How Do Bulgarians Argue?

What is it about?

The process of offering, testing, and perhaps agreeing on reasons is a fundamental social experience. People throughout the world argue in order to settle small things, such as who should find out if the children are sleeping; medium things, such as what vegetables to plant; and large things, such as whether or not to seek another job. In this paper, we report results from the first systematic investigation of motivations, understandings and emotional reactions regarding interpersonal arguing conducted in Bulgaria.

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Why is it important?

We found relatively few differences between male and female respondents. Furthermore, our respondents displayed a relatively low degree of concern with any positive or negative relational consequences from interpersonal disagreement as well as with identity display. We attempt to explain these and other interesting findings on the basis of certain specifics of Bulgarian culture as they are expressed in folk tales, sayings and results from studies in social psychology. One such specific, which we found to be particularly relevant, is the relatively low level of interpersonal trust in the country.