title: Extreme response style as a cultural response to climato-economic deprivation.
abstract: We investigated the effects of climato-economic harshness on extreme response style. Climato-economic theorising postulates that a more threatening climate in poorer countries, in contrast to countries with a more comforting climate and richer countries with a more challenging climate, triggers intolerance of ambiguity and uncertainty avoidance inherent to conservatism, in-group favouritism and autocracy. Scores of extreme response style at country level, a proxy of this cluster of cultural characteristics, were extracted from students' responses in the Programme for International Student Assessment to test the hypothesis. In a series of hierarchical regression analysis across 64 countries, cold demands, heat demands and GDP per capita showed a highly significant interaction effect on extreme response style, predicting in total 30.7% of the variance. Extreme response style was highest in poorer countries with higher climatic demands, and lowest in richer countries with lower climate demands. Implications are discussed.
authors.affiliation: Department of Educational Quality and Evaluation, German Institute for International Educational Research, Frankfurt, Germany.|Culture Studies, Tilburg University, Tilburg, The Netherlands.
authors.forename: Jia
authors.initials: J
authors.lastname: He
authors.affiliation: Department of Psychology, University of Groningen, Groningen, The Netherlands.
authors.forename: Evert
authors.initials: E
authors.lastname: Van de Vliert
authors.affiliation: Culture Studies, Tilburg University, Tilburg, The Netherlands.|Department of Psychology, North-West University, Potchefstroom, South Africa.|Department of Psychology, University of Queensland, Brisbane, Australia.
authors.forename: Fons J R
authors.initials: FJR
authors.lastname: Van de Vijver
mesh_terms: D002980:Climate; D003469:Culture; D017753:Ecosystem; D006801:Humans; D012959:Socioeconomic Factors
keywords: Cold demands; Culture; Extremity; Heat demands; Interaction; PISA; Wealth