Culture & Psychology
How do cultural worlds and psychological processes shape one another?
People learn to notice, feel, reason and relate within particular cultural worlds. They also sustain and change those worlds through everyday activity. Culture includes shared meanings, practices, relationships, institutions and material settings; it is not interchangeable with nationality, and people within a society do not all think alike.
This area brings cultural, cross-cultural and Indigenous approaches into conversation. It asks whose concepts guide research, what comparisons can establish, how psychological processes take shape in context, and how traditions change through learning, contact and historical conditions. Begin with the foundation to develop ways of evaluating a cultural explanation alongside the evidence supporting it.
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How Do Culture and Mind Shape Each Other?
A foundation in cultural psychology: whose concepts and samples we use, how cognition and emotion take shape in context, and how participation, norms and historical change connect people with cultural worlds.
Introductory · 9 core readings · 5 units · Prerequisites: No prior course in cultural psychology is required. How to Read Psychological Science provides useful preparation for evaluating claims and evidence. Be ready to compare conceptual arguments, qualitative examples and quantitative studies. Some reviews are demanding; follow their reasoning without treating every technical detail as a prerequisite.
Begin the syllabus →Additional syllabi
How Can We Compare Psychological Processes Across Cultures?
Evaluate cross-cultural comparisons through research design, sampling, task meaning, measurement invariance and the distinction between group patterns and individual processes.
Intermediate · 9 readings
How Do Cultural Worlds Shape Selves and Relationships?
Explore cultural models of selfhood through autonomy, relationships, institutional expectations and everyday situations, while distinguishing group patterns from individual experience.
Intermediate · 8 readings
How Does Culture Shape Perception, Thought and Communication?
Examine cultural accounts of attention, categorization, language and conversation through frameworks, contrasting studies and locally grounded evidence.
Intermediate · 9 readings
How Do Culture and Emotion Shape Each Other?
Explore how cultural meanings and practices enter emotional experience, expression, recognition and regulation, and what comparative evidence can establish.
Intermediate · 8 readings
How Do Cultural Norms and Institutions Organize Behavior?
Examine how norms, institutions, ecology and history shape behavior, and how experiments and replications test those explanations.
Intermediate · 10 readings
How Do Culture, Morality and Religion Shape One Another?
Compare moral frameworks and cultural evidence on intentions, fairness, religious practices, cooperation and prejudice toward nonbelievers.
Intermediate · 10 readings
How Are Cultures Learned, Transmitted and Changed?
Examine how people acquire and transform cultural knowledge, how networks support cumulative change, and what would justify an explanation of a society’s history.
Intermediate · 10 readings
How Do People Navigate Multiple Cultural Worlds?
A guided path through cultural contact: how participation, identities and responses vary, how institutions shape opportunities, and what evidence can establish about adaptation.
Intermediate · 8 readings