International Speakers

Culture is a construct that cannot be directly observed but has to be inferred. Anthropology has long emphasized the meaning making process for understanding culture, yet this important insight has been sidelined in survey-based cross-cultural studies. Researchers typically pose questions and then interpret selected statistical parameters from cross-cultural data. The interpretation of parameters that were constrained via researcher-posed questions crucially obscures the meaning making process used by respondents. To bring meaning-making back into the study of culture, I outline a broad invariance assessment process differentiating five stages of inquiry that apply to most research projects. I briefly outline cognitive theories of survey responding and meaning-making and show how they link to my invariance questions. I present examples to illustrate novel insights about culture as a multi-level concept that can be gained through this process. My main argument is that analysis of culture requires renewed focus on meaning making processes by individuals embedded in different social, economic, ecological and technological contexts. Invariance assessment in the broad sense outlined here is a central element in such an endeavor.

Schwartz's seminal psychological theory on human values (Schwartz, 1992, 2012) explains differences among individuals and countries. His instruments are robust, showing similar value structures across nations despite varying priorities. Our study examines value changes over time from both individual-level and country-level perspectives. For the individual level perspective, we use archetype analysis. This method identifies extreme observations representing specific value combinations, which are stable over time and useful for monitoring group changes. Country scores are averages of individual scores. Using European Social Survey data across 29 countries over a 20-year period, we identify three archetypes: Growth-focus, Self-focus, and Social-focus, all fitting Schwartz's theory. Changes in value priorities over time are observed between countries, with Growth-focus prevalence influenced by political and economic conditions. Wealthier and more democratic countries have a larger number of growth-focused individuals. For the country level perspective, we start with country-level value scores as input in the archetype analysis. We explain various results, emphasizing that values are individual level constructs based on survey responses. We argue that valid comparisons over time require equivalence of constructs across countries. The discussion focusses on the need for integrating the two perspectives with a plea for a strong theoretical basis of population-level constructs.

The research on culture as a pattern of values, attitudes, beliefs, and norms that differentiates countries or other units from another has reached the point where the abundance of different cultural models, all offering various cultural dimensions, might be rather confusing than helping. However, it can be reasonable to assume that different models cover the same cultural elements while grouping those elements in different ways. Based on already published theoretical and empirical research and new analyses, this presentation will discuss how different cultural models align with each other and with objective indicators describing various social, economic, and political phenomena. After all, although most interesting for researchers as it is, culture is a research topic also because we are interested in how cultural differences explain differences in various other phenomena and why different societies differ in how successful they are in managing various societal challenges. The presentation searches for answers to the following questions. Are two cultural dimensions enough to capture modern cultural differences across the world? How much do we need to explain the differences between societies? Is there one default cultural model that we can rely on from now on? Or is this picture still more nuanced?

How do people make choices about their actions? Broadly speaking, social scientific explanations tend to fall into two camps, emphasizing either individual decision-making or cultural/structural constraints. Scholars who examine organizational spheres offer a middle ground of sorts, focusing on the structure of relations among a set of actors and showing that individuals look to others in their organizational sphere to determine which actions lead to desirable outcomes. However, much of this work assumes that individuals operate within a single organizational sphere. Yet, in the contemporary world, many people are embedded in multiple spheres -- even within the same domain of activity -- each with distinct cultural and structural characteristics that shape how individuals obtain information about their cultural environment and make choices about their actions. This paper develops a theory of scalar variation in organizational spheres, arguing that spheres differ in both scale (from sub-national to supra-national) and size (from small to large), with significant consequences for how individuals navigate their social environments and make decisions. We propose a typology of organizational spheres based on these dimensions and explore how multi-scalar embeddedness influences action. By shifting the focus from fields as abstract structures to actors navigating organizational spheres with varying interpersonal dynamics, we build on and extend theories of fields to better account for how individuals make choices in complex social environments.

Climate change and human sustainability represent major global challenges that require collaborative solutions through interdisciplinary integration of psychology, earth sciences, environmental sciences, computational sciences, anthropology, and more. While culture serves as a vital mechanism for human adaptation to nature, prior cultural research has largely adopted a reductionist perspective, focusing on isolated scales and single-dimensional features. We propose a cross-scale, interdisciplinary research framework of Culturomics to understand and explore culture from a systems science perspective and investigate the link between climate change and the evolution of human culture and civilization. Grounded in the traditional Chinese philosophy of harmony between humans and nature (天人合一), our research integrates agent-based modeling, historical ethnographic analysis, cross-cultural assessments, psychological and behavioral experiments, and neuroimaging techniques. In combination with advanced analytical tools such as large language models and representational similarity analysis, this project aims to reveal how weather variability shapes human cultural values by altering adaptive environmental behaviors, and to uncover the underlying psychological mechanisms, neural substrates, and evolutionary patterns.

