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The Mileage from Social Axioms: Learning from the Past and Looking Forward

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Psychological Aspects of Social Axioms

Part of the book series: International and Cultural Psychology ((ICUP))

Social axioms are proposed as fundamental psychological constructs tapping a person's beliefs about the social world and how it works, positioned centrally in the nomological network of broad psychological constructs and capable of predicting crucial psychological outcomes. This ambitious proposal has been put to empirical test across psychological domains around the world. In this chapter, we review all published empirical investigations on social axioms, demarcating them from other broad psychological constructs (e.g., personality and values) as well as examining if and how they could serve the four specific functions originally proposed, viz., “facilitate the attainment of important goals (instrumental), help people protect their self-worth (ego-defensive), serve as a manifestation of people's values (value-expressive), and help people understand the world (knowledge)” (Leung et al., 2002, p. 288). We envisage social axioms as fundamental and useful psychological constructs that will continue to gain importance in social sciences research in the decades to come, and we propose a number of fruitful future research directions to promote this line of research.

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Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. The Chinese University of Hong Kong, China

    Chin-Ming Hui & Heung-Hung Natalie Hui

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  1. Chin-Ming Hui
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  2. Heung-Hung Natalie Hui
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Editors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Management, City University of Hong Kong, Kowloon, Hong Kong, China

    Kwok Leung

  2. Department of Psychology, Chinese University of Hong Kong Shatin, New Territories, Hong Kong, China

    Michael Harris Bond

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Hui, CM., Hui, HH.N. (2009). The Mileage from Social Axioms: Learning from the Past and Looking Forward. In: Leung, K., Bond, M.H. (eds) Psychological Aspects of Social Axioms. International and Cultural Psychology. Springer, New York, NY. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-0-387-09810-4_2

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