cross cultural research article in psychology

Cross-Cultural Psychology

WEIRD, Culture

Reviewed by Psychology Today Staff

Cross-cultural psychology is a branch of psychology that explores the similarities and differences in thinking and behavior between individuals from different cultures.

Scientists using a cross-cultural approach focus on and compare participants from diverse cultural groups to examine ways in which cognitive styles, perception, emotional expression, personality , and other psychological features relate to cultural contexts. They also compare cultural groups on broad dimensions such as individualism and collectivism—roughly, how much a culture emphasizes its members’ individuality versus their roles in a larger group.

Psychologists who are interested in expanding psychology’s focus on diverse cultures have pointed out that the majority of research participants are, to use a popular term, WEIRD: they are from Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, and Democratic societies. Cross-cultural research has made it clear that what psychologists conclude about this slice of the world’s population does not always extend to people with other cultural backgrounds.

• What Is Cross-Cultural Psychology?
• Psychological Differences Across Cultures
• The WEIRDness of Psychology

Psychology’s mission to understand how humans think and behave requires studying humanity as broadly as possible—not just the humans to which researchers tend to be nearest. Psychologists who conduct cross-cultural research investigate the richness of human psychological variation across the world, including points of consistency and divergence between populations with distinct cultural backgrounds, such as those in Western and East Asian countries.

Psychological research that incorporates a more global sample of people provides insights into whether findings and models (such as those about the structure of personality or the nature of mental illness) are universal or not, the extent to which psychological phenomena and characteristics vary across cultures, and the potential reasons for these differences. Cross-cultural research demonstrates that experimental effects, correlations, or other results that are observed in one cultural context—for example, the tendency of Western participants to rate their abilities as better-than-average—do not always appear in the same way, or at all, in others.

While various definitions are used, culture can be understood as the collection of ideas and typical ways of doing things that are shared by members of a society and have been passed down through generations. These can include norms, rules, and values as well as physical creations such as tools.

Cross-cultural studies allow psychologists to make comparisons and inferences about people from different countries or from broader geographic regions (such as North America or the Western world). But psychologists also compare groups at smaller scales, such as people from culturally distinct subpopulations or areas of the same country, or immigrants and non-immigrants. 

While there is overlap between these approaches, there are also differences. Cross-cultural psychology analyzes characteristics and behavior across different cultural groups, with an interest in variation as well as human universals. Cultural psychology involves comparison as well, but has been described as more focused on psychological processes within a particular culture. In another approach, indigenous psychology, research methods, concepts, and theories are developed within the context of the culture being studied.

The inhabitants of different regions and countries have a great deal in common : They build close social relationships, follow rules established by their communities, and engage in important rituals. But globally, groups also exhibit somewhat different psychological tendencies in domains ranging from the strictness of local rules to how happiness and other emotions are conceived. Of course, within each region, nation, or community, there is plenty of individual variation; people who share a culture never think and act in exactly the same way. Cross-cultural psychology seeks to uncover how populations with shared cultures differ on average from those with other cultural backgrounds—and how those differences tie back to cultural influence.

While there are shared aspects of emotional experience across cultural groups, culture seems to influence how people describe, evaluate, and act on emotions. For example, while the experience of shame follows perceived wrongdoing across cultures, having shame may be evaluated more positively in some cultures than in others and may be more likely to prompt behavioral responses such as reaching out to others rather than withdrawing. Different emotional concepts (such as “ anxiety ,” “ fear ,” and “ grief ”) may also be thought of as more or less closely related to each other in different cultures. And cultural differences have been observed with regard to how emotions are interpreted and the “display rules” that individuals learn about appropriate emotional expression.

While happiness seems to be one of the most cross-culturally recognizable emotions in terms of individual expression, culture can influence how one thinks about happiness. Research indicates that people in different cultures vary in how much value they place on happiness and how much they focus on their own well-being. Culture may also affect how people believe happiness should be defined and achieved —whether a good life is to be found more in individual self-enhancement or through one’s role as part of a collective, for example. 

Some mental health conditions, in addition to being reported at markedly different rates in different countries, can also be defined and even experienced in different ways. The appearance of depression may depend partly on culture —with mood-related symptoms emphasized in how Americans think of depression , for example, and bodily symptoms potentially more prominent in China. Features of certain cultural groups, such as highly stable social networks, may also serve as protective factors against the risk of mental illness. Increased understanding of cultural idiosyncrasies could lead to gains in mental health treatment.

Individualism and collectivism are two of the contrasting cultural patterns described in cross-cultural psychology. People in relatively collectivist cultures are described as tending to define themselves as parts of a group and to heed the norms and goals of the group. Those in relatively individualistic cultures are thought to emphasize independence and to favor personal attitudes and preferences to a greater degree. Cross-cultural psychologists have pointed to East Asia, Latin America, and Africa as regions where collectivism is relatively prominent and much of Europe, the U.S., and Canada as among those where individualism is more pronounced. But individualism-collectivism is thought of as a continuum, with particular countries, and cultures within those countries, showing a balance of each.

Tightness and looseness are contrasting cultural patterns related to how closely people adhere to social rules. Each culture has its own rules and norms about everything from acceptable public behavior to what kinds of intimate relationships are allowed. But in some cultures, or even in particular domains within cultures (such as the workplace), the importance placed on rules and norms and the pressure on people to follow them are greater than in other cultural contexts. Relatively rule-bound cultures have been described as “tight” cultures, while more permissive cultures are called “loose.” As with individualism and collectivism, tightness and looseness are thought of as opposite ends of the same dimension.

It seems to be. In the West, the Big Five model of personality traits and related models were developed to broadly map out personality differences, and they have been tested successfully in multiple countries. But research suggests that in some cultures, the Big Five traits are not necessarily the best way to describe how people perceive individual differences. Scientists have also found that associations between personality traits and outcomes that appear in some cultures may not be universal. For example, while more extraverted North Americans appear to be happier, on average, extraverts may not have the same advantage elsewhere.

While some mating preferences, such as a desire for kindness and physical attractiveness in a partner, appear in many if not all cultures, preferences also differ in some ways across cultures—like the importance placed on humor or other traits. In the realm of physical attraction , both men’s preferences and women’s preferences seem to depend partly on the cultural context, with research suggesting that men in wealthier societies more strongly favor women of average-to-slender weight, for instance.

In cross-cultural psychology, an analytic cognitive style roughly describes a tendency to focus on a salient object, person, or piece of information (as in an image or a story) independently from the context in which it appears. A holistic cognitive style, in contrast, involves a tendency to focus more on the broader context and relationship between objects. Using a variety of tasks—such as one in which a scene with both focal objects and background elements is freely described—psychologists have reported evidence that participants from Western cultures (like the U.S.) tend to show a more analytic cognitive style, while those from East Asian cultures (like Japan) show a more holistic cognitive style. Analytic thinking and holistic thinking have been theorized to stem, respectively, from independent and interdependent cultural tendencies.

The psychological findings that get the most attention are disproportionately derived from a fraction of the world’s population. Some scientists call this relatively well-examined subgroup of human societies WEIRD: that is, Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, and Democratic. As long as people who live in countries that meet these descriptors are the primary subjects of psychological research—and that has long been the case—it will often be difficult for psychologists to determine whether an observation applies to people in general or only to those in certain cultural contexts. Increasing the representation of people from diverse cultures in research is therefore a goal of many psychologists.

WEIRD populations are those who are broadly part of the Western world and who live in democratic societies that feature high levels of education , wealth, and industrialization. While there is not a single agreed-upon list of WEIRD cultures—and populations within particular countries can show different levels of these characteristics—commonly cited examples of WEIRD countries include the U.S., Canada, the U.K. and other parts of Western Europe, and Australia. 

