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CONTENTS

Foreword • ix
Introduction • 1

Chapter 1
Human Culture in Evolutionary Perspective • 5
Michael Tomasello
I. Introduction 5
II. Ape and Human Cooperation 6
III. Ape and Human Cultural Transmission 22
IV. Ape and Human Social Cognition 29
V. An Evolutionary Fairy Tale 39
VI. Conclusion 42

Chapter 2
Culture, Emotion, and Expression • 53
David Matsumoto and Hyi Sung Hwang
I. Introduction 53
II. A Theoretical Preview: The Cultural Calibration of Emotion 55
III. Overview of the Research Program 58
IV. Judgment Studies 59
V. Production Studies 75
VI. Conclusion 88

Chapter 3
Infectious Disease and the Creation of Culture • 99
Mark Schaller and Damian R. Murray
I. Introduction 99
II. Pathogen Prevalence and the Prediction of
Cross-Cultural Differences 109
III. Deeper Consideration of Underlying Causal Processes 133

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vi Contents

Chapter 4
Attachment, Learning, and Coping
The Interplay of Cultural Similarities and Differences • 153
Fred Rothbaum, Gilda Morelli, and Natalie Rusk
I. Introduction 153
II. Attachment Theory 158
III. Research Highlighting Cultural Differences in Attachment 161
IV. Research on Cultural Differences in Learning 178
V. Attachment and Coping 188
VI. Implications and Conclusion 197

Chapter 5
Culturally Situated Linguistic Ecologies and Language Use
Cultural Tools at the Service of Representing and Shaping
Situated Realities • 217
Gün R. Semin
I. Introduction 217
II. A Functional Approach to the Language–Cognition–Culture
Interface on the Situated Interaction Level 219
III. Interlude: From Language in Dialogue to
Omnipresent Language 235
IV. The Linguistic Ecology of Cultures and Its Impact on the
Shape of Psychological Realities 237
V. Summary and Conclusion 241

Chapter 6
Micro–Macro Dynamics of the Cultural Construction
of Reality
A Niche Construction Approach to Culture • 251
Toshio Yamagishi
I. Introduction 251
II. Illustrations: What Makes Individuals in a Collectivist Culture
Behave in a Collectivist Manner? 256
III. The Core Idea: Individuals’ Behaviors Collectively
Create a Social Niche 261
IV. Research Agendas 279
V. Conclusion: Mutual Construction of Mind and Ecology 297
 Contents vii

Chapter 7
Horizontal and Vertical Individualism and Collectivism
Implications for Understanding Psychological Processes • 309
Sharon Shavitt, Carlos J. Torelli, and Hila Riemer
I. Introduction 309
II. Horizontal and Vertical Individualism and Collectivism 310
III. Measuring Horizontal and Vertical Forms of
Individualism and Collectivism 313
IV. Who Am I and What Do I Value? 315
V. How Should I Present Myself? 319
VI. How Do I Perceive the Social Environment? 325
VII. Future Directions and Implications for
Consumer Psychology 338
VIII. Conclusion 341

