Shinobu Kitayama Explains Cultural Psychology
The preeminent cultural psychologist Shinobu Kitayama had studied cognitive dissonance and attribution theory at Kyoto University, but when he arrived at the University of Michigan in 1982 he experienced cultural shocks that made him feel “something more profound might be going on in terms of culture and its influence on psychological processes.”
Kitayama, an affiliate of the Research Center for Group Dynamics, and the Robert B. Zajonc Collegiate Professor of Psychology running its Culture & Cognition Lab, is interviewed by David Edmonds in a new Social Science Bites podcast that touches on East-West cultural difference that impacts the inner and outer dimensions of human experience:
How we define the self
How we understand each other
What is happiness
How culture “gets under our skin” to affect not only our biology but regional difference to how we approach work, politics, retirement, and baseball.
Read more about the podcast and have a listen.
Social Science Bites is produced in association with SAGE Publishing, the world’s leading independent academic and professional publisher and the parent of Social Science Space.
Kitayama has published widely in English and in Japanese and served as editor of the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology: Attitudes and Social Cognition and the Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin. He was a fellow of the Center for Advanced Studies of Behavioral Science at Stanford in 1995 and in 2007, a Guggenheim Fellow in 2010, inducted as a fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science in 2012, and served as president of the Association for Psychological Science in 2020.
