The structure of culture: cross-cultural investigation of shared beliefs

Social scientists have long argued about what culture is, and how to measure it. They most often use surveys to capture how culture gets internalized into human cognition, and what is widely shared within a society. Not everybody in society shares the same belief structures, however, and we need better measurement to accurately examine beliefs, which function as both shared ways of thinking and individual psychological beliefs. In this dissertation, I test recent statistical techniques that reflect modern theories of how to quantitatively identify shared belief systems (or logics). These methods do more than just average individual-level beliefs. I propose an analytic strategy, based on cultural cognitive sociology, which uncovers several previously hidden belief patterns, without presupposing differences by gender, race, and so on. By analyzing both explicit and implicit belief responses from surveys and psychological experiments, findings show heterogeneous cultural logics in each U.S. and South Korea and define the similarities and differences in the logics between South Koreans and Americans. This dissertation further underscores how cognitive patterns of beliefs are associated with educational, political, and religious outcomes, varying across stratification in the two societies.