In the past three decades, cultural psychologists have shown how culture shapes cognitive, emotional, and motivational processes, making it a crucial factor in understanding human behavior. While much of this work has focused on comparing Western European and East Asian heritages, there is a growing need to empirically examine other cultures and uncover new insights into how culture influences the mind. In this talk, I will examine the influence of ecology and geography on human activity, leading to the formation of organized systems of cultural practices and meanings known as "ecocultural complexes." These complexes have given rise to diverse cultural zones we observe today. Outside of the modern West, most cultural zones emphasize an interdependent view of the self. Notably, however, non-Western cultural zones display significant variability. I will explore several non-Western cultural zones, such as Arab, East Asian, Latin American, and South Asian zones, and examine how these cultures may have played a substantial role in shaping the contemporary Western cultural zone. The Western cultural zone, in contrast to non-Western zones, prioritizes the self’s independence over interdependence. By going beyond the conventional Western-East Asian comparison, this talk aims to broaden our understanding of the impact of culture on cognition, emotions, motivation, and behavior. It highlights the significance of exploring diverse cultural zones to gain deeper insights into the intricate relationship between culture and the human mind.

In the US, Asians are commonly viewed as the “model minority” in business academia. Some inspiring initiatives intended to help ethnic minorities to attain tenure and deanship exclude Asians from participating, perhaps because Asians are assumed to be already successful. Jackson G. Lu challenges this assumption by revealing a “Bamboo Ceiling” in tenure, full professorship, and deanship in US business schools. He analyzes a 10-year panel of tenure-track professors and deans at top-50 US business schools. Although Asians appear well represented at first glance, a stark contrast emerges once one distinguishes between East Asians (e.g., ethnic Chinese) and South Asians (e.g., ethnic Indians): Among all ethnicities, East Asian faculty are proportionally the least likely to be tenured professors, full professors, and deans, whereas South Asian faculty are the most likely. Moreover, East Asians tend to be employed by lower-ranked schools. To understand these puzzling patterns, Lu constructs large-scale datasets to test potential contributing factors, including (a) faculty recruitment bar, (b) research productivity, (c) research impact, (d) teaching evaluations, (e) invited seminar talks, (f) social media activities, and (g) social media mentions. As one of the largest endeavors to examine ethnic disparities in academia, this research extends the diversity, equity, and inclusion literature and the “leaky pipeline” literature by uncovering East Asian faculty’s neglected challenges in US business schools. Jackson G. Lu is the Sloan School Career Development Associate Professor in Work and Organization Studies at the MIT Sloan School of Management. He received his PhD from Columbia Business School. Jackson studies culture and globalization through two distinctive research streams. His first research stream examines the “Bamboo Ceiling” experienced by Asians despite their educational and economic achievements in the United States. His second research stream elucidates how multicultural experiences (e.g., working abroad, intercultural friendships) shape key organizational outcomes, including leadership, creativity, and ethics. Jackson has published in top general science journals (Nature Human Behaviour, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences), management journals (Journal of Applied Psychology, Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes, Organization Science), and psychology journals (Annual Review of Psychology, Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, Psychological Science). His research has been featured in over 300 media outlets (e.g., BBC, The Economist, The Financial Times, Harvard Business Review, NPR, The Boston Globe, The New York Times, The Washington Post).He has received prestigious awards and honors, including World’s 40 Best Business School Professors Under 40, 30 Thinkers to Watch, NLS Rising Star Award from the Academy of Management, Rising Star Award from the Association for Psychological Science, SAGE Early Career Trajectory Award from the Society for Personality and Social Psychology, Early Career Award from the International Association for Conflict Management, New Investigator Award from the Behavioral Science & Policy Association, and the Best Senior Editor Award from Management and Organization Review.

In this talk, Üskül presents recent findings pointing to a distinct emphasis on several forms of independence (relative intensity of disengaging [vs. engaging] emotions, happiness based on disengaging [vs. engaging] emotions, dispositional [vs. situational] attribution style, self-construal as different from others, self-directed, self-reliant, self-expressive, and consistent) and interdependence (closeness to in-group [vs. out-group] members, self-construal as connected and committed to close others) in the Mediterranean region compared to more commonly studied East Asian and Anglo-Western cultural groups. She discusses this unique pattern in light of the importance of “honor” values in Mediterranean societies, which require individuals to develop and protect a sense of their personal self-worth and their social reputation, through assertiveness, competitiveness, and retaliation in the face of threats. These findings extend previous insights into patterns of cultural orientation beyond commonly examined East–West comparisons to an understudied world region. In addition, she will share a within-region analysis of self-construal social orientation, and cognitive style to examine the role of ethnic, linguistic, national, religious and socio-ecological factors in similarities and differences between subregional groups.  Üskül is a social and cultural psychologist interested in the role of cultural and socio-ecological context in self-related, interpersonal and social cognitive processes. She completed her degrees at Bogazici University in Istanbul, Turkey (BA), Vrije Universiteit, Amsterdam, the Netherlands (MA), and York University, Toronto, Canada (PhD) and held a SSHRC-funded Postdoctoral Fellowship at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor between 2004-06. She held academic positions at the University of Essex, Queen's University Belfast, and University of Kent before joining the University of Sussex in 2022. Her past research on socio-economic basis of interdependence, cultural conceptions of honor, and culture and health behavior change received funding from the British Academy, the US National Science Foundation, the Economic and Social Research Council, the Leverhulme Trust, and Japanese Society of the Promotion of Science, among others. Her current comparative research on the role of honor in social interactional processes is funded by a European Research Council Consolidator Grant (www.honorlogic.org). She is Co-Chief Editor of the European Review of Social Psychology and the President of the Psychology Section of the British Science Association.