Sampling top psychology journals in the mid-2000s, psychologist Jeffrey Arnett observed that 96 percent of research subjects came from Western, industrialized countries that represented just 12 percent of the world’s population, and that about two-thirds were from the U.S. Subjects seemed to largely be sourced from the countries in which the researchers lived. In 2010, citing this finding and others, Joseph Henrich, Steven Heine, and Ara Norenzayan introduced the term WEIRD to describe this subpopulation. They expanded on the problems with focusing so exclusively on such participants and with assuming that findings from a relatively unrepresentative group generalized to the rest of the world.

In numerical terms, it seems, not much. While the problems with global underrepresentation in psychology research have gained more attention in recent years, an updated analysis of top journals in the mid-2010s found that the vast majority of samples were still from Western, industrialized countries, with about 60 percent from the U.S.

In many ways, WEIRD populations seem to be less representative of humans in general than non-WEIRD populations are. Overlapping with other findings from cross-cultural psychology, psychological differences between people from relatively WEIRD countries and those from elsewhere have been noted: WEIRD samples show higher levels of individualism and lower levels of conformity , on average, among other characteristics. One scientist behind the WEIRD concept theorizes that societal changes in the West caused by the Catholic Church, and their subsequent cultural impact, help explain these signature differences.

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For 50 years the Journal of Cross-Cultural Psychology has provided a leading interdisciplinary forum for psychologists, sociologists, and other researchers who study the relations between culture and behavior.

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The Journal of Cross-Cultural Psychology provides the latest empirical research on important cross-cultural questions in social, developmental, cognitive, linguistic, personality, organizational and other areas of psychology.

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Each volume of the Journal of Cross-Cultural Psychology includes empirical papers, brief reports, and integrative review articles of empirical cross-cultural research, along with theoretical papers that may suggest new orientations for future research. The Journal of Cross-Cultural Psychology publishes cross-cultural and single culture studies, and quantitative, qualitative, and mixed methods are represented.

Thematic Discussions

The Journal of Cross-Cultural Psychology supplements its broad coverage with single-themed Special Issues and Special Sections dedicated to topics of particular interest. Previous thematic discussions include Bridging Cross-Cultural Psychology with Societal Development Studies, Half-Century Assessment, Europe's Culture(s): Negotiating Cultural Meanings, Values, and Identities in the European Context, and Reflections on Methods and Theory. Special Issues Coming Soon: Diverse Methods for Assessing Cultural Identity, and Mapping Human Morality: Human Universals and Cultural Differences.

Journal of Cross-Cultural Psychology publishes papers that focus on the interrelations between culture and psychological processes. Submitted manuscripts may report results from either cross-cultural comparative research or single culture studies.

Research that concerns the ways in which culture, and related concepts such as ethnicity, affects the thinking and behavior of individuals, as well as how individual thought and behavior define and reflect aspects of culture are appropriate for the Journal of Cross-Cultural Psychology .

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Cross-Cultural Research Methodology In Psychology

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Saul McLeod, PhD., is a qualified psychology teacher with over 18 years of experience in further and higher education. He has been published in peer-reviewed journals, including the Journal of Clinical Psychology.

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Cross-cultural research allows you to identify important similarities and differences across cultures. This research approach involves comparing two or more cultural groups on psychological variables of interest to understand the links between culture and psychology better.

As Matsumoto and van de Vijver (2021) explain, cross-cultural comparisons test the boundaries of knowledge in psychology. Findings from these studies promote international cooperation and contribute to theories accommodating both cultural and individual variation.

However, there are also risks involved. Flawed methodology can produce incorrect cultural knowledge. Thus, cross-cultural scientists must address methodological issues beyond those faced in single-culture studies.

Methodology

Cross-cultural comparative research utilizes quasi-experimental designs comparing groups on target variables.

Cross-cultural research takes an etic outsider view, testing theories and standardized measurements often derived elsewhere. 

• Studies can be exploratory , aimed at increasing understanding of cultural similarities and differences by staying close to the data.
• In contrast, hypothesis-testing studies derive from pre-established frameworks predicting specific cultural differences. They substantially inform theory but may overlook unexpected findings outside researcher expectations (Matsumoto & van de Vijver, 2021).

Each approach has tradeoffs. Exploratory studies broadly uncover differences but have limited explanatory power. While good for revealing novel patterns, exploratory studies cannot address the reasons behind cross-cultural variations.

Hypothesis testing studies substantially inform theory but may overlook unexpected findings. Optimally, cross-cultural research should combine elements of both approaches.

Ideal cross-cultural research combines elements of exploratory work to uncover new phenomena and targeted hypothesis testing to isolate cultural drivers of observed differences (Matsumoto & van de Vijver, 2021).

Cross-cultural scientists should strategically intersect exploratory and theory-driven analysis while considering issues of equivalence and ecological validity.

Other distinctions include: comparing psychological structures versus absolute score levels; analysis at the individual versus cultural levels; and combining individual-level data with country indicators in multilevel modeling (Lun & Bond, 2016; Santos et al., 2017)

Methodological Considerations

Cross-cultural research brings unique methodological considerations beyond single-culture studies. Matsumoto and van de Vijver (2021) explain two key interconnected concepts – bias and equivalence.

Bias refers to systematic differences in meaning or methodology across cultures that threaten the validity of cross-cultural comparisons.

Bias signals a lack of equivalence, meaning score differences do not accurately reflect true psychological construct differences across groups.

There are three main types of bias:

• Construct bias stems from differences in the conceptual meaning of psychological concepts across cultures. This can occur due to incomplete overlap in behaviors related to the construct or differential appropriateness of certain behaviors in different cultures.
• Method bias arises from cross-cultural differences in data collection methods. This encompasses sample bias (differences in sample characteristics), administration bias (differences in procedures), and instrument bias (differences in meaning of specific test items across cultures).
• Item bias refers to specific test items functioning differently across cultural groups, even for people with the same standing on the underlying construct. This can result from issues like poor translation, item ambiguity, or differential familiarity or relevance of content.

Techniques to identify and minimize bias focus on achieving equivalence across cultures. This involves similar conceptualization, data collection methods, measurement properties, scale units and origins, and more.

Careful study design, measurement validation, data analysis, and interpretation help strengthen equivalence and reduce bias.

Equivalence

Equivalence refers to cross-cultural similarity that enables valid comparisons. There are multiple interrelated types of equivalence that researchers aim to establish:

• Conceptual/Construct Equivalence : Researchers evaluate whether the same theoretical construct is being measured across all cultural groups. This can involve literature reviews, focus groups, and pilot studies to assess construct relevance in each culture. Claims of inequivalence argue concepts can’t exist or be understood outside cultural contexts, precluding comparison.
• Functional Equivalence : Researchers test for identical patterns of correlations between the target instrument and other conceptually related and unrelated constructs across cultures. This helps evaluate whether the measure relates to other variables similarly in all groups.
• Structural Equivalence : Statistical techniques like exploratory and confirmatory factor analysis are used to check that underlying dimensions of multi-item instruments have the same structure across cultures.
• Measurement Unit Equivalence : Researchers determine if instruments have identical scale properties and meaning of quantitative score differences within and across cultural groups. This can be checked via methods like differential item functioning analysis.

Multifaceted assessment of equivalence is key for valid interpretation of score differences reflecting actual psychological variability across cultures.

Establishing equivalence requires careful translation and measurement validation using techniques like differential item functioning analysis, assessing response biases, and examining practical significance. Adaptation of instruments or procedures may be warranted to improve relevance for certain groups.

