The relationship between culture, as a set of norms that structure human social practice, and agency, as the human capacity to act, has been debated for decades. Achieving clarity in how these constructs intersect has been hampered by difficulty in measuring either one, and theory has not suggested how a model linking culture and agency might be specified. We present a model in which culture is measured as cultural consonance, or the degree to which individuals actually incorporate prototypes for behavior encoded in cultural models into their own behavior.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFThe relationship between culture and the individual is a central focus of social scientific research. This paper examines motivations that mediate between shared culture norms and individual actions. Inspired by the works of Leon Festinger and Melford Spiro, we posit that social network conformation (the perceived adherence of one's social network with norms) and internalization of cultural norms (incorporation of cultural models with the self-schema) will differentially shape behavior (cultural consonance) depending on the domain and individual characteristics.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFIntroduction: A cognitive theory of culture as socially distributed cultural models has proven useful in research. Cultural models exist in two forms: the model shared by individuals in a social group, and individual versions of that model modified by personal experience. In previous research we documented a shared cultural model of substance use risk among a general population sample in urban Brazil.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFInt J Environ Res Public Health
February 2023
Several errors were introduced after proofreading, and the authors hence wish to make the following corrections to this paper [...
View Article and Find Full Text PDFEating disorders are serious mental illnesses, but little research explores non-Western men's cultural experiences of body image and what affects their risks of disordered eating. Drawing on data collected over 17 months (August 2019 to January 2021) of fieldwork in Seoul, South Korea, the lens of intersectionality is employed alongside multiple regression and moderation analysis to understand how two axes of identity which emerged as important from the ethnography-sexual identity and university prestige-shape the ways in which young Korean men's cultural consonance with their local model of the ideal male body, influenced heavily by the kkonminam (flower boy), relates to risk for developing an eating disorder. Among young Korean men, intersections of university prestige and sexual identity frame embodiment of cultural models of male body image as a strategy for the making and maintenance of social relations and the advancement of social status in a precarious neoliberal economy.
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