Objectives. Considerable evidence suggests that enforcement efforts cannot fully explain the high degree of tax compliance. To resolve this puzzle of tax compliance, several researchers have argued that citizens' attitudes toward paying taxes, defined as tax morale, helps to explain the high degree of tax compliance. However, most studies have treated tax morale as a black box, without discussing which factors shape it. Additionally, the tax compliance literature provides little empirical research that investigates attitudes toward paying taxes in Europe. Methods. Thus, this article is unique in its examination of citizen tax morale within three multicultural European countries, Switzerland, Belgium, and Spain, a choice that allows far more detailed examination of the impact of culture and institutions using data sets from the World Values Survey and the European Values Survey. Results. The results indicate the tendency that cultural and regional differences affect tax morale. Conclusion. The findings suggest that higher legitimacy for political institutions leads to higher tax morale.

/pdf/what-shapes-attitudes-toward-paying-taxes-evidence-from-ifngtbn2kt.pdf

What Shapes Attitudes Toward Paying Taxes? Evidence from Multicultural European Countries*

Purpose – Internet portals have long been providing free services (e.g. e‐mail, blog) to attract new users and retain existing customers. However, it is uncertain whether the users will continue to use the present free service over time. Blog enables people to interact with others extensively and the population of blog users has been skyrocketing in recent years. This paper aims to investigate the impacts of virtual community on a user's attitude and intention to continually use the current blog service.Design/methodology/approach – The conceptual empirical model has been developed on the foundation of social psychology, relationship marketing, and transaction cost analysis (TCA). Users of blogging communities who have frequent experience of interacting with other members were the objects for this study. In total, 243 valid samples were obtained for empirical testing by employing structural equation model.Findings – Results show that asset specificity and community pressure play mediating roles in the rel...

The effect of community identification on attitude and intention toward a blogging community

The basic analytical unit used by E. B. Tylor, Franz Boas, Clark Wissler, A. L. Kroeber, and other early anthropologists interested in cultural transmission was the cultural trait. Most assumed that such traits were, at base, mental phenomena acquired through teaching and learning. The lack of an explicit theoretical concept of cultural trait meant that the units varied greatly in scale, generality, and inclusiveness among ethnographers. Efforts to resolve the difficulties of classification and scale were made but were largely unsuccessful. The history of the concept of cultural trait reveals not only the roots of modern theoretical difficulties with units of cultural transmission but also some of the properties that such a unit needs to have if it is to be analytically useful to theories of cultural evolution.

Cultural Traits: Units of Analysis in Early Twentieth-Century Anthropology

/pdf/diffusion-vs-evolution-an-anti-evolutionist-fallacy-2ilascvq12.pdf

“diffusion vs. evolution”: an anti‐evolutionist fallacy

It has been shown by experiments formulated upon the conditioned response principle that the blenny, Blennius gattorugine, is able to perceive and to profit by very small changes in its environment. This fish is able to form conditioned motor responses using food as unconditioned stimulus, towards a momentary increase of 0-4C, or more, in the temperature of the surrounding water.It is also able to form similar conditioned motor responses towards a momentary decrease in the salinity of the surrounding water, of as little as 3 parts per 1000, or towards a change of greater magnitude (up to 37 parts per 1000).Conditioned responses have been established in the wrasses, Crenilabrus inelops and Labrus bergylta, towards visual stimuli of varying kinds. It appears that these fishes can discriminate after differential training between one or two sources of light, and between monochromatic red, green, yellow, or violet light, but not readily between even comparatively large differences in intensity of a luminous source. These results are those obtained upon dark-adapted fishes. More extensive experiments will be necessary before a final statement is made upon their capacity for colour discrimination.

https://www.cambridge.org/core/services/aop-cambridge-core/content/view/S0025315400009528

Studies on conditioned responses in fishes. Part II.

There is developing in the United States a definite challenge to the older sociological systems. The anthropological school has, through study of exotic peoples, gathered material wich makes evident the essentially philosophical nature of much sociological writing. The anthropologists are attacking the premises upon which the earlier social systems were erected. Neglect of the element of culture in society is advanced as the reason for sociological shorthcomings. What is culture, and how does it operate? A sound, and methodologically secure sociology, must in the future include a consideration of the cultural material that the anthropologists have brought to attention.

https://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/pdfplus/10.1086/213579

The Cultural Approach to Sociology

Within the last decade the cultural group of sociologists has grown to occupy an important position in the field of sociology. The concept of culture, and the procedure outlined for its analysis, have, however, been vigorously attacked, especially by certain psychologists of whom Floyd Allport may be taken as typical. Allport's objection to cultural sociology is based on two points: what he terms the group fallacy in social explanation, and his insistence that cultural phenomena may be described in cultural terms but explained only on the next lower level of phenomena, the psychological. Each of these objections upon examination may be seen to involve a fundamental error, as the attempt to analyze certain cultural problems from a purely psychological approach makes evident.

The Validity of the Culture Concept

Giddings' concept of the consciousness of kind as the elemental aspect of human association is strengthened and clarified in the light of a recent development in psychology-the conditioned response. This latter, the transfer of associations and the conditioning of emotions, has been demonstrated by Pavlow's experiments with the salivary reflexes of dogs and John B. Watson's experiments with the emotional reactions of infants. This psychological mechanism clarifies many of the more obscure aspects of the Giddings concept, and in it one of the forces active in the determination of kind is discovered.

Malcolm M. Willey

Papers

The Cultural Approach to Sociology

The Validity of the Culture Concept

The Conditioned Response and the Consciousness of Kind