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Cooperative Behavior Pattern in "Belt-Road" Area: A Psychological Analysis of Big Data on Twitter

2018-04-03

The "Belt and Road" is a development strategy proposed by the Chinese government that focuses on connectivity and cooperation between Eurasian countries, primarily the People's Republic of China (PRC), the land-based Silk Road Economic Belt (SREB) and the ocean-going Maritime Silk Road (MSR). The strategy underlines China's push to take a larger role in global affairs with a China-centered trading network.  

Therefore, it's necessary to analyze the characters of countries along the "Belt and Road" and find an effective way to cooperate with them. This is an issue of vital concern to national strategy implementation. Due to its vast territory, multi-nations and the complexity of geopolitics, economics and cultural, the traditional method is difficult to work.   

Base on the above background, Dr. ZHU Tingshao from the Institute of Psychology of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, together with his research group, analyzed individualism of countries along the "Belt and Road" based on Twitter data with integrating cultural psychology and big data analytics.  

Social trust were predicted by individualism, and could be used to help us explore the behavior pattern of cooperate with coutries along the "Belt and Road".  

By correlating with self-expression in the World Values Survey(WVS) database or personality emancipation values and social trust indicators, the behavioral values of countries or regions along the "Belt and Road" are predicted.  

The WVS consists of nationally representative surveys conducted in almost 100 countries which contain almost 90 percent of the world's population, using a common questionnaire.  

The results indicated that there were large differences among these countries in individualism. It can be explained by the fact of its religious tradition. In adittion, general trust and special trust both could be predicted by individualism.  

In conclusion, these findings provide a new technology method to explore the behavior patterns of communicate and cooperate with the countries along the "Belt and Road".  

A paper about this work was published in Bulletin of Chinese Academy of Sciences. 

This research is one of the series of achievements in the field of "Computational Cyberpsychology" by Dr. ZHU and his research group of the Key Laboratory of Behavioral Sciences from the Institute of Psychology, Chinese Academy of Sciences.  

(Editor: ZHANG Nannan)