Index • 351
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FOREWORD

T he publication of Advances in Culture and Psychology is of historic impor-

tance. The buzz surrounding research on culture and psychology reemerged
in the 1980s and has been reverberating through several disciplines ever since,
including social, developmental, and cognitive psychology, anthropology, and
linguistics. There are now first-rate textbooks, handbooks, and journals on
the topic. A growing literature on psychic pluralism versus psychic unity across
cultural groups is rich with inspiring philosophical and theoretical manifestos,
eye-opening empirical studies, and informative review essays. Now happily
there is Advances in Culture and Psychology. The editors of the series invite lead-
ing scholars to give an overview of their mature research programs. Advances
in Culture and Psychology is sure to become an ongoing canonical vehicle for
the revival of psychological research that is both comparative and sensitive to
cultural realities.
Research programs in comparative psychology can, of course, be traced
back to the late nineteenth century and early decades of the twentieth cen-
tury. In the late 1890s a young psychologist, William McDougall, participated
in the famous pioneering interdisciplinary Cambridge University Torres Straits
expedition and established an experimental laboratory in New Guinea to
assess similarities and differences in sensory perception across cultural groups.
In the early 1930s a young anthropologist, Margaret Mead, returned from a
field trip to the Admiralty Islands and told a young Jean Piaget that Swiss
children in Geneva were distinctively Western and that he had wildly over-
generalized about the universal development of animistic thinking in children.
Concerns and debates of that sort—attentive to the population-based bound-
ary conditions for generalizations about human mental functioning and the
global representativeness of the samples and evidence supporting “fundamen-
tal psychological processes”—have never been entirely absent from the psy-
chological, semiotic, and behavioral sciences. Nevertheless they were largely
set to the side in “mainstream psychology” in the decades immediately follow-
ing World War II. Fortunately researchers in Europe and North America are

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x Foreword

beginning, once again, to become self-conscious about the possibility that the
findings they publish might be significantly (and interestingly) culture-bound.
And today research on culture and psychology is one of the growth sectors in
the psychological, semiotic, and behavioral sciences.
One looks forward to the day when the recurrence of interest in culture
and psychology has been systematically documented. Any such history, one
imagines, will point to events and processes both inside and outside the acad-
emy that have created a favorable environment for a field that is concerned
with questions of cultural influence. Concerning outside events, I have in
mind, for example, changes in the U.S. immigration laws in the 1960s that
prepared the way for increased levels of Asian, African, and South and Middle
American migration; the international pendulum swing in the direction of
economic globalization, which eroded national barriers to the flow of goods,
information, capital, and labor (including students and scholars) all over the
world; the emergence of identity politics, social justice concerns, and affirma-
tive action policies and their beneficial consequences for funding research or
researcher training with regard to ethnic and racial minority groups; and the
various and numerous conflicts and competitions between nations and groups
over the past decades (from the Japanese success in the world economy to the
wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and the tensions between Islam and Christianity
in Europe). These conflicts and competitions have made it increasingly appar-
ent that cultural influences and group differences in human goals, values, and
pictures of reality are not only here to stay but need to be understood for the
sake of domestic and international tranquility, and for everyone’s general well-
being. Concerning events inside the academy, I have in mind scholarly institu-
tions, including, for example, this publication series, which will regularly
publish and make visible the advances that mark progress in the disciplined
investigation of the ways culture and psyche make each other up.
Breadth of coverage is a positive thing for a publication series on culture
and psychology, if for no other reason than the diversity of existing research
program on mental states among human beings on a global scale. Most
researchers who work this field have more than just a general interest in cul-
tural influences on behavior. For some the aim of research on culture and psy-
chology is to guard against the hazards of parochialism and to ensure the
general truth or universal validity of any proposed psychological theory (includ-
ing theories of psychological development) by grounding any claims about psy-
chic unity in evidence that is representative of the diverse populations of
the world. For others the (closely related) aim of culture and psychology is to
 Foreword xi

establish comparability or equivalence for measuring instruments across

different populations (and to be especially alert to the hazards of misunder-
standing or miscommunication or mistranslation across cultural and linguistic
worlds). For still others the aim is to construct a credible theory of psycho-
logical pluralism and to give priority to the study of the distinctive mental
characteristics of various peoples. Here the aim of research in culture and psy-
chology is to document and explain differences in what people want, think,
know, feel, and value (and hence do) by virtue of growing up in a particular
cultural group. It is the study of human diversity in emotional functioning,
self-organization, moral evaluation, social cognition, and pathways of develop-
ment. Advances in Culture and Psychology will be a lively and welcoming home to
a multiplicity of such aims.
Richard A. Shweder
William Claude Reavis Distinguished Service Professor
Department of Comparative Human Development
University of Chicago
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Introduction

