Michael Harris Bond

• PhD
• Chair at The Hong Kong Polytechnic University

Confidence in one’s societal institutions is essential for people’s well-being. We argue that a citizen’s perceived trust in known others and trust in strangers mediate that relationship and that the effects of both sources of trust on life satisfaction depend on a society’s rule of law. Data were used from representative samples of persons (n = 39...

Even in the most egalitarian societies, hierarchies of power and status shape social life. However, power and received status are not synonymous—individuals in positions of power may or may not be accorded the respect corresponding to their role. Using a cooperatively collected dataset from 18,096 participants across 70 cultures, we investigate, th...

Culture is a complex topic involving a comprehensive representation of human institutions, social customs, norms, and lifestyles. Over the past half-century, the methods of cultural studies have improved dramatically in the depth of the research questions posed. However, most contemporary research on cultural issues is conducted from a single persp...

People care about their own well-being and about the well-being of their families. It is currently, however, unknown how much people tend to value their own versus their family's well-being. A recent study documented that people value family happiness over personal happiness across four cultures. In this study, we sought to replicate this finding a...

We argue that the importance of family relationships for individual well-being varies across societies as a function of a society’s degree of cultural heterogeneity. To examine the role of family relationships, we analyzed the responses from 13,009 participants in 50 societies on their life satisfaction across societies varying in their levels of h...

Psychological science tends to treat subjective well-being and happiness synonymously. We start from the assumption that subjective well-being is more than being happy to ask the fundamental question: What is the ideal level of happiness? From a cross-cultural perspective, we propose that the idealization of attaining maximum levels of happiness ma...

Cross-cultural research in social and behavioral sciences has expanded hugely over the past 50 years, but progress is currently hampered by a lack of appreciation of the profoundly differing principles and goals of two distinct traditions. The first is the main variant of cross-cultural psychology (CCP), focusing on how culture shapes individual ps...

Women generally report greater religiosity and justify morally debatable behaviors less than men. This study examined if personal religiosity mediates the relationship of gender and justification of different types of morally debatable behaviors across societies with diverse religious heritages. We also explored how a society's endorsement of prefe...

We explore to what extent previously observed pan-cultural association between dimensions of self-construal and personal life satisfaction (PLS) may be moderated by three national-contextual variables: national wealth, economic inequality, and religious heritage. The results showed that MSelf-reliance (vs. dependence on others) predicted PLSpositiv...

Past research has shown that economic inequality shapes individuals’ self-construals. However, it has been unclear which dimensions of self-construal are associated with and affected by economic inequality. A correlational (Study 1: N = 264) and an experimental study (Study 2: N = 532) provided converging evidence linking perceived economic inequal...

People care about their own well-being and about the well-being of their families. It is currently, however, unknown how much people tend to value their own versus their family’s well-being. A recent study documented that people value family happiness over personal happiness across four cultures. In this study, we sought to replicate this finding a...

How can one conclude that well-being is higher in country A than country B, when well-being is being measured according to the way people in country A think about well-being? We address this issue by proposing a new culturally sensitive method to comparing societal levels of well-being. We support our reasoning with data on life satisfaction and in...

W e predicted that the relationship between helping strangers and life satisfaction would depend partially on the wealth of the country in which one lives. We argue that wealthy societies provide a wide range of welfare provisions for assisting their citizens. By contrast, people living in poorer countries with associated lower individualism, lower...

This paper provides a unique perspective for understanding cultural differences: representation similarity—a computational technique that uses pairwise comparisons of units to reveal their representation in higher‐order space. By combining individual‐level measures of trust across domains and well‐being from 13,823 participants across 15 nations wi...

This collection of first-person accounts from legendary social psychologists tells the stories behind the science and offers unique insight into the development of the field from the 1950s to the present. One pillar, the grandson of a slave, was inspired by Kenneth Clark. Yet when he entered his PhD program in the 1960s, he was told that race was n...

