Comparing Mozambican and French People’s Conceptualization of Romantic Love
Résumé
The study compared the way Mozambican and French people conceptualize romantic love. Two subsamples of 238 Mozambican adults and 250 French adults were presented with 27 cards containing vignettes (scenarios) that described the characteristics of someone’s relationship regarding degree of passion, the degree of intimacy, and degree of commitment. Participants assessed the intensity of romantic love experienced by the characters in the scenarios using a continuous scale. The way people from both cultures conceptualized romantic love was not entirely similar, but the differences were very subtle. The impact of each component on the judged intensity of love was similar. In both samples, passion and intimacy explained most of the variance. The algebraic structure of the judgment rule was, however, different. Among French participants, the findings were consistent with an equal-weight averaging rule as suggested by previous authors. Among Mozambican participants, the patterns of rating were, however, consistent with a more complex judgment rule. In this rule, the impact of each factor depended on the level of the other factors: A differential weight averaging rule was proposed that can be written Love = wic Passion + w’pc Intimacy + w”pi Commitment / wic + w’pc + w”pi