Flexible societies excelled in saving lives in the first phase of the COVID-19 pandemic.

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.

The Big Five and Big Two personality factors in Mongolia.

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.

The weight of culture: Societal individualism and flexibility explain large global variations in obesity.

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.