My talk critiques the indiscriminate application of measurement invariance in psychology. Despite the growing recognition of the need for cross-cultural validation of measures in psychological studies, a tension persists between proponents of measurement invariance and practitioners frustrated with these stringent standards and ambiguous recommendations. I argue that cultural constructs need not be equivalent or invariant as long as they demonstrate external validity at the group level. Measurement invariance emerged from concerns about fairness in high-stakes individual selections; however, its meta-theoretical assumptions are irrelevant to many (if not most) cross-cultural studies, where researchers aim to uncover group differences. I illustrate my point using the General System Justification Scale, which has recently faced criticism for lacking invariance. I show that external validation can ensure meaningful group differences without establishing invariance criteria. I suggest that researchers determine the purpose of scale use and clarify ontological assumptions before applying measurement invariance methods. At its core, the debate over the use of measurement invariance overlooks philosophical questions regarding how to theorize and study culture. These questions, in my opinion, need to be addressed to advance the field.

Using national culture dimensions to explain differences in individual or group behavior has posed a challenge ever since Hofstede introduced the cultural dimension paradigm and stated that scores cannot be applied to individuals without committing the ecological fallacy. This limitation renders national dimension scores theoretically inapplicable for explaining cultural differences at any lower level than countries. However, people communicate, not countries. To address this issue, we calculate scores for 44,000 individuals from 54 countries for the Collectivism-Individualism and Monumentalism-Flexibility dimensions of the revised Minkov-Hofstede model. We derive a regression-based formula from the ecological level and employ it at the individual level, imposing the structure of countries on individuals. Aggregated back to the country level, they correlate with the original country-level factor scores at r = .98 and r  = .92, respectively, indicating that national culture differences have been accurately preserved. Density curves of individuals’ scores per country show a large overlap between individuals of different countries, confirming the non-transferability of country scores to individuals. Yet, we argue national culture serves as a codebook for all individuals within a country. Further, our method provides insights into differences within countries, such as ethnic background and gender. Future work should focus on quantifying the impact of national culture on individuals.  

In recent years, researchers have made enormous strides in understanding culture and cognitive processes, e.g.: cultural differences in information processing, emotion, motivation, and identity; cognitive biases; empathy and value judgments. By and large, however, these insights have not been incorporated into intercultural education. Instead, intercultural education finds itself in crisis as long-standing approaches have lost credibility. This talk will argue that the empirical insights of cognitive and cultural psychology can help reorient intercultural education away from abstraction and ideology, towards the psychological realities of intercultural experiences. I will discuss research which shows that the beliefs/assumptions of intercultural educators are often at odds with an empirical understanding of cognitive processes. Just as a therapist can help identify cognitive distortions and change how we interact with others, intercultural education can give learners insights into: 1) the influence of culture on our experience of the world, 2) patterns of psychological difference around the world, 3) mental shortcuts (cognitive biases) that lead to intercultural misunderstanding, 4) and, the cognitive processes related to empathy. I will share examples of how this “deep culture” approach is being developed and applied, and invite participants to discuss the future of intercultural education.   

What do ground squirrels, killifish, and humans have in common? The answer is that all have evolved to adopt certain traits and behaviors, in response to variation in environmental and ecological conditions. This is known as adaptive plasticity. I outline how thinking about adaptive plasticity, and animal behavioral ecology more broadly, can provide novel insights to our understanding of the nature and origins of human cultural variation. Specifically, I focus on two lines of work: (1) the psychological effects of living in environments where individuals are surrounded by many family relatives—referred to as ecological relatedness, and (2) the psychological effects of living in environments with many unrelated individuals (i.e., high population densities in general). I highlight how this perspective can generate novel predictions about cultural variation and also integrate existing cultural psychological explanations. Finally, I discuss how this perspective is similar to or different from existing theoretical perspectives, and key questions that remain.

Understanding cultural change remains central to social science research. The growing availability of long-term data has renewed interest in analyzing cultural change, sparking debate over its mechanisms. Most scholars agree that existential insecurity influences value change (scarcity hypothesis), but whether it occurs across generations or also within lifetimes remains debated. Inglehart’s socialization hypothesis, now represented by the settled disposition model, argues that values formed in pre-adulthood remain stable, with change occurring mainly through intergenerational replacement and limited individual adaptation (Restrepo Ochoa & Vaisey, 2024; Kiley & Vaisey, 2020; Vaisey & Kiley, 2021). However, Tormos (2019) and Akaliyski & Tormos (forthcoming) challenge this, presenting evidence of substantial within-individual value change in Western societies, favoring the alternative active updating model. Using panel and repeated cross-sectional data combined with diverse modelling strategies, we provide empirical evidence for this alternative perspective. We address key debates in cultural change, including individual vs. societal shifts, the often-misunderstood implications of age, period, and cohort effects, and the importance of triangulating across data sources and country contexts. We advocate for a theory-driven approach that considers both exogenous and endogenous influences on value dynamics, reviewing mechanisms of change and discussing improved modelling strategies for understanding these complex processes.