Over 5 days at the Nag’s Head Conference Center, USA in 1987, social and cross-cultural psychologists discussed what would be required if research relating to culture were to gain greater attention from psychology in general, and in particular from what was perceived at the time as its mainstream. The criteria for gaining greater credibility laid d...

Informed by a distinguished career's worth of reflection on Chinese psychology, this concluding essay situates Chinese moral psychology by forging a social psychological model applicable across cultures. Previous models have often been tailored to Western cultural contexts, but a handful-such as Fiske (1991), drawn upon here-were developed explicit...

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 cultur...

How does a society’s religious context affect the relationships between personal religiosity and well-being? To explore this question, we used two measures of personal religiosity, the absolute importance of religion, and the importance of religion relative to the importance of six life domains, viz., family, friends, work, politics, leisure, and r...

Nations have been questioned as meaningful units for analyzing culture due to their allegedly limited variance-capturing power and large internal heterogeneity. Against this skepticism, we argue that culture is by definition a collective phenomenon and focusing on individual differences contradicts the very concept of culture. Through the “miracle...

Mono-cultural studies have demonstrated that individual religiosity buffers the negative relationship between perceived injustice and personal well-being. However, it is unclear whether this relationship holds as strongly across societies with varying levels of cultural religiosity. We argue that higher levels of societal religiosity provide a cult...

Nations have been questioned as meaningful units for analyzing culture due to their limited variance-capturing power and large internal heterogeneity. Against this skepticism, we argue that culture is by definition a collective phenomenon and focusing on individual differences contradicts the very concept of culture. Through the “miracle of aggrega...

This paper provides a unique perspective for understanding cultural differences: representation similarity - a computational technique that uses pairwise comparisons of units to reveal their representation in higher-order space. By combining individual-level measures of trust across domains and well-being from 13,823 participants across 15 nations...

Using the framework of role balance theory, the authors take a cross-national view of an employee’s engagement in the work and nonwork domains of life. Employing the World Values Survey (WVS) with a sample of 21,270 married employees from 53 nations, we find cross-national variations in the relationship of employees’ degree of work and nonwork doma...

In this paper, we introduce the concept of ‘societal emotional environment’: the emotional climate of a society (operationalized as the degree to which positive and negative emotions are expressed in a society). Using data collected from 12,888 participants across 49 countries, we show how societal emotional environments vary across countries and c...

Numerous studies document that societal happiness is correlated with individualism, but the nature of this phenomenon remains understudied. In the current paper, we address this gap and test the reasoning that individualism correlates with societal happiness because the most common measure of societal happiness (i.e., country-level aggregates of pe...

Social and behavioral scientists have long investigated the relationship between interpersonal trust and features of the environment. However, it remains unclear how the micro-environment of relational distance (i.e., social proximity between two persons) interacts with the macro-environment of human ecology (i.e., social and natural environments)...

This is a draft for a soon-to-be-published collection of papers on Chinese morality. it is my first foray into the broad area of morality studies, and i have given it a multi-cultural orientation that suggests future studies to arise from its ideas.

Measures of personality have been shown to predict employee satisfaction at work and in life, but these findings arise mostly from research conducted in national cultures of Anglo heritage. To broaden the generality of such findings, we explore the relationships between Big Five dimensions of personality and satisfaction with life across representa...

Yang Kuo-Shu and I met in 1978 and conversed frequently during that magical year of exchanges about psychology and Chinese culture. We continued to communicate at conferences and correspond until 2012, co-authoring research, and presenting Kuo-Shu’s evolving thoughts on the Chinese personality to English-reading audiences in seminal collections of...

Valid understanding of the relationship between cultures and persons requires an adequate conceptualization of the many contexts within which individuals work and live. These contexts include the more distal features of the individual’s birth ecology and ethno-national group history. These features converge more proximally upon individual experienc...