Building equivalence into the research process reduces non-equivalence biases. This avoids incorrect attribution of score differences to cultural divergence, when differences may alternatively reflect methodological inconsistencies.

Procedures to Deal With Bias

Researchers can take steps before data collection (a priori procedures) and after (a posteriori procedures) to deal with bias and equivalence threats. Using both types of procedures is optimal (Matsumoto & van de Vijver, 2021).

Designing cross-cultural studies (a priori procedure)

Simply documenting cultural differences has limited scientific value today, as differences are relatively easy to obtain between distant groups. The critical challenge facing contemporary cross-cultural researchers is isolating the cultural sources of observed differences (Matsumoto & Yoo, 2006).

This involves first defining what constitutes a cultural (vs. noncultural) explanatory variable. Studies should incorporate empirical measures of hypothesized cultural drivers of differences, not just vaguely attribute variations to overall “culture.”

Both top-down and bottom-up models of mutual influence between culture and psychology are plausible. Research designs should align with the theorized causal directionality.

Individual-level cultural factors must also be distinguished conceptually and statistically from noncultural individual differences like personality traits. Not all self-report measures automatically concern “culture.” Extensive cultural rationale is required.

Multi-level modeling can integrate data across individual, cultural, and ecological levels. However, no single study can examine all facets of culture and psychology simultaneously.

Pursuing a narrow, clearly conceptualized scope often yields greater returns than superficial breadth (Matsumoto & van de Vijver, 2021). By tackling small pieces thoroughly, researchers collectively construct an interlocking picture of how culture shapes human psychology.

Sampling (a priori procedure)

Unlike typical American psychology research drawing from student participant pools, cross-cultural work often cannot access similar convenience samples .

Groups compared across cultures frequently diverge substantially in background characteristics beyond the cultural differences of research interest (Matsumoto & van de Vijver, 2021).

Demographic variables like educational level easily become confounds making it difficult to interpret whether cultural or sampling factors drive observed differences in psychological outcomes. Boehnke et al. (2011) note samples of greater cultural distance often have more confounding influences .

Guidelines exist to promote adequate within-culture representativeness and cross-cultural matching on key demographics that cannot be dismissed as irrelevant to the research hypotheses. This allows empirically isolating effects of cultural variables over and above sample characteristics threatening equivalence.

Where perfect demographic matching is impossible across widely disparate groups, analysts should still measure and statistically control salient sample variables that may form rival explanations for group outcome differences. This unpacks whether valid cultural distinctions still exist after addressing sampling confounds.

In summary, sampling rigor in subject selection and representativeness support isolating genuine cultural differences apart from method factors, jeopardizing equivalence in cross-cultural research.

Designing questions and scales (a priori procedure)

Cross-cultural differences in response styles when using rating scales have posed persistent challenges. Once viewed as merely nuisance variables requiring statistical control, theory now conceptualizes styles like social desirability, acquiescence, and extremity as a meaningful individual and cultural variation in their own right (Smith, 2004).

For example, an agreeableness acquiescence tendency may be tracked with harmony values in East Asia. Efforts to simply “correct for” response style biases can thus discount substantive culture-linked variation in scale scores (Matsumoto & van de Vijver, 2021).

Guidelines help adapt item design, instructions, response options, scale polarity, and survey properties to mitigate certain biases and equivocal interpretations when comparing scores across groups.

It remains important to assess response biases empirically through statistical controls or secondary measures. This evaluates whether cultural score differences reflect intended psychological constructs above and beyond style artifacts.

Appropriately contextualizing different response tendencies allows judiciously retaining stylistic variation attributable to cultural factors while isolating bias-threatening equivalence. Interpreting response biases as culturally informative rather than merely as problematic noise affords richer analysis.

In summary, response styles exhibit differential prevalence across cultures and should be analyzed contextually through both control and embrace rather than simplistically dismissed as invalid nuisance factors.

A Posteriori Procedures to Deal With Bias

After data collection, analysts can evaluate measurement equivalence and probe biases threatening the validity of cross-cultural score comparisons (Matsumoto & van de Vijver, 2021).

For structure-oriented studies examining relationships among variables, techniques like exploratory factor analysis, confirmatory factor analysis, and multidimensional scaling assess similarities in conceptual dimensions across groups. This establishes structural equivalence.

For comparing group mean scores, methods like differential item functioning, logistic regression, and standardization identify biases causing specific items or scales to function differently across cultures. Addressing biases promotes equivalence (Fischer & Fontaine, 2011; Sireci, 2011).

Multilevel modeling clarifies connections between culture-level ecological factors, individual psychological outcomes, and variables at other levels simultaneously. This leverages the nested nature of cross-cultural data (Matsumoto et al., 2007).

Supplementing statistical significance with effect sizes evaluates the real-world importance of score differences. Metrics like standardized mean differences and probability of superiority prevent overinterpreting minor absolute variations between groups (Matsumoto et al., 2001).

In summary, a posteriori analytic approach evaluates equivalence at structural and measurement levels and isolates biases interfering with valid score comparisons across cultures. Quantifying practical effects also aids replication and application.

Ethical Issues

Several ethical considerations span the research process when working across cultures. In design, conscious efforts must counteract subtle perpetuation of stereotypes through poorly constructed studies or ignorance of biases.

Extensive collaboration with cultural informants and members can alert researchers to pitfalls (Matsumoto & van de Vijver, 2021).

Recruiting participants ethically becomes more complex globally, as coercion risks increase without shared assumptions about voluntary participation rights.

Securing comprehensible, properly translated informed consent also grows more demanding, though remains an ethical priority even when local guidelines seem more lax. Confidentiality protections likewise prove more intricate across legal systems, requiring extra researcher care.

Studying sensitive topics like gender, sexuality, and human rights brings additional concerns in varying cultural contexts, necessitating localized ethical insight.

Analyzing and reporting data in a culturally conscious manner provides its own challenges, as both subtle biases and consciously overgeneralizing findings can spur harm.

Above all, ethical cross-cultural research requires recognizing communities as equal partners, not mere data sources. From first consultations to disseminating final analyses, maintaining indigenous rights and perspectives proves paramount to ethical engagement.

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van de Vijver, F. J. R. (2009). Types of cross-cultural studies in cross-cultural psychology. Online Readings in Psychology and Culture, 2 (2). https://doi.org/10.9707/2307-0919.1017

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Volume 40, 1989, review article, cross-cultural psychology: current research and trends.

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• Vol. 40:493-531 (Volume publication date February 1989) https://doi.org/10.1146/annurev.ps.40.020189.002425
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What Is Cross-Cultural Psychology? 11 Theories & Examples

Therefore, we must consider the effect of cultural learning on how we live, our drives, and our goals (Heine, 2010).

As Steven Heine (2010) writes, “on no occasions do we cast aside our cultural dressings to reveal the naked universal human mind.”

Culture should be taken into account when working with clients. According to cross-cultural psychology, it has broad impacts, including on our motivation, self-esteem, social behavior, and communication (Triandis, 2002).

This article explores the background of cross-cultural psychology’s search for possible behavioral and psychological universals.

Before you continue, we thought you might like to download our three Positive Psychology Exercises for free . These science-based exercises will explore fundamental aspects of positive psychology including strengths, values, and self-compassion, and will give you the tools to enhance the wellbeing of your clients, students, or employees.

This Article Contains:

What is cross-cultural psychology, 7 theories and goals of the field, 4 examples of real-life applications, popular topics: 4 interesting research findings, differences between psychology and cultural psychology, a look at 8 programs, degrees, and training options, 4 books to learn more, positivepsychology.com’s related resources, a take-home message.

