The Social Psychology of Democracies in Transition: 1989–2019

Cultural social psychology: intercultural relations

Ben Stanley

Department of Social Sciences, SWPS University

May 28, 2026

Today’s topics

Overview of today’s lecture

  • Cultural social psychology — why cultural differences matter and how to measure them
  • Schwartz’s three dimensions of values and where CEE countries sit on them
  • Cross-cultural interpersonal relations — Smith’s (2015) 135-nation helping study
  • Post-materialist value shifts — Inglehart / WVS / Pew evidence
  • Changes in gender attitudes across CEE (Pew 2019)
  • Grabowska & Garapich: social remittances between Poland and the UK
  • Recent evidence on Polish return migration post-Brexit (CEEMR 2024)

Cultural social psychology

Schwartz’s three dimensions of values

  • Culture = social system of shared meanings. Some classic findings don’t replicate across cultures; others are universal.
  • Neither Western default nor CEE exceptionalism — both produce errors.
  • Schwartz (1992): three basic problems → three value dimensions.
    • Embeddedness vs. autonomy — long-term relationships vs. separateness
    • Hierarchy vs. egalitarianism — inequality/deference vs. equality
    • Mastery vs. harmony — achievement vs. harmony with nature

Where CEE sits

Dimension Lowest-scoring nations
Embeddedness UK, France, Denmark, Netherlands, Germany
Hierarchy Italy, Spain, Sweden, Finland, Slovenia, Germany
Mastery Italy, Sweden, Finland, Estonia, Slovenia, Germany
  • CEE (E. Germany, Slovenia, Estonia) sits with Western Europe on the low end of hierarchy and mastery — closer to post-materialist Europe than to traditional embedded societies elsewhere.

Interpersonal relations

Helping across cultures: Smith (2015)

  • 135 nations, three helping types (stranger / charity / volunteering) combined into a pro-social index (−2 to +2).
  • Highest in nations low on in-group favouritism and low on uncertainty avoidance.
  • Strong in-group orientation confines helping within the group; tolerance of uncertainty enables engagement with strangers.

The pro-social index: CEE position

  • CEE countries cluster in the lower half.
  • Myanmar and Ireland at the top reflect specific cultural conditions (Buddhist tradition of dana, Irish charitable giving) that do not straightforwardly scale.
  • Remember Lecture 9’s qualifier: this index measures formal helping; informal helping in CEE is often higher than this figure suggests.

Intercultural relations

Unprecedented contact

  • Unprecedented cross-cultural contact through media, tourism, migration.
  • Direction: short-term moves go individualist → collectivist; long-term moves go the other way.
  • National value profiles remain distinctive, but a global shift toward post-materialist values is visible.
  • Migration and intermarriage are creating growing numbers of bicultural individuals.

Post-materialist values

  • Classic items:
    • “My self-expression and quality of life are more important than my economic and physical security.”
    • “I am happy.”
    • “Homosexuality is justifiable.”
    • “You can trust most people.”
    • “I have signed one or more petitions.”
  • Expanded: gender equality, tolerance of minorities, recycling, state support for the needy, new technologies.
  • The shift is generational: younger cohorts everywhere are more post-materialist than older cohorts, even where the level difference is small.

Attitudes to Muslims (Pew 2019)

Country Unfavourable Change 2016→2019
Hungary 58% −14
Italy 55% −14
Greece 57% −8
UK 18% −10
France 22% −7
  • Unfavourable opinions declined across Europe 2016–2019.
  • Largest declines where starting levels were highest.
  • Contact hypothesis (Lecture 12): softening concentrated where Muslim populations are visible in mainstream life.

Homosexuality: generational gaps are large in CEE

Country Youngest-oldest gap (% acceptance)
Lithuania +36
Czech Republic +35
Slovakia +33
Poland +29
  • CEE has some of the largest youngest-oldest gaps in Europe.
  • Younger cohorts close to Western European norms; older cohorts traditional.
  • The CEE value landscape is not frozen — it is shifting generationally, and fast.

Gender attitudes shifting fast in CEE

  • % saying women have more rights now than under communism (1991 → 2019):
    • Poland: 12% → 52% (+40); Slovakia: 11% → 49% (+38); Czechia: 15% → 44% (+29); Bulgaria: 20% → 40% (+20)
  • % preferring egalitarian marriage (1991 → 2019):
    • Poland: 43% → 69%; Czechia: 45% → 60%; Lithuania: 38% → 53%
  • Generational gap on traditional roles in CEE is large (young −17 to −24 vs. old). Russia is the outlier: young Russians more traditional (+13).
  • Real legal/social progress, but not reflected equally in labour market or political representation.

