When psychological scientists theorize about the role of culture, the focus is often on how psychological processes are implicitly and explicitly shaped by features of the sociocultural contexts or worlds that people inhabit, as well as how these psychological processes in turn reflect and reproduce those sociocultural contexts or worlds ( Markus and Conner, 2014 Gelfand and Kashima, 2016 Cohen and Kitayama, 2019). We propose that the culture cycle-a schematic or tool that represents culture as a multilayered, interacting, dynamic system of ideas, institutions, interactions, and individuals-can be useful to researchers and practitioners by: (1) revealing and explaining the psychological dynamics that underlie today’s significant culture clashes and (2) identifying ways to change or improve cultural practices and institutions to foster a more inclusive, equal, and effective multicultural society.
Americans confront every day, we ask how psychological scientists can leverage insights from cultural psychology to shed light on these issues. Given the demographic changes, cultural interactions and hybridizations, and shifting power dynamics that many U.S. From gender clashes between men and women in the workplace, to race clashes between the police and communities of color in American suburbs and cities, to political clashes between conservatives and liberals around the nation, cultural differences and cultural misunderstandings are consistently in the spotlight ( Armacost, 2016 Vance, 2016 Chang, 2018).Īt the heart of these culture clashes are questions about the meaning and nature of social group differences, as well as the ways in which these differences are more often than not constructed as forms of inequality and marginalization ( Markus, 2008 Markus and Moya, 2010 Salter and Adams, 2013 Adams et al., 2015 Omi and Winant, 2015 Adler and Aycan, 2018). Headlines and social media feeds are populated daily with news of culture clashes or cultural divides that take place both within organizations and across society. People invoke culture as they confront pressing issues in business, government, law enforcement, entertainment, education, and more, and as they grapple with power and inequality in the institutions and practices of these domains (e.g., racism, sexism, classism, homophobia, imperialism). To say “It’s cultural,” or “It’s a culture clash,” or “We need a culture change” is becoming idiomatic. Americans are calling out the role of “culture” today as they struggle to make sense of their increasingly diverse and divided worlds. We propose that the culture cycle-a tool that represents culture as a multilayered, interacting, dynamic system of ideas, institutions, interactions, and individuals-can be useful to researchers and practitioners by: (1) revealing and explaining the psychological dynamics that underlie today’s significant culture clashes and (2) identifying ways to change or improve cultural practices and institutions to foster a more inclusive, equal, and effective multicultural society. Americans repeatedly invoke the role of “culture” today as they struggle to make sense of their increasingly diverse and divided worlds.
2Department of Psychology, Stanford University, Stanford, CA, United States.1Center for Social Psychological Answers to Real-World Questions (SPARQ), Stanford University, Stanford, CA, United States.
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