Since the Second World War, the dominating paradigm of societal development has focused on economic growth. While economic growth has improved the quality of human life in a variety of ways, we posit that the identification of economic growth as the primary societal goal is culture-blind because preferences for developmental pathways likely vary be...

Self-concept has been crucial to the description of human beings since ancient times. Different authors have offered definitions and approaches to the study of the self. Many instruments have been developed to measure this multifaceted construct. However, there is great difficulty in using definitions and instruments developed in one ecosystem to d...

Relative centrality of work (RCW) is defined as the psychological importance given by individuals regarding work relative to the importance they attach to other major domains of living. Prior evidence has been inconclusive in terms of how RCW might influence the life satisfaction (LS) of individuals. Hence, in this study, we hypothesize that this r...

Culture is well recognized as an important basis for understanding psychological processes and behavior. Culturally informed research in psychology continues to supplement and challenge traditional knowledge in mainstream psychology in many ways, making culture a major topic of relevance for students and professionals in all areas of psychology. Th...

The world’s systems of higher education (HE) are caught up in the fourth industrial revolution of the twenty-first century. Driven by increased globalization, demographic expansion in demand for education, new information and communications technology, and changing cost structures influencing societal expectations and control, higher education syst...

A growing body of research has documented positive outcomes of gratitude in personal and interpersonal domains. To uncover the dynamic process of gratitude and relational well-being, we examined the interplay of grateful disposition, grateful mood, and grateful expression in ongoing close relationships. Hong Kong Chinese couples (n = 100) participa...

Healthy organizations are ones that can, to an extent, overcome employee characteristics that result in negative outcomes by creating policies and procedures that minimize the results of these individual differences. The relationship between general social cynicism and three forms of cynicism about one's organization - cognitive, affective, and beh...

Studies repeatedly have documented that societal well‐being is associated with individualism. Most of these studies, however, have conceptualized/measured well‐being as individual life satisfaction—a type of well‐being that originates in Western research traditions. Drawing from the latest research on interdependent happiness and on family well‐bei...

To broaden our understanding of culture-as-operative in organizational settings and make these cultural influences tractable to empirical analysis, we focus upon individual behavior as the outcome of interest and acknowledge the embeddedness of an organizational member in a nested and multiple array of cultures be they national, regional, organizat...

Inequalities between men and women are common and well-documented. Objective indexes show that men are better positioned than women in societal hierarchies—there is no single country in the world without a gender gap. In contrast, researchers have found that the women-are-wonderful effect—that women are evaluated more positively than men overall—is...

In this investigation of cultural differences in the experience of obligation, we distinguish between Confucian Role Ethics versus Relative Autonomy lay theories of motivation and illustrate them with data showing relevant cultural differences in both social judgments and intrapersonal experience. First, when judging others, Western European herita...

This study aims to examine why and how individuals’ self-reported engagement in creative work is separately and jointly influenced by dispositional, situational, and national-cultural factors worldwide. Using data abstracted from the World Value Survey, we proposed a multi-level model testing how the relationship between individuals’ creative value...

This study investigates the relationship between personality, social axioms, and dyadic adjustment. A sample of 420 participants (210 heterosexual couples), approximately evenly distributed between four ethnic backgrounds (Romanian, Hungarian, German, and Rroma), was investigated in a cross-sectional approach with the Romanian versions of the Socia...

The cognitive science of religion examines the naturalness of religious phenomena by identifying universals in the human cognitive apparatus and process, then exploring the nomological nets surrounding them. There is variation both within and across populations in these constructs and in their linkages, thereby enabling cultural examination of thes...

Hofstede’s “long-term orientation” (LTO) may be one of the most important dimensions of national culture, as it highlights differences on a continuum from East Asia to Africa and Latin America, strongly associated with differences in educational achievement. However, LTO’s structure lacks theoretical coherence. We show that a statistically similar,...

Questions linking national culture, workplace culture, and national economic performance have been at the forefront of research during the last half of the twentieth century.

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...

