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.

Across the millennia, human groups have evolved specific cultural and psychological adaptations to cope with collective threats, from terrorism to natural disasters to pathogens. In particular, cultural tightness, characterized by strict social norms and punishments, as one key adaptation that helps groups coordinate to survive collective threats. However, interferences with threat signals that facilitate tightening can lead to cultural mismatches—either too much or not enough tightening. Michele Gelfand discusses two examples of cultural mismatches: the COVID-19 pandemic (a case in which collective threat is real, but there is a resistance to tightening) and the rise of populist movements (a case in which exaggerated threat leads to unnecessary tightening), and highlight theoretical and practical implications of cultural mismatch theory.

Michele Gelfand is the John H. Scully Professor of Cross-Cultural Management and Professor of Organizational Behavior at the Stanford Graduate School of Business School and Professor of Psychology by Courtesy. Gelfand uses field, experimental, computational and neuroscience methods to understand the evolution of culture and its multilevel consequences. Her book Rule Makers, Rule Breakers: How Tight and Loose Cultures Wire the World was published by Scribner in 2018. She is the Past President of the International Association for Conflict Management. She is a member of the National Academy of Sciences, American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and the Council on Foreign Relations.

People are enculturated actors, shaped by their sociocultural and socioecological contexts. A vast empirical literature has documented that, in Global North contexts that afford greater choice and material abundance, selves are more independent–prioritizing personal interests and autonomy in their preferences and behavior. However, the social psychological literature suffers from glaring gaps in low resource Global South contexts where selves are likely higher in interdependence–prioritizing relationships, roles and obligations in their preferences and behavior (Thomas & Markus, 2023). An agenda on ‘culturally wise’ interventions seeks to fill this gap by experimentally comparing different culturally grounded approaches across diverse sociocultural contexts. Building on theoretical principles of wise interventions (Walton & Wilson, 2018) and culture match (Stephens et al., 2012), culturally wise interventions are attuned to how culturally specific models of self, motivation, and relationality can exert powerful effects on meaning making and behavior. Through experimental evaluations of such intervention approaches in understudied contexts, this research agenda seeks to advance a more comprehensive account of human behavior as well as strategies for promoting psychosocial and economic well-being around the globe. This talk will focus on how culturally wise approaches in sub-Saharan Africa can be leveraged to mitigate poverty and inequality.