T he launching of the Advances in Culture and Psychology series is the result

of a confluence of events that happened at the right place and the right
time. Like many ideas, the germ of the conception of the series was quite ser-
endipitous. It was December of 2006, during a conference on culture spon-
sored by the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, that we were
reflecting on the achievements of the culture field over a coffee break. After
days of very stimulating presentations that energized and connected culture
scholars from across the field, we had the collective recognition that the state
of the science of culture and psychology was far deeper, far broader, and far
more impactful than anyone at the conference had even begun to acknowl-
edge. It was a recognition that a cultural revolution is beginning to take form
throughout the discipline, with culture research infiltrating all of psycholo-
gy—from neuroscience, cognitive, developmental, clinical, and counseling, to
social and organizational and beyond. Far from being the “exception,” culture
research in the discipline was becoming more of the norm. Over our coffee
break, we also had another collective realization: While culture research per-
vades the discipline, the disciplinary structure of the field inhibits this very
recognition and synergy. Much of the culture work in psychology remains
within its own disciplinary walls, rarely breaking out to be found in its sister
disciplines. Additionally, with few exceptions, there is little institution build-
ing that organizes, disseminates, and marks the collective contributions of the

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2 Introduction

culture and psychology field. The Advances in Culture and Psychology series
seeks to do just that.
In this series, we seek to showcase highly influential research programs
on topics related to culture and psychology, broadly defined. The series is a
source for students, researchers, and practitioners who want to find compre-
hensive, critical, and state-of-the-art reviews on mature research programs in
culture and psychology. The Advances series is committed to showcasing cul-
ture research that represents a wide variety of theoretical, epistemological,
and methodological perspectives, including research from cross-cultural, cul-
tural, indigenous, computational, linguistic, among many other traditions;
work that spans many levels of analysis; and work from psychology as well as
our sister disciplines, including linguistics, sociology, anthropology, political
science, economics, among others. Of note, we deliberately chose the title
Culture and Psychology to communicate the breadth and depth with which we
view the intellectual terrain of the series.
With this series, we hope to develop an intellectual home for culture and
psychology research programs and to foster bridges among culture scholars
from across the discipline and beyond. We aim to provide a space to display
our collective knowledge, to take stock of the best that our field has to offer,
and to push the cultural envelope even farther and deeper into the discipline
of psychology. We also envision the series as a mechanism to translate our
knowledge into practical relevance for managing interdependence in an
increasingly “flat” world. In a world of global threats and global opportunities,
knowledge about cultural processes is critical for dealing with pressing univer-
sal concerns, from terrorism to globalization to the preservation of the
environment.
Scholars from across the discipline will be invited to contribute articles on
a yearly basis so that the volume reflects diverse contributions across the fields
of culture and psychology. Authors are also encouraged to submit their work
to be considered for publication. Target articles for the Advances in Culture and
Psychology series are scholars’ own mature research programs—comprehen-
sive reviews of the cumulative knowledge that has been gained through one’s
programmatic work (similar to the high-profile Advances in Experimental Social
Psychology series). We will also consider manuscripts that describe up-and-
coming research programs that have already shown promise on cutting-edge
topics, as well as manuscripts that describe new data from large-scale empiri-
cal research projects. We envision the Advances in Culture and Psychology series
to also showcase work from other disciplines, given that culture research is
inherently interdisciplinary.
 Introduction 3

We extend our sincere gratitude to many people who have helped in the
design and implementation of the series. First, we thank members of the
Advances in Culture and Psychology Advisory board, which provides advice and
ideas for the series, including Patricia Greenfield (University of California, Los
Angeles), Yoshi Kashima (University of Melbourne), Shinobu Kitayama
(University of Michigan), Mark Schaller (University of British Columbia),
Richard Shweder (University of Chicago), and Colleen Ward (Victoria University
of Wellington). We are grateful to Mark Zanna (University of Waterloo), the
editor of the Advances in Experimental Social Psychology series, for his sage
advice on the structure of the series. We thank Oxford University Press, and
Lori Handleman in particular, for their support in launching the series. We
also thank our respective institutions, the University of Maryland, the
University of Illinois, and Nanyang Technological University, for their sup-
port. Finally, we thank Harry Triandis, a pioneer in the field, who has inspired
us throughout the years with his wisdom and his friendship.