Gender and economic anxiety

  • Most Europeans disagree that “men should have more right to a job when jobs are scarce” — but the disagreement is less consensual in CEE:
    • Slovakia: 59% agree (majority still endorse traditional norm)
    • Greece: 46% agree; Poland: 42%; Bulgaria: 40%
    • Sweden: 7% agree; Spain: 12%; Netherlands: 14%
  • Lower-income respondents consistently endorse the traditional norm more than higher-income respondents (by ~15 points in most countries).
  • Economic anxiety activates compensatory traditionalism: relative deprivation (Lecture 8) expressed through gender attitudes.

Social remittances: Grabowska & Garapich

The concept

  • Grabowska & Garapich: social remittances between Poland and the UK after the 2004 EU enlargement.
  • Beyond financial remittances (money home): transfer of ideas, values, practices, norms, aspirations, social capital across borders.
  • Context: CEE system transformation is uneven and non-linear — “leftovers” from the communist era and delayed convergence.
  • Migration is not just a labour-market phenomenon but a cultural-change engine.

Where does social remitting happen?

  • Areas in which migrants acquire ideas that address gaps in the home system:
    • Social control in neighbourhoods and workplaces: easier to live and work in accordance with one’s own preferences without the interference and evaluation that small-town post-communist societies can impose
    • Family, family relationships, fertility:
      • greater fluidity in making and breaking relationships
      • patchwork families
      • more equal sharing of childcare
    • Self-perception and awareness of perception by others: less scrutiny of appearance by others, and consequently less self-scrutiny

Transfer requires agency

  • Acquisition ≠ transfer: ideas must be moved back to the home country.
  • Transfer depends on conditions at the starting point and the destination point; communication alone is not enough.
  • Only some migrants become agents of change. The requirements:
    • capacity to act in an agency-oriented mode
    • a social mandate (local recognition)
    • a regular space for diffusion (a workplace, business, association)
  • Diffusion ultimately depends on collective mandate and local readiness.

Example: a Polish nurse

  • A nurse who worked as a care assistant in a UK nursing home. On return to Poland, she transferred:
    • New work practices (division of labour between nurses and carers)
    • A more holistic approach to patients
    • A sincere and empathic approach to family members
    • New motivational techniques for staff supervisors
  • Mandate · audience · setting all present — transfer succeeded.

Updates: social remittances after Brexit

  • Comparative Migration Studies (2024): return migration from UK to Poland increased markedly after 2016 (Brexit referendum) and especially after 2020 (full Brexit). The pandemic accelerated the trend.
  • CEEMR (2024): Polish migrants experienced Brexit as an “unsettling event” that forced decisions that had been postponed. Brexit was a catalyst, not a cause.
  • Return migrants bring accumulated social remittances: work practices, family arrangements, civic participation norms.
  • Net effect on Polish society: gradual, diffuse, but measurable — especially in the regions with the most returnees (Podkarpackie, Podlaskie, small towns).

Theory integration

Theories through the migration lens (1)

  • Social identity: biculturalism, complex group memberships, in-group helping shifts.
  • Social learning: observation and modelling of new practices; media success stories reinforce norms.
  • Learned helplessness: migration as mastery experience that breaks the cycle; returnees come back with stronger self-efficacy.
  • Contact theory: Western workplaces meet Allport’s optimal conditions; positive contact transfers back home.

Theories through the migration lens (2)

  • Cognitive dissonance: migrants help resolve CEE tensions (collectivist past / individualist present; traditional / liberal norms) by modelling integration.
  • Social capital: higher-capital countries (Slovenia, Czechia) show more migration and more remittance; returnees import networking practices.
  • Terror management: Polish Catholic churches, Hungarian cultural centres — cultural preservation abroad provides existential purpose.
  • Relative deprivation + collective memory: deprivation drives initial moves; new reference groups; migration stories enter shared narrative.

Conclusions

What cultural social psychology adds

  • CEE is neither a Western special case nor a wholly distinctive region: close to Western Europe on Schwartz’s hierarchy/mastery, in the lower half on Smith’s pro-social index.
  • The right unit of analysis is the generational layer within the country — on homosexuality, gender roles, and Muslims, younger CEE cohorts have moved dramatically toward Western European norms.
  • CEE value landscapes are not frozen; convergence is uneven, and the intergenerational gap is itself a source of political tension (populism, polarisation).

What migration adds to the picture

  • Migration is a cultural-change engine, not just a labour-market phenomenon. Social remittances capture what financial accounting misses.
  • Transfer is agentic, not automatic — needs mandate, audience, setting (the Polish nurse is the prototype).
  • Brexit + pandemic have accelerated return migration to Poland, concentrating remittances in specific regions on top of the generational shift already underway.

Theory through the migration lens

  • The frameworks from earlier in the course work together on a single phenomenon: identity, social learning, contact, dissonance, learned helplessness all activate through migration.
  • But no single theory captures why one returnee’s practices take hold and another’s don’t — the answer always involves individual capacity, group reception, and institutional setting together.