Scientific assessment of subjective culture became a practical matter in the final quarter of the twentieth century. Psychologists Osgood, May, and Miron (1975) derived three dimensions of affective meaning from multivariate analyses of adjective rating scales
Scientific assessment of subjective culture became a practical matter in the final quarter of the twentieth century. Psychologists Osgood, May, and Miron (1975) derived three dimensions of affective meaning from multivariate analyses of adjective rating scales, and they showed that these factors of affective meaning exist in more than 20 cultures around the world. Sociologist Heise (1979; 1985) mathematically modeled the human cybernetic system that operates on affective meanings, and he and others demonstrated how the mind uses the system in the construction of a variety of cultural forms such as roles, emotions, attributions, and labeling (Smith-Lovin and Heise, 1987; MacKinnon, 1994). Anthropologists Romney, Weller, and Batchelder (1986) mathematically analyzed informants’ knowledge about a homogeneous culture and showed that the respondent sampling requirements for a reliable assessment of culture are far less than the sample sizes required to survey individual characteristics in a diverse population. In combination, these developments provide the foundation for a new social science technology that permits significant portions of cultural knowledge to be measured, stored, and retrieved with computers, that opens new approaches to understanding social relations, and that permits rigorous cross-cultural studies.
Project Magellan, described in this report, manifests the new technology. In the 1980s and 1990s sociologists Neil MacKinnon, Andreas Schneider, and Herman Smith obtained large dictionaries of affective meanings cross-culturally for use in computer simulations of social interaction (Schneider and Heise, 1995). Their work has nucleated into the Magellan project of international data collection and distribution via the Internet.
This description of the new enterprise begins by focusing on a new computer program named Surveyor, which can be employed around the world via the Internet. Surveyor gathers data on affective meanings using adjective rating scales in indigenous languages. Next the mechanics of a Magellan project in a particular culture are indicated by outlining a study currently being conducted in the U.S.A. Finally, some of potentials of the enterprise are portrayed through cross-cultural analyses of data already collected. The findings anticipate results that will ensue from Magellan because the available data were obtained with instruments similar to but less powerful than Surveyor.
Affective meanings can be measured with bipolar scales defined with contrasting adjectives at each end (Osgood, May, and Miron, 1975). For example, a scale might contrast “good, nice” with “bad, awful” and provide nine reference positions in between, as shown in Figure 1. A stimulus like “helping someone” is presented above the scale. The respondent positions a pointer on the scale in order to represent her sentiment about helping someone.
The middle position on the scale is labeled “neutral” and reference positions going outward are labeled with adverbs “slightly,” “quite,” “extremely,” “infinitely.” Figure 1 reveals how each reference position is coded numerically on the basis of scaling analyses (Heise, 1978). However, the coding numbers typically are not shown to respondents who are using the scale to make ratings.
A number of generalizations are supported by hundreds of research studies on the use of bipolar adjective rating scales for measuring affective meanings (Snider and Osgood, 1969).
Evaluation is involved in more semantic contrasts than Potency, and Potency is more ubiquitous than Activity. However, all three dimensions are equally important in social studies. For example, Evaluations correspond to attitudes and values, the Potency dimension indexes the power of roles and the impact of actions, and the Activity dimension assesses individuals’ propensity to action and levels of emotional activation.
In the 1970s, thousands of sentiments about social identities and social behaviors were measured in the United States and in Ireland (e.g. see Smith-Lovin and Heise, 1988). Opportunities for cross-cultural analyses grew with Neil MacKinnon’s acquisition of data on sentiments in Canada (e.g., see MacKinnon and Langford, 1994), with Andreas Schneider’s survey of sentiments in Germany (e.g., see Schneider, 1996), and with Herman Smith’s sentiment measurements in Japan (e.g., see Smith, Matsuno, and Umino, 1994) and currently in China.
The early studies in the U.S.A., Ireland, and Canada were done with printed questionnaires employing mark-sense technology. Typesetting and printing the questionnaires was expensive, and muscular researchers were required to lug boxes of questionnaires from offices to respondents to mark-sense machines. The mark-sense technology was contemporaneous with the infamous card-punch system of Florida elections and equally reliable, so tedious and costly data cleaning was a necessity.
In the 1980s a program called Attitude was developed for computer-based data collection (Heise, 1982). The computer methodology eliminated printed questionnaires and the unreliable process of transforming pencil marks to electronic digits. Bipolar rating scales presented on computer screens offered far more rating positions than the old printed questionnaires, and computer-based randomization eliminated various kinds of measurement biases. Attitude, translated to German, Japanese, and Chinese, was used to collect all of the available foreign-language dictionaries of affective meanings, and it currently is being used to update dictionaries in Canada.
Recently, the Attitude program was reconstructed as a Java applet named Surveyor in order to collect EPA ratings via the World Wide Web. Respondents with a computer connection to the Internet go to a WWW page that f