6 Comments

There's nothing natural about them fitting on the circle. Someone just decided they wanted a "put words on a circle" model, called a circumplex.

Circumplex models are descriptively shallow: the facets of human preferences simply aren't generated by varying an angle parameter. (Neither are emotions of personality traits. If the circumplex model was cast out from psychology today, it would not be soon enough.) Circumplex models are even poor as mere clustering methods. They're extremely low dimensional and they enforce a constraint that factors be adjacent to two others, which is never motivated.

I also don't like the idea of placing a nation on the circumplex. Schwartz selected his factors to be cultural universals, with countries having profiles of relative reliance on all the different facets. But I understand your need to squeeze the theory down until it looks like a data point of support or disconfirmation for your endlessly applicable theory of near-far construal levels.

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Are countries points, clouds, pie slices, or something else?

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The US is rich, so up, and individual, so to right. Hence the US is upper right. A communal poor place, like Romania, is in the lower left.

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I'm having trouble interpreting this. What point/area would the United States occupy on that map?

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But since they largely agree, the credibility of the last one should add to the credibility of this one.

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I find this less facially credible than the previous 2d maps.

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