An enormous amount of scientific research compels two fundamental conclusions about the human mind: The mind is the product of evolution, and the mind is shaped by culture. These two perspectives on the human mind are not incompatible, but, until … Continue reading
The Ape that Understood the Universe is the story of the strangest animal in the world: the human animal. It opens with a question: How would an alien scientist view our species? What would it make of our sex differences, … Continue reading
Cumulative culture gives us knowledge and tools far beyond our individual powers. Cumulative culture doesn’t just gift our species technology that none of us could have invented; it literally makes us smarter. The products of cumulative culture include not only … Continue reading
How the “outside” affects the “inside” is at the heart of many of the deepest psychological questions. In this fast-paced survey of research on how culture shapes cognition, Nalini Ambady examines the neural evidence for socio-cultural influences on thinking, judgment, … Continue reading
A South American tribe living in near-total isolation with no Western dietary influences showed no increase in average blood pressure from age one to age 60, according to a study led by researchers at Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public … Continue reading
Internalization, the process by which culture becomes mind, is a core concept in cultural psychology. However, since the 1990s it has also been the source of debate. Critiques have focused on the underlying metaphor of internal-external as problematic. It has … Continue reading
This editorial highlights the contributions of Gustav Jahoda to cross-cultural and cultural psychology. Gustav’s broad and deep scholarship, focusing on culture, mind and history, crossed disciplinary boundaries of psychology, anthropology and sociology in his attempts to understand human psyche and … Continue reading
Everybody eats to live but food is more than nutrition. Food is a powerful carrier of cultural meaning. Food touches many core issues in sociology and social life, like social stratification, poverty, and prestige, class, gender roles, consumption, nationalism, and … Continue reading
The relationship between emotions and culture has been discussed ever since there was interest in what it means to be human, and since then that relationship has been contrastingly characterized as either inimical or reconcilable. Culture can be understood as … Continue reading
‘Culture’ is in many ways the most fundamental of anthropological concepts. Yet it has been the subject of a range of critical interventions in the course of the discipline’s history, the most recent of which is the ‘ontological turn’. Proponents … Continue reading
