Essays
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Cultural Neuroscience: Connecting Culture, Brain, and Genes - Kitayama, Shinobu
Cultural neuroscience emerged during the past decade at the intersection of cultural psychology, several subfields of human neuroscience, genetics, and epigenetics. In the present essay, we define the field, provide a selective review of its empirical accomplishment, and discuss its future directions. Cultural neuroscience conceptualizes the human mind as biologically prepared and grounded and, at the same time, as socially and culturally shaped and completed. This young field initially started as an effort to expand preceding behavioral work in cultural psychology with novel brain imaging methods. Increasingly, however, the field is poised to address the interplay between biology, environment, and behavior, as shown in our review of recent empirical work on (i) culture and the self, (ii) culture and genes, and (iii) multicultural identity. The future of the field hinges on several key initiatives including the use of brain stimulation methods, expansion of its database to cultures other than North America and Asia, and a more comprehensive analysis of gene–culture coevolution. In conclusion, we observe that further investigation of culture, brain, and genes may lead to an important insight that to study cultural diversity is no less to affirm the unity of humans as a common biological species. -
Cultural Psychology, Socialization, and Individual Development in Changing Contexts - Trommsdorff, Gisela
This essay discusses two major emerging trends in the study of culture and psychology. One trend can be observed in the reconciliation of cross‐cultural and culture‐indigenous approaches due to conceptualizing culture in a value‐ and norm‐oriented framework of cultural meaning and cultural minds. A second trend is based on questions of culture learning and socialization, reconciling the nature–nurture debate. Developmental studies integrating biological and socialization conditions in cultural contexts are complemented by selected studies on culture‐specificities of self‐regulation, prosocial behavior, caretaker's implicit theories on parenting, and intergenerational relations. The meaning‐making function of socialization is seen as a major process in culture learning and the development of cultural mindsets. I conclude with questions regarding socioeconomic, demographic, and cultural changes, suggesting a major research goal for an emerging science of cultural psychology: to provide a scientific basis for better understanding culture‐psychological conditions and consequences of fundamental ongoing changes related to cultural diversity and to accelerating intercultural connections. -
Culture and Cognition - Cerulo, Karen A.
Culture and cognition is a rapidly growing subfield within sociology. Scholars working in this area address how aspects of both social structure and culture impact the ways in which social actors think. From the literature, one learns about specific processes and styles that individuals adopt when engaged in thought, cognitive patterns that characterize certain groups or communities, and thought styles that emerge in specific situations and social contexts. New works pay special attention to the links between mind, body, and sociocultural context. In this essay, I define the general focus of the field, review its intellectual roots, discuss recent turns in its literature, and identify issues for future research. -
Culture as Situated Cognition - Oyserman, Daphna
Culture‐as‐situated‐cognition (CSC) theory proposes that culture can be thought of at three levels. At the highest level, culture is a human universal, a “good enough” solution to universal needs. At the intermediate level, culture is a specific meaning‐making framework, a “mindset” that influences what is attended to, which goals or mental procedure is salient. At the most proximal level, culture is a set of particular practices within a specific society, time, and place which influences what feels fluent and to‐be‐expected. Cross‐national comparisons demonstrate that differences exist. To understand what observed differences imply for underlying process, a situated cognition framework and experimental methods are needed. Indeed, individualistic and collectivistic mindsets are accessible cross‐culturally, so both can be primed. Whether an individualistic or collectivistic cultural mindset is salient in the moment matters, resulting in downstream consequences for meaning making, self‐processes, willingness to invest in relationships, and for complex mental procedures. Between‐group differences arise in part from momentary cues that make either individualistic or collectivistic mindset accessible. Within a culture, people experience cultural fluency if situations match their expectations and cultural disfluency if they do not. Cultural disfluency has downstream consequences for choice and behavior. Moving from one culture to another is difficult because people experience many situations in which they either do not know what to expect or their expectations are not met and feedback as to the nature of the mismatch is almost always ambiguous. For these reasons, while cultural processes are universal, acculturation is often fraught, lengthy, and incomplete.