Research in cross-cultural cognitive psychology builds on the well-founded assumption that human cognition is influenced by individuals' internal properties (e.g., brain, visual system) and external environments (e.g., social situations). A follow-up assumption is that culture is a particularly potent force operating both on individuals' external environments and internal properties. One of the most pressing challenges facing scholars studying culture and cognition is the issue of the independent variable: "What is culture?" Wide-ranging answers are available from myriad disciplines, including shared meaning systems, cultural ethos, practices and habits, institutions and social structures, artifacts and tools, and the catch-all of everything that takes place in human psychological life and interaction beyond what is driven by genes. In order to get traction on the issue of culture and cognition, we must first make progress by "unpacking" culture and adopting a position on how to define it and how to represent it in our research. There is unlikely to be one best definition of culture or way of studying culture's effects. Rather, we must discuss and grapple with various aspects of culture, eventually settling on inevitably imperfect but workable assumptions about what culture means.

Examples of Research Questions

culture as distinct values systems

culture as distinct conceptions of selfhood

culture as distinct implicit folk epistemologies

Culture as distinct value systems.

Most people who have traveled or lived outside of their home country have a sense that people in other cultures possess different values from their own. These values may define culture itself, and systematic differences in core values can provide a framework for investigating cultural differences. This is the path Geert Hofstede took when, over 20 years ago, he administered a survey of values to nearly 120,000 IBM employees in 40 countries. Values included (a) power distance (degree of willingness to tolerate differences in power and authority across people in a society), (b) individualism vs. collectivism (one's orientation either toward the individual or the group), (c) masculinity vs femininity (the former stressing achievement and material success, the latter stressing harmony and caring), and (d) uncertainty avoidance (degree of willingness and ability to tolerate ambiguity). Back to questions

Culture as distinct conceptions of selfhood.

Many theorists have suggested not only that the psychology of self varies across cultures but that self conceptions are at the very heart of what culture is. Research has found, for example, that people who grow up participating in Western European cultures (e.g., Euro-North Americans) tend to have a more "independent" self-concept. Such a self is viewed as a separate, autonomous, and bounded agent. In contrast, people who grow up participating in East Asian cultures tend to have a more "interdependent" self-concept. Such a self is viewed as part of an interconnected web of relationships and mutual obligations, and in fact only gains meaning in relation to important others such as in-group members. So, for example, when research participants are asked to describe themselves, East Asians' self-descriptions are more likely to reflect their social identities ("I am a Ritsumeikan University student") or refer to relationships ("I am a sister"). Euro-North Americans' self-descriptions, in contrast, are more likely to reflect abstract personality traits ("I am funny"). One of the most significant research questions that our Exploratory Workshop members will pursue is "What culturally-based differences in attentional, perceptual, and cognitive processes might derive from these distinct self-construals?" Euro-North American cultures, focused on the self as an independent, autonomous agent, may encourage attention to properties of the central object (i.e., the foreground), even to the exclusion of the field at large. East Asian cultures, focused on the self as interconnected and related, tend to view the world as a collection of overlapping and interpenetrating properties. Behavior in a collectivist society, therefore, requires smooth and simultaneous coordination around the needs and demands of others, and the set of situational factors relevant to behavior is often very great. Thus, attention may be directed to the context or field at large, and to relations among objects in the field. How will humanists think about such issues? What would it mean for certain cultural groups to be predisposed to be more attentive either to focal objects or to the field at large? It will also be important for us to grapple with such issues at the micro level of analysis. Neuro-anatomical processes of visual perception are instructive here. From the time a stimulus first enters the eye to the time a percept emerges into consciousness, the stimulus has been coded at several levels in the visual system. Recent evidence leads compellingly to the idea that these visual perceptions emerge not from a simple linear set of discrete "feed-forward" stages, but from iterative exchanges between higher and lower brain regions through reentrant neural pathways. In such a system, primary visual cortex is critically involved with higher brain regions at all successive stages of computation. On this view, conscious perceptions depend critically not only on the pattern of stimulation entering the visual system from the environment, but also on the kind of perceptual hypotheses that have been established through learning. Like all other learned knowledge, these perceptual hypotheses are likely to be somewhat culturally bound. Another research question therefore is "What specific things can we discover about the micro-level perceptual hypotheses that are in significant ways built by cultural forces?" Back to questions

Culture as distinct implicit folk epistemologies.

Members of a culture share many widespread stances that have been labeled cultural models, social representations, naïve ontologies and epistemologies, and folk psychologies. These implicit theories about the world cover much territory, for example, they can be about personality change, attribution for causality, physics, or biology. Here, culture is operationalized as a set of knowledge structures that guide inference. Theories can play a direct role in human inference as perceivers invoke their particular theory to go beyond the information available. Theories also can play a management role in human inference, guiding how evidence is recruited and analyzed. One of the central issues that we will consider in this Exploratory Workshop is the possibility of integrating these three (and other viable) perspectives. For example, what do folk theories do and where do they come from? Cultural values surely must be an important source for such implicit theories. That is, people's intuitions about "what the world is like" may be importantly shaped by "what they think the world should be like." In this way, implicit theories may mediate between values (and/or self concept) on the one hand and inference on the other. A very different kind of research question concerns how investigators can get a better handle on the precise ways in which culture has its influence on human cognition. We need to understand much more about how cultural messages are transmitted (a mapping out of the links). For example, within the context of self-construal, we will consider ways in which advertisements in different cultures make one orientation or the other more accessible. Western advertisements tend to emphasize individualism ("Make your way through the crowd"), whereas Eastern advertisements tend to emphasize collectivism ("Ringing out the news of business friendships that really work"). Yet we will also consider how mother-infant interactions may make one orientation or the other more accessible. Japanese mothers tend to know in advance when their baby is about to cry for milk and breast-feed just prior to the cry. Euro-North American mothers are more likely to respond when they hear their baby's cry. The Japanese baby, therefore, learns that she or he is part of an interconnected system; the unit is the mother/baby. The Euro-North American baby learns that she or he is an autonomous agent, needing to signal to disconnected others her or his needs. Finally, a new wave of research on culture and cognition suggests that people are not shaped uniformly by cultural experiences, but rather have access to multiple cultural meaning systems that are selectively activated by contextual cues. This dynamic constructivist approach focuses on the processes through which specific pieces of cultural knowledge (implicit theories) become operative in guiding the construction of meaning from a stimulus. The idea is that a construct's accessibility, which is a function of recent use, makes it more operative in a particular interpretive task. So, for example, researchers have found that bicultural participants (i.e., Hong Kong Chinese with exposure to both Chinese and Euro-American cultures) behave differently when primed with icons of Chinese culture (pictures of the Stone Monkey or a Peking opera actor) than when primed with icons of Euro-American culture (pictures of Superman or Marilyn Monroe). The beauty of this theory is in its power to explain both cultural similarities and differences. In fact, the research convincingly demonstrates that cultural differences in social cognition and behavior appear or disappear depending on the implicit beliefs adopted by the participants. Back to questions