insufficiently explored, given the emphasis of research on values and self-construals. We propose the construct of contextualism, referring to beliefs about the importance of context in understanding people, as a facet of cultura...

The motive to attain a distinctive identity is sometimes thought to be stronger in, or even specific to, those socialized into individualistic cultures. Using data from 4,751 participants in 21 cultural groups (18 nations and 3 regions), we tested this prediction against our alternative view that culture would moderate the ways in which people achi...

The purpose of the study was to investigate the cultural specificity of guanxi, wasta, and jeitinho, each of which has been identified as an indigenous process of informal influence. Students in Brazil, China, Lebanon, and the United Kingdom were presented with three scenarios derived from each of the nations sampled. They rated the extent to which...

Previous research examined whether justice effects are comparable, focusing on quantitative differences in justice effects. This study examines whether justice perceptions are structured similarly or whether they are qualitatively different across working populations from 13 nations. Confirmatory factor analysis and multi-group analysis show that C...

Managerial leadership within 56 nations is examined in terms of the sources of guidance that managers use to handle work events. Correlations between the sources of guidance that managers use and the perceived effectiveness of how well these events are handled are employed to represent their schemas and attributional propensities for effectiveness....

Managerial leadership within 56 nations is examined in terms of the sources of guidance that managers use to handle work events. Correlations between the sources of guidance that managers use and the perceived effectiveness of how well these events are handled are employed to represent their schemas and attributional propensities for effectiveness....

Research investigating predictors of stress perceptions in organisational settings has been extensive. Value incongruence between employees and the organisation as well as organisational justice (distributive, procedural, informational, and interpersonal) are thought to be significant predictors of organisational outcomes. The current study investi...

This study investigated values, ambivalent sexism, religiosity, religious differences, gender, and attitudes toward rape victims as predictors of rape myths in a sample of Lebanese students (N = 300). Values of self-transcendence and conservation, gender, hostile sexism, and attitudes toward rape victims emerged as significant predictors of rape my...

We introduce a new construct called Context Differentiation (CD), and describe how it functions on both the individual and cultural levels. We derive several measures of it from a multi-context measure of cultural display rules for emotional expressions obtained from 33 countries, and examine country and cultural differences on it, and relate those...

The development and validation of a new instrument for measuring the descriptive norms related to individualism-collectivism (IC) is presented. IC is conceptualized as a group- specific unidimensional cultural construct with four defining attributes (Triandis, 1995). Three studies are reported showing the dimensionality and validities at individual...

This study examines predictors of expressed support for resistance to U.S.-led forces in Iraq among a sample of 130 university students in Baghdad. Based on a review of the literature and common discourse, personality, clash of civilization and social-psychological variables are tested as likely predictors of support for resistance. Data were colle...

This article reviews the literature on cross-cultural assessment of self-construals and proposes to refine their conceptualization by incorporating principles derived from self-categorization theory and a critique of cross-cultural research. A Sixfold Self-Construal Scale is devised to measure six subcategories of self-construal: the personal self,...

Despite the importance of the concept of cultural display rules in explaining cultural differences in emotional expression, and despite the fact that it has been over 30 years since this concept was coined (Ekman & Friesen, 1969), there is yet to be a study that surveys display rules across a wide range of cultures. This article reports such a stud...

In recent years, cross cultural researchers have greatly increased the range of nations that are sampled in their studies. A notable exception to this trend is provided by the 22 nations comprising the Arab League. Hof-stede's (1980) pioneering study of national differences in culture originally omitted the whole of the Arab region, but later inclu...

The present article has two objectives. First, general issues for developing and testing cross cultural multi-level models such as variable identification, measurement, sampling and data analysis are discussed. A second aim is to illustrate some of these issues by developing a multi-level framework incorporating variables at an individual, organiza...

Leung and colleagues have revealed a five-dimensional structure of social axioms across individuals from five cultural groups. The present research was designed to reveal the culture level factor structure of social axioms and its correlates across 41 nations. An ecological factor analysis on the 60 items of the Social Axioms Survey extracted two f...

Data are presented showing how middle managers in 47 countries report handling 8 specific work events, including events focused on the manager's subordinate work team and other referring to relations with the wider organization. The data are used to test the ability of cultural value dimensions derived from the work of G. Hofstede (1994), F. Trompe...