Browsing by Author "Khan SS"

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    "Heroes" and "villains" of world history across cultures.
    (PUBLIC LIBRARY SCIENCE, 2015) Hanke K; Liu JH; Sibley CG; Paez D; Gaines SO; Moloney G; Leong C-H; Wagner W; Licata L; Klein O; Garber I; Böhm G; Hilton DJ; Valchev V; Khan SS; Cabecinhas R
    Emergent properties of global political culture were examined using data from the World History Survey (WHS) involving 6,902 university students in 37 countries evaluating 40 figures from world history. Multidimensional scaling and factor analysis techniques found only limited forms of universality in evaluations across Western, Catholic/Orthodox, Muslim, and Asian country clusters. The highest consensus across cultures involved scientific innovators, with Einstein having the most positive evaluation overall. Peaceful humanitarians like Mother Theresa and Gandhi followed. There was much less cross-cultural consistency in the evaluation of negative figures, led by Hitler, Osama bin Laden, and Saddam Hussein. After more traditional empirical methods (e.g., factor analysis) failed to identify meaningful cross-cultural patterns, Latent Profile Analysis (LPA) was used to identify four global representational profiles: Secular and Religious Idealists were overwhelmingly prevalent in Christian countries, and Political Realists were common in Muslim and Asian countries. We discuss possible consequences and interpretations of these different representational profiles.
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    Implications of a Psychological Approach to Collective Remembering: Social Representations as Cultural Ground for Interpreting Survey and Experimental Results
    (SAGE Publications on behalf of Beijing Normal University, 2021-01-01) Liu JH; Khan SS
    Psychology has become connected to the “memory boom” in research, that highlights the concept of social representations, defined as a shared system of knowledge and belief that facilitates communication about social objects where culture is conceptualized as a meta-system of social representations mediated by language, symbols, and their institutional carriers. Six articles on collective remembering, including survey results, text analysis, and experiments, are summarized in this introduction. All rely on content-rich meanings, embedded in sociocultural contexts that influence the results of the surveys and experiments. In the cases of Germany and China, the “historical charter” of the states in the late 19th century was ruptured, resulting in substantially different expressions of nationalism and national identity (in Germany) and filial piety and nationalism (in China) today. Surveys on the organization of living historical memory in Hungary and Finland found that the European Union formed an enduring social context for the formation of memory groups regarding recent history. Finally, in experiments, historical reminders are likely to be anchored in existing networks of meaning, and prime people about what they already believe, rather than exert independent causal effects. This anchoring of historical memory in communicating societies explains why the experimental results in this area are so inconsistent.