Michele J. Gelfand
College Park, Maryland
Chi-yue Chiu
Singapore
Ying-yi Hong
Singapore
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 CHAPTER 1

Human Culture in
Evolutionary Perspective
MICHAEL TOMASELLO
Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology

I. INTRODUCTION
Many animal species are “cultural” in the sense that individuals acquire impor-
tant behaviors and skills from groupmates via social learning. Thus, whales
socially learn some foraging techniques from others, capuchin monkeys
socially learn some grooming-type behaviors from others, and chimpanzees
acquire the use of some tools by observing the tool-use activities of others in
their social group (see Laland & Galef, 2009, for an overview).
But human culture is clearly different. The challenge from an evolutionary
perspective is to specify the nature of this difference. The proposal here is that
nonhuman primate (and other animal) culture is essentially individualistic, or
maybe even exploitative. That is to say, when a chimpanzee individual observes
another using a tool and then learns something that facilitates her own use,
she is simply gathering information that is useful to her—much as she might
gather information from the inanimate world. The one being observed may
not even know that the observer is gathering information from her actions.
In contrast, human culture and cultural transmission are fundamentally
cooperative. Synchronically, humans engage in much more cooperative behav-
ior in terms of such things as collaborative problem solving and cooperative
(or even conventional) communication. Moreover, human individuals live
in a world in which the group expects them to conform to its particular
conventions and social norms—or else! The result is a society structured by

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6 Advances in Culture and Psychology

cooperatively created and enforced conventions and norms for how to behave
as one of “us,” resulting ultimately in rule-governed social institutions.
Diachronically, this cooperative way of living translates into established mem-
bers of the group teaching things to youngsters and novitiates, who not only
learn but actively conform. Teaching and conformity are main contributors to
the stability of cultural practices in a group and—precisely because of this
stability—to the unique ways in which human cultural practices ratchet up in
complexity over historical time. The result is human artifacts and symbol sys-
tems with “histories,” so-called cumulative cultural evolution (Tomasello,
Kruger, & Ratner, 1993).
Underlying humans’ uniquely cooperative lifeways and modes of cultural
transmission are a set of species-unique social-cognitive processes, which we
may refer to collectively as skills and motivations for shared intentionality
(Tomasello, Carpenter, Call, Behne, & Moll, 2005). These involve such things
as the ability and motivation to form shared goals and intentions with others
in collaborative activities, and the ability and motivation to share experience
with others via joint attention, cooperative communication, and teaching.
Skills and motivations of shared intentionality arose as part of a coevolution-
ary process in which humans evolved species-unique ways of operating,
indeed cooperating, within their own self-built cultural worlds (Richerson &
Boyd, 2006).
In this chapter, we attempt to characterize human culture in evolutionary
perspective. We do this, first, by specifying some of the most important ways
in which human social life is more cooperatively structured than that of other
primates. Second, we detail how this more cooperative mode of living trans-
forms the process of cultural transmission across generations. And third, we
look at the underlying social-cognitive skills and motivations that make it pos-
sible for developing children to come to participate in the culture into which
they are born—which then leads them to construct still further, culturally
specific cognitive skills. We conclude with some speculations about how this
all might have come about in the process of human evolution.

II. APE AND HUMAN COOPERATION

The vast majority of primate species live in social groups and so are coopera-
tive in a very general way. But what we are concerned with here are more spe-
cific, and arguably more complex, forms of cooperation such as collaborative
problem solving; coalitions, alliances, and group defense; active food sharing;
cooperative communication; conventions and social norms for cooperation;