Cross-cultural psychology is not only fascinating, but insightful, shedding vital light on how and why we behave as we do. This offshoot of psychology involves the scientific study of variations in human behavior under the influence of a “shared way of life of a group of people,” known as cultural context (Berry, 2013).

The American Psychological Association describes cross-cultural psychology as being interested in the “similarities and variances in human behavior across different cultures” to identify “the different psychological constructs and explanatory models used by these cultures” (APA Dictionary of Psychology, 2020).

Cross-cultural psychology became a sub-discipline of general psychology in the 1960s to prevent psychology from “becoming an entirely Western project” and “sought to test the universality of psychological laws via cultural comparative studies” (Ellis & Stam, 2015).

This cross-cultural approach to psychology involved recognizing culture as an external variable and exploring its impact on individual behavior. Over the decades that followed, the focus remained on identifying and testing the generalizability of using mainstream psychology approaches (Ellis & Stam, 2015).

It differs from cultural psychology , which aims to organize psychological processes by culture, because rather than looking for differences, cross-cultural psychology is ultimately searching for psychological universals. It seeks psychological patterns that we all share (Ellis & Stam, 2015; Berry, 2013).

Cross-cultural psychology borrows ideas, theories, and approaches from anthropology; it also recognizes the importance of analyzing international differences identified through social-psychological mechanisms.

And it’s important. We often assume that, psychologically speaking, all cultures are the same. Yet this is simply not the case (Berry, 2013).

When anthropologist turned psychologist Joseph Henrich began his research into cultural diversity, he became aware that Western populations were often unusual compared to others.

He also warns us of the risks of psychological bias toward WEIRD (Western, educated, industrialized, rich, and democratic) populations. We could be ignoring the psychological differences between peoples and wrongly assuming psychological patterns hold cross-culturally (Henrich, 2020).

As Henrich (2020) says, we should celebrate human diversity (psychological or otherwise), while noting that none of the psychological differences identified between cultures suggest one is better than the other or is immutable . Instead, human “psychology has changed over history and will continue to evolve” (Henrich, 2020).

• First and most importantly, test the field’s generality by looking at how different cultures respond to standard psychological tests.
• Next, remain open and observant of other cultures’ psychology, such as recognizing novel aspects of how they behave.
• Finally, integrate the knowledge (from the first two points) to create nearly universal psychology valid for a greater number of cultures.

Several psychological theories, models, and approaches have emerged from the ongoing research into cross-cultural psychology. They are often not distinct, but complementary, and include:

• Ecocultural model More recently, having reconfirmed the above goals, Berry proposed the ecocultural model.

It treats culture as a series of variables, existing at both individual and population levels, that interact to influence diversity in individual behavior (Berry, 2004, 2013; Ellis & Stam, 2015).

• Cultural syndromes Harry Triandis (2002) from the University of Illinois suggests that ecologies shape cultures, and cultures “influence the development of personalities.”

Cultural differences are identified, measured, and described as cultural syndromes (defined by their complexity, tightness, individualism, and collectivism) that can be used to group and organize cultures.

• Individualism and collectivism Over the years since Triandis’s initial work, individualism and collectivism have dominated research in the field, particularly regarding the differences identified through psychometric testing (Ellis & Stam, 2015).

Individualistic cultures recognize the individual’s needs (over the group’s), including individual goals and rights. By contrast, collectivist cultures are motivated by group goals, where individuals sacrifice their own needs for the group (Triandis, 2002).

• Natural science approach “Cross-cultural psychology relies on genetics” and neuroscience to provide a more complete picture of biological building materials that influence the behaviors and psychological features associated with different cultures (Shiraev & Levy, 2020).

Evolutionary theory provides further information regarding the evolutionary factors that influence human experience and behavior, laying the foundation for human culture (Shiraev & Levy, 2020).

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Cross-cultural psychology has been applied to (and affected) multiple, diverse areas of human care over the last few decades.

Narrative approach in psychotherapy

“Culture can be thought of as a community of individuals who see the world in a particular manner” (Howard, 1991). As a result, storytelling can be a powerful therapy approach, with narratives capturing the essence of human thought and cultural context. Narrative helps the psychotherapist not only relate to clients, but also understand the development of their identity.

Multicultural counseling and therapy

Cross-cultural psychology is valuable in informing mental healthcare. Indeed, “systems of care must adapt to cultural complexity so that services are acceptable and effective” (Gielen, Draguns, & Fish, 2008).

It is essential to begin with an awareness of biases and privilege, then form a deep understanding of the cultural influences on wellbeing and distress to improve service delivery (Gielen et al., 2008).

Learning and teaching

Combining insights from multiple disciplines, including cross-cultural psychology, has informed educational psychology and led to numerous teaching reforms. A broader cultural view encourages educators and researchers to revisit the biases of educational systems at various levels (Watkins, 2000).

Speech therapy

The development of speech is inevitably influenced by cultural factors. Knowledge gained from cross-cultural psychology provides greater insight into the needs and difficulties faced by children and improves the awareness of potential bias from clinicians and assessors (Carter et al., 2005).

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Cross-cultural psychology research has led to some fascinating findings in diverse areas, including the following.

Entrepreneurial career intentions

To better understand “the antecedents of entrepreneurial intention,” psychology has used cross-cultural research methods to confirm the importance of cultural context (including cultural identity and cultural variation) on career decisions (Moriano, Gorgievski, Laguna, Stephan, & Zarafshani, 2011).

Moriano et al. (2011) found that sociocultural attitudes were the strongest predictors of individuals wanting to become entrepreneurs. Indeed, an entrepreneur in one culture may be seen as more legitimate than in another, impacting uptake (Moriano et al., 2011).

Differences between individualistic and collectivist cultures

There are some very recognizable differences between individualistic and collectivist cultures (Church, 2000).

In collectivist cultures:

• People tend to focus on context rather than their internal processes when predicting others’ behavior.
• Individual behaviors are less consistent across different situations.
• Behavior is more easily predicted from “norms and roles than from attitudes.”

Cross-cultural psychology has been applied to the field of creativity with some interesting results.

According to Glăveanu (2010), “culture and the individual are both open systems” and the two are mutually dependent and involved in the creative process.

Glăveanu (2010) suggests that the community serves as a social context for producing the artistic outcome and contributes to evaluating creativity.

Cohen, Wu, and Miller (2016) suggest “that a greater attention to both Western and Eastern religions in cross-cultural psychology can be illuminating regarding religion and culture” and insightful regarding how national cultures interact.

Collectivist cultures encourage people to develop interdependent selves, connected in meaningful ways to those around them. By contrast, in individualistic cultures, people think of themselves “as relatively distinct from close others” (Cohen et al., 2016).

Furthermore, some religions are collectivistic, focusing on tradition and community-based religious practice, while others are individualistic, expressing personal faith and one’s relationship with God.

What is cross-cultural psychology? – Audioversity

“Cross-cultural psychology arose as a division of mainstream psychology that deliberately extended the mainstream research framework to test the universality of psychological principles” (Ellis & Stam, 2015).

However, there are several differences between cross-cultural psychology and other branches of psychology. Indeed, much of general psychology focuses on the impact of other people on behavior (such as family, relationships, and friends), yet it ignore culture’s influence. On the other hand, cross-cultural psychology looks at human behavior within the culture, using it as the context for study (Shiraev & Levy, 2020).

It is also important to note that while cross-cultural and cultural psychology are both extensions of general psychology, despite the similar names, they have different focuses (Ellis & Stam, 2015).