Personality research has been focused on different aspects of the self, including traits, attitudes, beliefs, goals, and motivation. These aspects of the self are used to explain and predict social behaviour. The present research assessed generalized beliefs about the world, termed 'social axioms' (Leung et al., ), and examined their additive power...

National differences in subjective well-being (SWB) have been attributed to socioeconomic, climatic, and genetic factors. We focus on one particular facet of SWB—happiness or positive affect—measured by the nationally representative World Values Survey (WVS). We find that national percentages of very happy people across the three latest WVS waves (...

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...

Smiling individuals are usually perceived more favorably than non-smiling ones - they are judged as happier, more attractive, competent, and friendly. These seemingly clear and obvious consequences of smiling are assumed to be culturally universal, however most of the psychological research is carried out in WEIRD societies (Western, Educated, Indu...

We investigated whether Reggae preferences are associated with similar values across cultures compared with its culture of origin—Jamaica. Remote acculturation predicts that Reggae listeners across countries will share similar cultural values with Reggae listeners in Jamaica regardless of their cultural or geographical distance from the Caribbean i...

This article is a set of tributes about Kwok Leung, a colleague of the four colleagues who collaborated with Kwok over more than three decades and provide their reflections on working professionally with him. The four content areas of their academic contributions were justice, social axioms, and methodology in cross-cultural research and creativity...

Work centrality has been defined as individual beliefs regarding the importance of work in one’s life (Kostek, 2012). In previous research, however, the importance of work has rarely been contrasted with the importance of other life domains and never across sufficient cultural groups to enable cultural moderation of processes around work centrality...

What makes some acts immoral? Although Western theories of morality often define harmful behaviors as centrally immoral, whether this is applicable to other cultures is still under debate. In particular, Confucianism emphasizes civility as fundamental to moral excellence. We describe three studies examining how the word immoral is used by Chinese a...

The current research examined differences in career decision-making profiles (CDMP) between American and Chinese university students, as well as the mediating mechanisms possibly underlying these cultural differences. The results of a survey among American (n = 929) and Chinese (n = 945) undergraduates showed that Chinese participants scored signif...

Purpose – Cross-national studies of employees’ values and beliefs have extracted dimensions of national culture from diverse samples of employees. The purpose of this paper is to find out if this sample diversity impacts the nature of the extracted dimensions: is a given dimension replicable across diverse samples (such as managers vs skilled worke...

The existence of a genetic factor behind group-level differences in life history strategy (LHS) has long been disputed. A number of recent studies suggest that some polymorphisms in the androgen receptor gene AR, the dopamine receptor gene DRD4, and the 5-HTTLPR VNTR of the serotonin transporter gene are associated with risk acceptance versus prude...

The present study examines the housework distribution between spouses in Mainland China and from a dyadic perspective. The findings from 211 Chinese couples indicated a pattern consistent with Western findings: housework distribution is lopsided in favor of husbands. On average, wives accounted for two third of the total time that the couples spent...

We proposed a model suggesting how national goals for socializing children moderate the contributions made by the individual’s level of in-group trust and out-group trust to his/her level of trust in most people, viz., non-specific trust. Consistent with our hypotheses, a two-level HLM analysis of representative data across 49 countries from the Wo...

To augment value-based frameworks for cross-cultural analysis, a framework based on social axioms, or generalized beliefs about the world, has been developed based on a global research program. Five dimensions of social axioms have been identified: Social cynicism asserts the malevolence of human nature and social institutions; reward for applicati...

We propose that one’s subjective well-being (SWB) arises from the satisfaction of one’s basic needs, but that the importance of attaining specific needs will vary according to one’s gender, age, and national culture. We argue that the role of one’s national-cultural background in that process can best be unpackaged in terms of the emphasis of a nat...

Studies comparing personality across cultures have found inconsistencies between self-reports and measures of national character or behaviour, especially on evaluative traits such as Conscientiousness. We demonstrate that self-perceptions and other-perceptions of personality vary with cultural mindset, thereby accounting for some of this inconsiste...

