Culture Conscious

How culture shapes thought.

by Lawrence T. White, Ph.D., and Steven B. Jackson

What's Funny?

Humor is a universal phenomenon, present in virtually all human groups. Despite its ubiquity, humor is far from being fully understood. Read More

The Occupy movement protests against economic inequality and the concentration of wealth among an elite few. In Garrison Keillor’s fictional town of Lake Wobegon, “all the women are strong, all the men are good-looking, and all the children are above average.” Surprisingly, the former may have something to do with the latter. Read More

Chatting Up Culture With Steven Heine: Part II

The final installment of an interview with Steven Heine, a leading figure in cross-cultural psychology. A prolific researcher, author, and professor, Heine is constantly hard at work, pursuing the big questions in human behavior. Read More

Chatting Up Culture With Steven Heine: Part I

In the first half of a two-part interview, renowned cross-cultural psychologist Steven Heine discusses his latest research, shares a critique of Western psychology, and tells us why everyone should care about this stuff. Read More

Southern Comfort

Why are Southerners so polite? In cultures of honor—and the South is one such culture—people are concerned about their reputation for toughness and readiness to avenge insults and slurs. Read More

Why Left Is Less and Right Is More (Sometimes)

We tend to think about numbers as existing in space. These spatial associations are shaped by cultural factors to some degree, but can also be tempered by experience in the here and now. Read More

How Good Is Your Memory?

Picture yourself at a party for UN staffers. People from Brazil, China, and Sweden are rubbing elbows with people from Germany, India, and Morocco. The hostess says, "Let's play a memory game." She asks everyone to sit quietly and look carefully at a large screen, on which she projects—one by one—a series of 10 numerals. Read More

Math Was Digital Long Before Calculators

By looking at culturally specific ways of dealing with numbers, we can begin to tease apart which aspects of math, while not transcending humanity, may at least be universal to all cultures. We'll start the exploration simply, the same way many of us learned to deal with numbers: by counting on our hands. Read More

Is "Punctuality Standard" an Oxymoron?

Roger Axtell often traveled abroad in his role as vice-president for worldwide marketing with the Parker Pen Company. After many years on the road and in the air, he wrote an entertaining guide for international business travelers in which he offered advice about punctuality. In New Zealand, for example, "visitors should try to be a bit early." In Panama, "punctuality is held Read More

Getting Grown

Nature, nurture, and the global experience of adolescence. Read More

Do Cultures Segment Time Differently?

How we partition the minutes in an hour may affect punctuality. Psychologist Robert Levine observed that most Americans assess punctuality in 5-minute intervals, whereas most Arabs assess punctuality in quarters of an hour (i.e., 15-minute intervals). Read More

Are the Twos Terrible Everywhere?

Most of us are familiar with the "terrible twos," a difficult period in the development of a child that is marked by defiance, temper tantrums, and the like. Most parents in the United States come to terms with the terrible twos, accepting it as a frustrating but necessary transitional step in early childhood. Read More

Is Before to the Left of After?

How we think about time can differ dramatically across cultures. Suppose someone gives you four cards, each of which depicts a scene from a story about preparing and eating a meal. The person asks you to arrange the scenes in temporal order, from beginning to end. Will you place the first card to the left or to the right of the second card? Read More

Musical Minds

Psychologically speaking, music is special. Whether it's blues in Chicago, Euro pop in Berlin, or Gamelan in Bali, music speaks to us like nothing else can. Is our love affair with music innately human or culturally programmed? Read More