Cross-cultural psychology has, since the 1970s, formed part of the established, mainstream, and empirical psychology dedicated to individualistic explanations of psychological phenomena. Culture becomes a way of testing the universality of psychological processes (Ellis & Stam, 2015).

Cultural psychology is interested in determining how local cultures (including their social practices) influence and shape how our psychological processes develop (Ellis & Stam, 2015).

Several organizations offer training influenced by cross-cultural psychology theory and research findings, including:

• Cross-cultural training Global Integration provides tailored training opportunities that include understanding the impact of cultural styles, recognizing the benefits of cultural diversity, and seeing the value in more inclusive virtual meetings.
• Country-specific cross-culture training Living Institute offers training to help collaborate across cultures and seek value in diversity.
• Building cross-cultural skills for global working Culturewise specializes in cross-cultural and cultural awareness training including, leadership, management, and communication skills.

While few graduate programs focus entirely on cross-cultural psychology, the following master’s degrees offer valuable insights into areas related to the field.

• Social and cultural psychology The London School of Economics and Political Science , UK, offers a master’s degree that explores how culture and society shape how we think, behave, and relate to one another.
• Culture, adaptive leadership, & transcultural competence The University of Amsterdam , Netherlands, has a master’s program that includes cross-cultural psychology. Specifically, it covers how culture shapes psychological functioning and how to design programs and culturally sensitive interventions.
• Mental health: Cultural psychology and psychiatry Queen Mary University , London, UK, offers a master’s degree that explores sociocultural factors in mental health and mental illness.
• Diversity and inclusion leadership Tufts University , Medford, USA, offers a master’s degree in becoming a strong, informed, and skilled leader versed in diversity and inclusion.
• Criminal justice – Diversity, inclusion and belonging Saint Joseph’s University , Philadelphia, USA, offers a master’s degree in criminal justice with a concentration in diversity, inclusion , and belonging.

The following four books are some of our favorites on the subject of cross-cultural psychology. Combined, they provide a broad and deep insight into the research, theories, and application.

1. Cross-Cultural Psychology: Research and Applications – John Berry, Ype Poortinga, Seger Breugelmans, Athanasios Chasiotis, and David Sam

This new edition of one of the leading textbooks on cross-cultural psychology targets students new to the field and more experienced practitioners wishing to update their skills.

Written by a team of distinguished international authors, the book’s 18 chapters present an exhaustive discussion of cross-cultural psychology approaches and their application.

Find the book on Amazon .

2. Cross-Cultural Psychology: Critical Thinking and Contemporary Applications – Eric Shiraev and David Levy

This new seventh edition of this popular text on cross-cultural psychology is conversational in style and uses a critical thinking framework to develop analytical skills.

The book contains a wealth of recent references to keep you updated about the field. Along with covering the theory, it explores how to apply the learnings in various multicultural contexts including teaching, healthcare, social work, and counseling.

3. Cross-Cultural Psychology: Contemporary Themes and Perspectives – Kenneth Keith

Kenneth Keith does an excellent job at placing key areas of psychology within a cultural perspective. An introductory section is followed by the research and theories of cross-cultural psychology, and then the book moves into clinical and social principles and applications.

This second edition is rich in research and examples and will provide the reader with a comprehensive overview of the discipline and its integration with the rest of psychology.

4. The Cross-Cultural Coaching Kaleidoscope  – Jennifer Plaister-Ten

In Jennifer Plaister-Ten’s excellent book, we learn about the impact of cross-cultural psychology research findings on coaching and how to work and practice in a global market.

This is an incredibly valuable text for coaches working in a multicultural environment and raising awareness of cultural influences for their clients’ benefit.

Our cultural context influences who we are, including our personality, strengths, values, and behavior.

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Psychological phenomena vary significantly across cultural contexts and have different degrees of universality. And yet, a great deal of psychological research has been performed in Western countries – a high percentage in the United States – impacting and biasing our understanding of human psychology (Heine, 2010).

Cross-cultural psychology is particularly valuable, as it helps address this narrow view by looking for what psychological phenomena are universal. It “examines psychological diversity and the underlying reasons for such diversity” (Shiraev & Levy, 2020).

Findings from research studies provide insight into cultural norms and behavior, including how social and cultural forces impact our activities (Shiraev & Levy, 2020).

Cross-cultural psychology aims to do more than merely identify differences between cultural groups; it seeks to uncover what is common or shared.

Explore some of the mental health theories , research, and applications involved in cross-cultural psychology. While it is a complex and vast subject, it has far-reaching value in our direct dealings with individuals from different cultures and can be used to promote awareness in our clients that may benefit their multicultural relationships.

We hope you enjoyed reading this article. Don’t forget to download our three Positive Psychology Exercises for free .

• APA Dictionary of Psychology. (2020). Retrieved March 21, 2021, from https://dictionary.apa.org/cross-cultural-psychology
• Berry, J. W. (2004). An ecocultural perspective on the development of competence. In R. J. Sternberg & E. Grigorenko (Eds.), Culture and competence (pp. 3–22). American Psychological Association.
• Berry, J. (2013). Achieving a global psychology. Canadian Psychology , 54 , 55–61.
• Berry, J. W., Poortinga, Y. H., Breugelmans, S. M., Chasiotis, A., & Sam, D. L. (2011).  Cross-cultural psychology: Research and applications  (3rd ed.). Cambridge University Press.
• Berry, J., Poortinga, Y. H., Marshall, S. H., & Dasen, P. R. (1992). Cross-cultural psychology: Research and applications (1st ed.). Cambridge University Press.
• Carter, J. A., Lees, J. A., Murira, G. M., Gona, J., Neville, B. G. R., & Newton, C. R. J. C. (2005). Issues in the development of cross-cultural assessments of speech and language for children. International Journal of Language & Communication Disorders , 40 (4), 385–401.
• Church, A. T. (2000). Culture and personality: Toward an integrated cultural trait psychology. Journal of Personality ,  69 , 651–703.
• Cohen, A. B., Wu, M. S., & Miller, J. (2016). Religion and culture. Journal of Cross-Cultural Psychology , 47 (9), 1236–1249.
• Ellis, B. D., & Stam, H. J. (2015). Crisis? What crisis? Cross-cultural psychology’s appropriation of cultural psychology. Culture & Psychology , 21 (3), 293–317.
• Gielen, U. P., Draguns, J. G., & Fish, J. M. (Eds.). (2008). Counseling and psychotherapy: Investigating practice from scientific, historical, and cultural perspectives. Principles of multicultural counseling and therapy . Routledge/Taylor & Francis Group.
• Glăveanu, V. P. (2010). Principles for a cultural psychology of creativity. Culture & Psychology , 16 (2), 147–163.
• Heine, S. J. (2010). Cultural psychology. In S. T. Fiske, D. T. Gilbert, & G. Lindzey (Eds.), Handbook of social psychology (pp. 1423–1464). John Wiley & Sons.
• Henrich, J. P. (2020). The WEIRDest people in the world: How the West became psychologically peculiar and particularly prosperous . Penguin Books.
• Howard, G. S. (1991). Culture tales: A narrative approach to thinking, cross-cultural psychology, and psychotherapy. American Psychologist , 46 (3), 187–197.
• Keith, K. D. (Ed.). (2019).  Cross-cultural psychology: Contemporary themes and perspectives  (2nd ed.). Wiley-Blackwell.
• Moriano, J. A., Gorgievski, M., Laguna, M., Stephan, U., & Zarafshani, K. (2011). A cross-cultural approach to understanding entrepreneurial intention. Journal of Career Development , 39 (2), 162–185.
• Plaister-Ten, J. (2016).  The cross-cultural coaching kaleidoscope.  Routledge.
• Shiraev, E., & Levy, D. A. (2020). Cross-cultural psychology: Critical thinking and contemporary applications (7th ed.). Routledge.
• Triandis, H. C. (2002). Cultural influences on personality. Annual Review of Psychology , 53 , 133–160.
• Watkins, D. (2000). Learning and teaching: A cross-cultural perspective. School Leadership & Management , 20 (2), 161–173.
• Wei, Y., Spencer-Rodgers, J., Anderson, E., & Peng, K. (2020). The effects of a cross-cultural psychology course on perceived intercultural competence. Teaching of Psychology .

