Minkov indb

1.3. Culture As Is Versus 
Culture As It Would Be
Further to the previous point, Schmitt, 
Allik, McCrae, and Benet-Martinez (2007) 
indicate that studies of Big Five personal-
ity traits usually correct for age and gender 
differences. Hofstede (2001) reports raw 
dimension indices as well as indices after 
correcting for age. Are such operations 
logical? 

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The Concept of Culture
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13
In cross-cultural analysis, data that are 
adjusted in this way are not more correct 
than raw data. They simply provide a dif-
ferent image of a particular culture: how it 
would look if certain conditions changed. 
Imagine that we are comparing nation A 
and nation B on “thrift” as a value. We 
find that people in A value thrift more. 
However, we also find that people in A 
are older and that older people are thriftier 
in principle. If age is controlled for, the 
thrift-related differences between the two 
nations disappear. What should our con-
clusion be? Should we categorize nation A 
as having a thriftier national culture? Or 
should we say that it exhibits the charac-
teristics of age culture, not national cul-
ture, because if its members were younger 
they would be more profligate? 
The answer depends on how we prefer 
to view and compare cultures. We can 
look at actual snapshots of them, reflect-
ing their real characteristics at a specific 
point in time. Alternatively, we can choose 
to work with hypothetical constructs: cul-
tures as they would be under certain 
hypothetical conditions that may become 
real some day. For instance, if two societ-
ies have different demographic structures 
today, these differences might disappear 
in the future. 
The first approach is the easier solution. 
The second may be attractive in some situ-
ations but it is less practical. Controlling 
for various variables by means of statisti-
cal tools does not guarantee that the statis-
tically obtained situation depicts what we 
would observe in reality if culture A did 
not differ from culture B on the variable 
we have controlled for. 
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