I’m quite uncertain about the methodology reported upon here leading to the conclusions thus claimed. The results are interesting but I’m not entirely sure what they really prove — and I doubt very much that they prove what is claimed. Nor am I at all confident that a study of Asian-Americans’ cross-cultural identities first “primed” with respect to work ethics and then “tested” with respect to sexual ethics proves that all these Asian-Americans are somehow neo-Puritans.
Culture matters; the culture we create today will still echo hundreds of years into the future. I didn’t need word-association experimental psychology reaching shaky conclusions to tell me that. Puritan culture survives in such a fashion today — we are much more comfortable with violence than sex in our entertainments and quicker to identify sexual behavior as raising moral issues than almost any other kind. Puritans did not have a monopoly on the association of hard work with good moral behavior, however; nor did they have a lock on personal propriety being a profound virtue.