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What Is Cross-Cultural Psychology?

Cross-cultural psychology is a branch of psychology that looks at how cultural factors influence human behavior. While many aspects of human thought and behavior are universal, cultural differences can lead to often surprising differences in how people think, feel, and act.

Some cultures, for example, might stress individualism and the importance of personal autonomy. Other cultures may place a higher value on collectivism and cooperation among members of the group. Such differences can play an influential role in many aspects of life.

This article discusses the history of cross-cultural psychology, different types of cross-cultural psychology, and applications of this field. It also discusses the impact it has had on the understanding of human psychology.

What Is Culture?

Culture refers to many characteristics of a group of people, including attitudes , behaviors, customs, religious beliefs, and values that are transmitted from one generation to the next. Cultures throughout the world share many similarities but are also marked by considerable differences. For example, while people of all cultures experience happiness , how this feeling is expressed varies from one culture to the next.

The goal of cross-cultural psychologists is to look at both universal behaviors and unique behaviors to identify the ways in which culture influences behavior, family life, education, social experiences, and other areas.

History of Cross-Cultural Psychology

Cross-cultural psychology is an important topic. Researchers strive to understand both the differences and similarities among people of various cultures throughout the world.

The International Association of Cross-Cultural Psychology (IACCP) was established in 1972, and this branch of psychology has continued to grow and develop since that time. Today, increasing numbers of psychologists investigate how behavior differs among various cultures throughout the world.

After prioritizing European and North American research for many years, Western researchers began to question whether many of the observations and ideas once believed to be universal might apply to cultures outside of these areas. Could their findings and assumptions about human psychology be biased based on the sample from which their observations were drawn?

Many of the findings described by psychologists are focused on a specific group of people, which some researchers have dubbed Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, and Democratic, often referred to by the acronym WEIRD.

As a result, cross-cultural psychologists suggest that many observations about human thought and behavior may only be generalizable to specific subgroups. To develop a broader, richer understanding of people that can be applied to a wider variety of cultural settings, it is essential for researchers to also look at people from diverse cultures.

Despite recognizing that research has a strong Western bias, evidence suggests that this bias persists today. According to one analysis of six prominent psychology research journals, around 90% of participants in psychology research are drawn from Western, industrialized countries, 60% of which were American.

Cross-cultural psychologists work to rectify many of the biases that may exist in the current research and determine if the phenomena that appear in European and North American cultures also appear in other parts of the world.

Types of Cross-Cultural Psychology

Many cross-cultural psychologists choose to focus on one of two approaches:

• The etic approach studies culture through an "outsider" perspective, applying one "universal" set of concepts and measurements to all cultures.
• The emic approach studies culture using an "insider" perspective, analyzing concepts within the specific context of the observed culture.

It is also common for cross-cultural psychologists to take a combined emic-etic approach.

Meanwhile, some cross-cultural psychologists also study something known as ethnocentrism. Ethnocentrism refers to a tendency to use your own culture as the standard by which to judge and evaluate other cultures.

In other words, taking an ethnocentric point of view means using your understanding of your own culture to gauge what is "normal." This can lead to biases and a tendency to view cultural differences as abnormal or in a negative light. It can also make it difficult to see how your cultural background influences your behaviors.

Cross-cultural psychologists often look at how ethnocentrism influences our behaviors and thoughts, including how we interact with individuals from other cultures.  

Psychologists are also concerned with how ethnocentrism can influence the research process. For example, a study might be criticized for having an ethnocentric bias.

Topics in Cross-Cultural Psychology

Cross-cultural psychology explores many subjects, focusing on how culture affects different aspects of development, thought, and behavior. Some important areas of study include:

• Emotions : This field seeks to understand if all people experience emotions the same way and if emotional expressions are universal.
• Language acquisition : This area explores whether language development follows the same path throughout different cultures.
• Child development : This topic investigates how culture affects child development and whether different cultural practices influence the course of development. For example, psychologists might investigate how child-rearing practices differ in various cultures and how these practices impact variables such as achievement, self-esteem, and subjective well-being .
• Personality : This area researches the degree to which different aspects of personality might be influenced or tied to cultural influences.
• Social behavior : Cultural norms and expectations can have a powerful effect on social behavior, which this topic seeks to understand.
• Family and social relationships : Familial and other interpersonal relationships can also be heavily influenced by societies and cultures.
• Mental health: Professionals who provide mental health services should embrace cultural sensitivity. There can be significant differences in emotional expression, social behaviors, and spiritual beliefs across cultures that are "normal" within the context of the person's culture and should not be treated as a symptom or disorder.

Cross-cultural psychology seeks to understand how culture influences many different aspects of human emotion, thought, and behavior. Cross-cultural psychologists often study child development, personality, and social relationships. Mental health professionals should be culturally sensitive to differing norms in the context of culture.

Uses for Cross-Cultural Psychology

Cross-cultural psychology touches on a wide range of topics, so students interested in other psychology topics may choose to also focus on this area of psychology. For example, a child psychologist might study how child-rearing practices in different cultures impact development.

Cross-cultural psychology can help teachers, educators, and curriculum designers who create multicultural education lessons and materials learn more about how cultural differences affect student learning, achievement, and motivation.

In the field of social psychology, applying a cross-cultural view might lead researchers to study how social cognition might vary in an individualist culture versus a collectivist culture. Do people from each culture rely on the same types of social cues? What cultural differences might influence how people perceive each other ?

Impact of Cross-Cultural Psychology

Many other branches of psychology focus on how parents, friends, and other people impact human behavior. However, most do not take into account the powerful impact that culture may have on individual human actions.

Cross-cultural psychology focuses on studying human behavior in a way that takes the effects of culture into account.

The study of cross-cultural psychology and the inclusion of more representative and diverse samples in psychology research is essential for understanding the universality and uniqueness of different psychological phenomena. Recognizing how different factors manifest in various cultures can help researchers better understand the underlying influences and causes.

A Word From Verywell

Cross-cultural psychology plays an important role in the understanding of behavior throughout the cultures of the world. While much of psychology research remains primarily Western and Eurocentric, there is a stronger awareness of the importance of representation and diversity in the research process.

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In some cultures, merely exerting effort is considered virtuous, even when the effort is inefficient. Our study examines how this moral attitude towards effort (relative to efficiency) has evolved historically across two distinct sociopolitical and linguistic contexts: the People’s Republic of China and the United States, using natural language processing techniques. Specifically, two formal political corpora were used—the People’s Daily (1950–2021) and the Congressional speeches for the U.S. (1873–2011). We developed dictionaries for each concept based on pre-trained word embedding models in both languages. Moral attitudes towards effort and efficiency were calculated on a year-by-year basis as the cosine similarity between the dictionaries of these concepts and an existing dictionary of morality. We benchmarked the fluctuations of moral attitude towards inefficient effort against critical historical events in the two countries. Additional time series analysis and Granger tests revealed the association and potential directionality between the evolution of moral attitude towards inefficient effort and critical socio-cultural variables such as collectivism and cultural looseness. Our research sheds light on the historical and socio-cultural roots of moralization of effort and has implications for historical psychology research on moral attitudes.

