Original title: Cultural additivity: behavioural insights from the interaction of Confucianism, Buddhism and Taoism in folktales
Researchers examined 307 Vietnamese folktales and sorted their messages by values or anti-values linked to ConfucianismA tradition of ideas about conduct and social relationships associated with Confucius., Buddhism, and TaoismA Chinese religious and philosophical tradition that also shaped beliefs in Vietnam.. They used Bayesian statisticsA way to estimate how likely an explanation is by combining evidence with uncertainty., a way to estimate how likely patterns are while accounting for uncertainty. They found that Buddhist values were more often separate, while Confucian and Taoist values were more likely to appear together. The researchers call this “cultural additivityThe pattern of selecting and combining cultural ideas, even when they can seem to conflict.”: selecting and combining ideas, even when they may seem to conflict.
Imagine planning a family meal when everyone brings a dish from a different tradition. Some dishes stay separate, while others end up on the same table even if their usual rules differ. In this paper, the dishes are religious values in folktales: Buddhist values often remain apart, while Confucian and Taoist values are more likely to appear together.
The study offers a way to examine how people live with beliefs that may not fit neatly together. It may help readers understand cultural patterns in Vietnamese stories and other parts of Vietnamese life, though the evidence here comes from folktales.
The evidence described here comes from 307 Vietnamese folktales, so it does not establish that the same pattern holds across all Vietnamese people, other cultures, or every kind of cultural material. The abstract does not explain how the stories were selected or how reliably their messages were classified.
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Cultural additivity: behavioural insights from the interaction of Confucianism, Buddhism and Taoism in folktales — Quan‐Hoang Vuong, Quang-Khiem Bui, Viet‐Phuong La et al. — Humanities and Social Sciences Communications — doi:10.1057/s41599-018-0189-2
Abstract licence: CC BY
Explanation generated by Synthesis from the abstract — it is not the original paper.