We studied the gender gap in life expectancy (GGLE), which currently favours women on average by 5 years. Individual data from 54 societies were extracted from the 1999-2004 wave of the World Values Survey. The GGLE was not predicted by the socio-economic factors of gross domestic product (GDP) or Gini coefficient, but was increased by national lev...

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...

The current research examined Chinese parents’ motivation regarding music training for their children, and its relationships with their children’s learning outcomes (N = 269). Results of principal component analysis showed that Chinese parents had both intrinsic and extrinsic motivation regarding children’s music training. Parents’ intrinsic motiva...

Accepting C ole's the premise that, “cultural‐inclusive psychology has been … an elusive goal” (1996, pp. 7–8) but one worth striving to attain, I first set out to identify my domain of interest and competence as an intellectual. Deciding it to be social interaction between individuals, I then searched out theoretical approaches to this domain that...

We offer a critical overview of studies associating genetic differences in the 5-HTTLPR VNTR in the serotonin-transporter gene with societal differences. We also highlight recent findings from individual-level research on 5-HTTLPR generating new hypotheses concerning the effect of genes on culture. We provide an expanded national index reflecting 5...

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...

This chapter of the Oxford Handbook of Asian Business Systems provides an overview of culture in Asia. Culture is defined as shared meaning interpreted in institutions in patterns that are best analysed through a complex adaptive systems framework. The understanding of the variety of Asian cultures begins with certain socio-economic givens, such as...

This cross-sectional study investigates how perceived support and relational conflict mediate the associations of attachment orientations with depressive symptoms among 367 (153 Chinese, 214 American) dating individuals. Results revealed a pan-cultural association of attachment anxiety with depressive symptoms mediated though relational conflict. A...

A number of cultural dimensions have been proposed to account for similarities and differences in psychological processes and outcomes across cultures. These dimensions are mostly based on value contrasts, such as individualism-collectivism. Dimensions based on other conceptual frameworks need to be explored for a more comprehensive understanding o...

Kwok Leung is a survivor of the educational filter that once existed in Hong Kong. Entering the Chinese University of Hong Kong in 1977, he was one of only 2% of his age cohort then gaining access to the local tertiary system. Like many students at the time, he was in the science stream and majored in biology. In 1979, Leung took a social psycholog...

Peter B. Smith is emeritus professor of social psychology at the University of Sussex in the United Kingdom, where he has been a faculty member for more than 40 years. Following his Ph.D. (Cambridge University, 1963), he became an acute observer and analyst of group processes, writing extensively on this topic. Inspired by conversations on cultural...

Religion and spirituality have often been associated with the higher subjective well-being of individuals, but departures from this relationship have also been noted in previous research. We identified two important issues that may affect this relationship: the various measurements of religion, spirituality, and subjective well-being used, and the...

This essay addresses the question of how best to do culturally sensitive research on social processes. This research aims to assess models for individual outcomes that hold across cultural groups but are moderated by cultural factors. Such research requires that social scientists identify and metricize cultural factors, like socialization goals, th...

Out-group trust is a crucial driver of international business performance. However, employees from different countries vary in their levels of out-group trust. The aim of this study is therefore to capture national forces driving out-group trust. Based on Kramer's theorizing on the multiple bases of trust, we argue that, at the societal level, disp...

The purpose of this paper is to develop a model for individual social behavior, B, that incorporates the contributions of both the personality of the actor, P, and the relevant features of the situation, S, in which he or she is performing. In analyzing the original formula by Lewin, viz., B = f(P.S), the paper first considers the importance accord...

Previous research concludes that empowerment is ineffective with employees from societies high in power distance. The present study examines this conclusion across three types of empowerment: discretion empowerment, psychological empowerment, and leadership empowerment (or empowerment leadership behaviors). To assess the effects of power distance o...