BMF CP94: Temperature and rainfall as predictors of embeddedness and hierarchy cultural values

AISDL Team

September 29, 2024

“Lately, it had been raining a lot, the plants were lush, and the ponds were full of fish and shrimp. Birds from everywhere flocked to live here. The population of the Bird Village increased sharply. The Bird Village’s prosperity created the need for a Village Chief.”

—In “Kindness Policy”; Wild Wise Weird (2024)

[COLLABORATIVE PROJECT]

1. Project description

1.1. Main objectives

The current study is conducted to examine the following research question:

• How are the temperature and rainfall associated with the countries’ cultural values of embeddedness and hierarchy cultural values?

1.2. Materials

The granular interaction thinking of mindsponge theory will be used for the conceptual development of this study, while Bayesian Mindsponge Framework (BMF) analytics will be used for statistical analysis [1-4]. The dataset comprises the ecological and cultural characteristics of 220 countries during the 1901-2019 period [5]. Statistical analyses will be conducted using the bayesvl R package, which utilizes the Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) algorithm for estimation [6]. For the sake of research transparency and reducing research and reproducibility costs, we have stored all data and computer code on Zenodo: https://zenodo.org/records/13854643.

1.3. Main findings

The preliminary analysis shows that countries that have higher temperatures tend to have a higher value of embeddedness. On the contrary, countries that have higher amounts of rainfall tend to have a lower value of embeddedness. However, the effect of rainfall on embeddedness reduces significantly as the temperature increases (see Figure 1). The results provide supportive evidence for the hypotheses regarding the relationship between cultural additivity, the availability of resources, and the additivity limitations [7,8].



Figure 1: The estimated level of embeddedness of cultural value

2. Collaboration procedure

Portal users should follow these steps for registering to participate in this research project:

1. Create an account on the website (preferably using an institution email).
2. Comment your name, affiliation, and your desired role in the project below this post.
3. Patiently wait for the formal agreement on the project from the AISDL mentor.

If you have further inquiries, please contact us at aisdl_team@mindsponge.info

If you have been invited to join the project by an AISDL member, you are still encouraged to follow the above formal steps.

All the resources for conducting and writing the research manuscript will be distributed upon project participation.

AISDL mentor for this project: Minh-Hoang Nguyen

AISDL members who have joined this project: Quan-Hoang Vuong, Viet-Phuong La.

The research project strictly adheres to scientific integrity standards, including authorship rights and obligations, without incurring an economic burden at participants’ expenses.

References

[1] Vuong QH. (2023). Mindsponge Theory. Walter de Gruyter GmbH. https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0C3WHZ2B3

[2] Vuong QH, Nguyen MH, La VP. (2022). The mindsponge and BMF analytics for innovative thinking in social sciences and humanities. Walter de Gruyter GmbH. https://www.amazon.com/dp/8367405102/

[3] Vuong QH, Nguyen MH. (2024). Better economics for the Earth: A lesson from quantum and information theories. https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0D98L5K44

[4] Vuong QH, Nguyen MH. (2024). Further on informational quanta, interactions, and entropy under the granular view of value formation. https://dx.doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.4922461

[5] Wormley AS, et al. (2022). The Ecology-Culture Dataset: A new resource for investigating cultural variation. Scientific Data, 9, 615. https://www.nature.com/articles/s41597-022-01738-z

[6] La VP, Vuong QH. (2019). bayesvl: Visually Learning the Graphical Structure of Bayesian Networks and Performing MCMC with ‘Stan’. The Comprehensive R Archive Network. https://cran.r-project.org/web/packages/bayesvl/index.html

[7] Nguyen MH. (2021). Cultural additivity: the outcome of resource abundance and constraint. https://www.researchgate.net/publication/348480069_Cultural_additivity_the_outcome_of_resource_abundance_and_constraint

[8] Nguyen MH, Vuong QH. (2024). Revisiting cultural additivity through the lens of granular interactions thinking mechanism. https://philpapers.org/rec/NGURCA

[9] Vuong QH. (2024). Wild Wise Weird. https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0BG2NNHY6