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Introduction.

Consider this scenario: A newspaper company recently adopted an Artificial Intelligence (AI) system capable of producing articles indistinguishable from those written by human journalists. The sale of the newspaper is unaffected after the company relies entirely on the AI system. Consequently, the two journalists employed by the company now benefit from indefinite paid time off (PTO). During this period, one journalist continues to write two articles daily as before, while the other spends their days lounging on the couch and watching TV. Who would you instinctively consider more morally praiseworthy? Recent work on moralization of inefficient effort has suggested that across multiple cultures, people tend to morally praise the individuals who exert efforts even when the efforts produce no discernible outcomes (Amos et al., 2019 ; Bigman and Tamir, 2016 ; Celniker et al., 2023 ; Ess and Burke, 2022 ; Fwu et al., 2014 ). In laboratory settings, individuals tend to infer positive moral attributes from a mere cue of effort (Amos et al., 2019 ; Celniker et al., 2023 ). Utilizing vignettes across various domains—including paid employment and partner choice—in different cultures, this line of research demonstrates that individuals who exert greater effort, even in tasks that appear meaningless and completely replaceable by less effortful alternatives, are perceived as more moral and deserving of higher monetary reward. Such a preference for effort has behavioral consequences. For example, the demonstration of effort exerted by fundraisers has been shown to increase participants’ willingness to donate to the charity; participants were more likely to pay higher salaries to employees who exhibited more effort, even when the actual outcome or end product remains the same (Celniker et al., 2023 ).

The tendency to morally praise effort regardless of outcomes is observed not only in laboratory settings, but also seems to be a common theme in the workplace across many developed economies, where many high paying and prestigious jobs are deemed useless and meaningless (or “bullshit jobs”) even by the employees holding those positions (Celniker et al., 2023 ; Graeber, 2018 ). A sociology work suggests that wealthy people in the U.S. tend to use their “hard work” to morally justify their advantageous socioeconomic status, while intentionally or unintentionally downplaying or ignoring the structural privilege they have (Sherman, 2017 ).

Interestingly, the consequences of moralization of inefficient effort may differ at the societal level compared with the individual level. While the dissociation between effort and efficiency can lead to negative individual consequences, such as diminished learning outcomes (Kirk-Johnson et al., 2019 ) and a lack of sense of meaningfulness (Graeber, 2018 ), it can serve a strategic role at the societal level. By valuing effort irrespective of outcomes, societies might encourage persistence and foster resilience in the face of challenges and setbacks. Such work ethics can pave the way for long-term innovation (Kundro, 2022 ) and stimulate economic growth (Becker and Woessmann, 2009 ), even if immediate results are not always evident. In short, the moralization of inefficient effort, in its ambivalent nature and its relationship to the societal environment, is more than merely justifying one’s effortful actions but rather is linked to the evolution of moral systems and their intricate interplay with broader socio-cultural contexts.

Delving deeper into the moralization of inefficient effort, we could find its roots in a society’s history and culture. Historically, many cultures have celebrated virtues such as diligence, perseverance, and hard work, often rooted in religious and/or philosophical teachings (Fitouchi et al., 2022 ). For instance, the Protestant Work Ethic (PWE) emphasizes labor and discipline as symbols of personal virtue (Weber, 1905 ). Empirical studies have shown that societies with a strong emphasis on PWE tend to value individual effort and achievement, even in secular contexts (Furnham, 1984 ; Uhlmann and Sanchez-Burks, 2014 ). Similarly, Confucian values from East Asia stress the importance of industriousness and constant self-improvement as moral obligations (Hwang, 2012 ). For example, in societies influenced by Confucian values (e.g., China, Korea), the education system is designed to reward effort-driven practices such as intensive memorization for exams. Here, students might internalize the belief that effort is a desirable goal in and of itself, a belief often reinforced by parents and educators (Chen, 2023 ). These cultural norms may have shaped societies to prioritize the exertion of effort itself over its outcomes, viewing genuine hard work as intrinsically valuable, regardless of its direct utility or efficiency.

Furthermore, differences also manifest in the perception and pursuit of efficiency. In the Confucian value system, equality is prioritized over individual efficiency (Poznanski, 2017 ). In contrast, the PWE not only promotes hard work but also views efficiency and individual achievement as means to achieve personal salvation (Weber, 1905 ). For example, compared to American families, Japanese families often promote task involvement through interpersonal cooperation rather than competition, often avoiding evaluations based on individual performance (Holloway, 1988 ).

In both cultures, the moral underpinnings of effort and efficiency are not just abstract values. They influence educational practices, social judgments, and even economic policies. However, traditional survey and experimental methods have limited capacity in revealing the historical roots and evolution of these moral attitudes at the societal level (Atari and Henrich, 2023 ; Muthukrishna et al., 2021 ).

Here, we aim to trace the moral values of effort and efficiency within two distinct sociopolitical and linguistic contexts - the United States and the People’s Republic of China. We explore how these values evolved over time and how they interacted with key historical and economic trends. Our approach integrates natural language processing techniques and data from historical and contemporary sources, providing a robust and nuanced analysis of these complex moral constructs.

The historical and cultural perspectives

Rarely does any moral attitude remain static throughout history (Muthukrishna et al., 2021 ). Investigating the evolution of moral attitudes and the societal factors that influence and result from their changes can advance our understanding of cross-cultural and historical variations in human cognition. Studying these variations and their historical origins can provide insight into the fundamental aspects of human society, such as its values, ethics, and customs (Atari and Henrich, 2023 ; Schulz et al., 2019 ).

In the study of the evolution of moral attitudes, text corpora serve as an invaluable gateway into history, as it documents the collective minds of the human societies in the past (Muthukrishna et al., 2021 ). With the recent trend of applying computational linguistic models to historical text corpora, psychologists can reveal theoretically intriguing and hitherto neglected historical evolutions of various cultural and social constructs. For example, previous studies have identified a rise in individualism and the loosening of cultural norms within U.S. society over the past two centuries (Greenfield, 2013 ; Jackson et al., 2019 ). Adopting a similar approach, Choi and colleagues track the changes in the use of threatening language in American English books, and show that these changes correspond with actual threats in the U.S. history (Choi et al., 2022 ). Other studies have documented the surge of language use that is associated with cognitive distortion, such as overgeneralizing and mislabeling, in American English, Spanish, and German books since the 1980s, and shown that this pattern is not driven by linguistic shifts (Bollen et al., 2021 ).

This line of work typically relies on the frequency of a set of words (i.e., a dictionary) that represents the psychological construct in question in large language corpora (e.g., Google Book) across time (Michel et al., 2011 ). A second approach for studying historical psychology employs co-occurrence analysis. By rating language proximal to specific terms based on psychological constructs, such as positivity and stereotypes, researchers can gain insights into the increasing negativity of attitudes toward older adults across time and ambivalent age stereotypes across cultures (Mason et al., 2015 ; Ng and Chow, 2021 ). More recent research leverages a natural language processing (NLP) technique, word embeddings, to measure semantic similarities between psychological constructs of interests, and to examine the historical evolution of such semantic similarities. This approach is based on the distributional hypothesis from linguistics, which posits that the semantic contexts around words capture their meaning in terms of cultural associations (Sahlgren, 2008 ) and has been shown to align well with human implicit bias data (Caliskan et al., 2017 ). Existing research has demonstrated its usefulness in capturing historical dynamics of social group representation (Cao et al., 2024 ; Charlesworth et al., 2022 ), identifying polarized framing of immigrants between political parties’ speeches (Card et al., 2022 ), tracking the decline of gender and ethnic stereotypes in American historical corpora (Garg et al., 2018 ; Jones et al., 2020 ), as well as the consistency of gender stereotypes across child and adult corpora (Charlesworth et al., 2022 ).