The rice theory is the idea traditional rice farming’s labor and irrigation demands made rice-farming cultures more interdependent cultures. Thomas Talhelm will present data showing that northern and southern China have cultural differences that fall along the historical borders of rice and wheat. And since most of East Asia was built on rice farming, rice could help explain larger East-West cultural differences. In this talk, he’ll show new data on manspreading around the world. He and his team coded how much space 7,000 people were taking up in Starbucks in nine countries. He will also build from the cartoonish kindergarten version of the rice theory (rice = collectivism!) to a slightly more realistic undergrad version. The undergrad version of the theory can explain puzzles like why China’s wheat-farming north is still so different from wheat-farming Western Europe and why China’s most fertile farming regions were the last to start farming. Thomas Talhelm is an Associate Professor of Behavioral Science at the University of Chicago Booth School of Business. He researches the agricultural roots of cultural differences and how people (researchers!) get collectivism wrong. Thomas has lived in China for seven years as a Princeton in Asia Fellow, a freelance journalist, and a Fulbright scholar. When he should have been writing his dissertation, he founded a social enterprise called Smart Air, which makes low-cost, open-data-backed air purifiers to help people in China and India protect themselves from air pollution. 

In a new book, A Theory of Everyone: Who We Are, How We Got Here, and Where We're Going, Michael Muthukrishna argues that the psychological and behavioral sciences are in the midst of a scientific revolution on the scale of Newtonian and Einsteinian physics, the periodic table, and Darwinian evolution. It is a revolution moving us from alchemy to chemistry and one that is bringing order to chaos and laying the path from science to technology – in this case, policy applications. This emerging science is grounded in a formal general theory that recognizes that our psychology and behavior are governed by millions of years of genetic evolution, our genetic inheritance as an African ape; thousands of years of cultural evolution, our cultural inheritance a product of path dependencies and cultural adaptations in the various ecologies we’ve thrived in across the planet; and a short lifetime of experience, tuning these other two lines of informational inheritance. This revolution has 3 parts: (1) general and specific, ultimate and proximate formal theories that make falsifiable predictions for universal and culturally specific psychology and behavior; (2) new tools for measuring and analyzing psychology and culture through large datasets, field and lab experiments; (3) real world tests using policy interventions, guided by the principle that if your theories don’t work in the real world, they don’t work at all. Michael Muthukrishna is Associate Professor of Economic Psychology and Affiliate in Developmental Economics and in Data Science at the London School of Economics (LSE), Technical Director of the Database of Religious History, and CIFAR Azrieli Global Scholar at the Canadian Institute for Advanced Research (CIFAR) program for Boundaries, Membership, and Belonging. His research focuses on human biological and cultural evolution and how the “theory of human behavior” that emerges from this research can be used to improve innovation, reduce corruption, and increase cross-cultural cooperation. His work has been featured in a variety of news outlets including CNN, BBC, Wall Street Journal, The Economist, The Guardian, The Telegraph, The Times, Scientific American, Nature News, and Science News. He advises both governments and organizations and has won several awards for his research. Michael's research is informed by his educational background in engineering and psychology, with graduate training in evolutionary biology, economics, and statistics, and his personal background living in Sri Lanka, Botswana, Papua New Guinea, Australia, Canada, United States, and the United Kingdom. He is the author of “A Theory of Everyone: Who We Are, How We Got Here, and Where We're Going”.  For more information, please see his website: https://michael.muthukrishna.com/  A Theory of Everyone: Who We Are, How We Got Here, and Where We're Going is out September 28th. Available to pre-order: https://linktr.ee/theoryofeveryone

In its attempt to understand, explain, and predict human behavior, mainstream psychology has notoriously understudied populations in the global south. Africans currently make up 16% of the world’s population and are projected to comprise 25% of the world’s population by 2050 and 40% by 2100, according to UN projections. By 2100, half of all babies in the world will be born in Africa. Investing in research efforts in this population will advance psychology’s broader goals of human progress and understanding.  Emotions are fundamental to the human experience, and wellbeing is important to understanding the human condition and the social influences that impact individual experience. Emotion experiences have been understudied in African contexts. Using data from 2 African countries and the United States, this presentation will explore culturally-shaped patterns of emotion expression, experience, and regulation; cultural emotion norms; and cultural understandings of wellbeing. 

During the COVID-19 pandemic, societies faced the challenge of an unknown and potentially deadly disease. While many questions about the pandemic remain unanswered, it is evident that countries like Japan, Taiwan, and South Korea outperformed the United States in responding to and controlling the outbreak, particularly in its early stages. While many factors are implicated, a comprehensive understanding of this difference requires attention to the variation in common sense and to the meaning systems that ground and organize these contexts. Our goal is both scientific and practical. We identify some common existential questions that emerged during various stages of the pandemic: "Will it happen to us?", "What should I/we do?", and "How should I/we live now,?" and propose that how people answered these questions and made sense of the pandemic reflects the influence of tacit but foundational models of agency and their associated cognitive, affective, and motivational psychological defaults.   In the United States, where a predominant model of agency emphasizes the independence of the individual, these psychological defaults include optimism-uniqueness; single causes; high arousal; influence and control; personal choice and self-regulation; and promotion. In Japan, Taiwan and South Korea, where a predominant model of agency emphasizes the interdependence of individuals, these psychological defaults include realism-similarity, multiple causes; low arousal; wait and adjust; social choice and social regulation; and prevention. Integrating research from decades of empirical research in social and cultural psychology, we describe how these cultural defaults operated together, influencing commonly observed behavioral patterns and decision making throughout the pandemic. Although much more research is necessary in many unexamined contexts of the world, in the well-researched areas described here, we suggest how to incorporate a consideration of cultural models and psychological defaults into guidelines for decision making and planning for future crises.