social comparison and the heterogeneity of a culture

I could see that the homogeneity of the culture may blur the difference of the predicted performance of a person relative to effort ambiguous and effort maximum of the proxy. What it means is that people with more homogenous culture may tend to less believe efforts shown if it is deviant from what they believe is “supposed to be” according to the attributes. Thus the length of the black bar may be less different with the white bar than shown in figure 1, in homogenous cultures.

Korean society is a very homogeneous society due to many reasons: our closed policies about foreign trades during the 17 and 18^th centuries (we basically thought China was the best and no other countries were trustworthy), unified race, leftovers from what we were forced to do by Japan in the first half of 1900’s (unified and organized groups are always easy to rule), religious / philosophical belief, etc etc.

I may have to press a little bit about my preconception about the Korean society here. People with certain attributes behave certain ways, or at least are expected to behave certain ways. (although we are getting better) Thus we are not used to coping with a person who is difficult to anticipate based on the attributes. The culture is nicely fitting in with the nice symmetrical bell shaped curve, and anything that is outside the curve is supposed to be deviant, and somehow will be assessed by the standards that are inside the bell curve. The standards in the bell curve are the assessments with the attributes in the proxy model, and the proxy is always a sample of the population that is ideally graphed as the bell curve. Thus again the effort maximum may not win the belief toward perceptions around attributes, if the effort maximum contradicts what the proxy should do according to the attributes.