Social Axioms Survey

For the last several decades research in cross-cultural psychology has focused on the cultural patterning and positioning of values. Unfortunately, values have low predictive power for actual behavior. Researchers at the Chinese University of Hong Kong decided to develop a questionnaire to measure beliefs, i.e., what is believed to be true about the world, to add to the power of values, i.e., what the person believes is valuable, in predicting behavior.

They administered the original Social Axioms Survey (SAS) in five countries and used exploratory and confirmatory factor analysis to evaluate the individual-level data. Five factors were found: Social cynicism, Social complexity, Reward for application, Religiosity and Fate control. However, analyzing the data on a country-wide level yielded only two factors: Societal cynicism and a combination of the other four factors labeled Dynamic externality. The SAS has proven useful in many research contexts, and eight years later the original researchers developed an updated version, the SAS II, using a more complex methodology to increase the reliability of the various factors. The SAS II is currently being used in research as the more comprehensive and reliable measure of beliefs about the world.

The study of values has a long history in psychological research, for instance Rokeach's value scale, which has been used widely. That focus has also been transferred to the study of culture in psychology. The anthropologists Kluckhohn and Strodtbeck conducted a large-scale study of values in five Southwestern US cultures in the 1950s. However, it was Geert Hofstede's cultural dimensions theory that really initiated the wave of cross-cultural research on values. His four (later increased to six) dimensions of cultural values have become a major tool in many kinds of cross-cultural research. Values, however, have important limitations for predicting behavior. A value states that, "X is good/desirable/important," but it does not indicate if a person thinks that X is obtainable. A belief, on the other hand, is a statement about how things work in reality. A social axiom, according to Leung and Bond's (2002) definition, describes how the world and society are believed to work. In other words, "...a typical social axiom has the structure – A is related to B. A and B can be any entities, and the relationship can be causal or correlational." The strength of a belief can vary from person to person. Furthermore, a social axiom is different from a normative belief. Normative beliefs tell us what we ought to do, e.g., be polite to everyone. Social axioms are a guide as to what it is "possible" to do.

Leung and Bond (2008) provide a formal definition of social axioms:

"Social axioms are generalized beliefs about people, social groups, social institutions, the physical environment, or the spiritual world as well as about categories of events and phenomena in the social world. These generalized beliefs are encoded in the form of an assertion about the relationship between two entities or concepts."

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