Similar to the various psychological constructs reviewed above, cross-cultural diversity in moral attitudes in today’s world is likely a consequence of distinct historical evolution trajectories in different geographic, linguistic, and social contexts (Henrich, 2020 ). Existing NLP-based historical psychological research has largely been focused on the so-called Western, Educated, Industrial, Rich, and Democratic (WEIRD) societies, and has primarily relied on English texts. While there are exceptions that use non-English sources such as German and French (Baumard et al., 2022 ; Bollen et al., 2021 ; Martins and Baumard, 2020 ), the Eurocentric focus in previous research has constrained the exploration of broader cultural and historical diversity. Here, we examine and compare the historical evolution of moral attitudes toward effort and efficiency in modern history of China and the U.S., two societies significantly differ in their political and economic institutions, popular cultures, ideologies, and languages. This allows us to identify similar and distinct societal and cultural drivers behind the different evolution trajectories. The rationale for focusing on these two cultures and languages is twofold. From a theoretical perspective, China and the U.S. are known to differ in important political structures, cultural values, and social norms, such as collectivism/individualism and cultural tightness/looseness (we acknowledge that cultural and social norms also differ significantly within each country) (Talhelm and English, 2020 ). More importantly, the two cultures also differ in their dominant work ethic (Amos et al., 2019 ; Celniker et al., 2023 ; Zhang et al., 2012 ): while the U.S. work ethic is strongly influenced by Protestant Work Ethic (PWE) beliefs (industrious, ambitious, hardworking, intrinsically motivated), the Chinese work ethic reflects Confucianism values (e.g., hard work, diligence, frugality, and the love of education). It is thus theoretically interesting to examine how the evolution of moral attitudes towards effort and efficiency/productivity differs in these two distinct cultures (e.g., as the economic performance of the society fluctuates). From a pragmatic perspective, Chinese is one of the most widely used non-alphabetical texts, yet it is digitally disadvantaged and underrepresented in natural language processing research (Zaugg et al., 2022 ). The text corpus that we adopted in this study spans the entire history of the People’s Republic of China. Sharing the diachronic word embeddings based on this corpus will provide materials for future NLP-based historical psychology research.

Specifically, we set out to address three novel research questions and goals: (1) developing a computational linguistic tool targeting moral attitudes toward effort and efficiency expressed in Chinese and English texts; (2) characterizing the historical evolution trajectories of moral attitudes toward efforts and efficiency in modern Chinese and U.S. histories; and (3) understanding the social and cultural antecedents and consequences of the moral attitudes toward efforts and efficiency in both cultures.

Dictionary development

To capture the concepts of effort and efficiency in text data, we followed the procedure of several recent studies and developed dictionaries (i.e., word lists) representing the concepts of effort and efficiency. To this end, we employed a combination of pre-trained language models and human ratings, following the procedures of previous studies (Choi et al., 2022 ; Jackson et al., 2019 ; Lin et al., 2022 ). The process consisted of the following four main steps.

First, we identified English and Chinese seed words related to effort and efficiency from WordNet (Miller, 1995 ), a comprehensive lexical database and thesaurus.

Second, we computed the mean vector coordinates of the seed words using models pre-trained on datasets including Google News (Mikolov et al., 2013 ), Wikipedia (Bojanowski et al., 2017 ), and Twitter (Pennington et al., 2014 ) for English, and Renmin Web (people.cn), Wikipedia, and Weibo for Chinese (Li et al., 2018 ). This way, we located the seed words in high-dimensional semantic spaces and identified semantically similar terms. The selection of these pre-trained models was based on their coverage across diverse platforms, spanning traditional mass media, social media, and encyclopedism references. The rationale of using a more diverse set of corpora (as opposed to the corpora used for the main analyses) for dictionary development is to obtain a representative and generalizable linguistic indicator of the underlying constructs. The corpora used for the main analysis (i.e., People’s Daily and Congressional speeches) was chosen partly due to their well-preserved temporal information and historical continuity. However, these corpora are limited in the contents, genre, and scope. Therefore, we believe that basing our dictionary development on a more comprehensive linguistic source is more appropriate and useful for future research.

Third, we extracted the 50 words closest to the mean coordinates of the seed words in each pre-trained model. These words were considered closely related to the concepts. None-words, duplications, and very low frequency words were filtered out before the next step.

Finally, two native speakers of English and two native speakers of Chinese from the research team were trained to evaluate the remaining candidate words for conceptual relevance to the concept in question on a scale of 1 ( not at all relevant ) to 5 ( extremely relevant ). Then, we selected the words that had an average rating higher than 3. Within this selection, certain words were excluded despite meeting the rating criterion due to reasons such as being very similar to other terms in the dictionaries, a low frequency of occurrence, consisting of multiple tokens, or ambiguous interpretations. The inter-rater reliability for the relevance ratings, assessed using the Intraclass Correlation Coefficient (ICC), demonstrated good reliability for effort in both English (ICC = 0.88) and Chinese (ICC = 0.76) and moderate reliability for efficiency in English (ICC = 0.67) and Chinese (ICC = 0.51). We acknowledge that the ICC for the Chinese efficiency words was not great and therefore, the interpretations related to efficiency in the Chinese context should be taken with caution. The final dictionaries consisted of 10 words each for effort and efficiency in English, while the Chinese versions incorporated 13 for effort and 10 for efficiency. For the effort dictionary in Chinese, we include three additional words because four words positioned tenth in the relevance ratings which are all highly relevant to the concept and the overall cosine similarity between groups of words should not be significantly impacted, as the embedding process inherently normalizes these frequency effects. Some examples of the effort dictionary are “effort”, “toil”, and “perseverance”. The efficiency dictionary comprises words like “efficiency,” “productivity”, “effective”, “economical”, and “profitable”. Some examples of the Chinese effort dictionary are “努力”, “力求”, and “尽力”, and some examples of the Chinese efficiency dictionary are “效益”, “效率”, and “效用”. The complete list of candidate words and their ratings can be found in Supplementary Tables 1 – 4 .

Calculating the moral values of effort and efficiency concepts

To represent positive and negative moral values, we used the word lists (i.e., dictionaries) from the Moral Foundations Dictionary 2.0 (Frimer et al., 2019 ), which is based on the Moral Foundations Theory (Graham et al., 2013 ). Some examples of these words, which are rooted in moral foundations (care, fairness, loyalty, authority, and sanctity), include “compassion”, “equality”, “loyalty”, “respect”, and “purity”. The Chinese Moral Foundations Dictionary was adapted and translated from English to Chinese. The ability of this Chinese version to effectively capture moral values in Chinese texts has been validated in previous work (Chen et al., 2024 ; Garten et al., 2018 ). We acknowledge that various versions of the Moral Foundations Dictionary exist, both in English and Chinese (e.g., the Extended Moral Foundations Dictionary, (Hopp et al., 2020 ); the Chinese Moral Foundations Dictionary 2.0, (Cheng and Zhang, 2023 )). We chose MFD 2.0 over MFD 1.0 because the former offers a more comprehensive set of moral terms (Kennedy et al., 2021 b). MFD 2.0 contains five moral foundations, which is comparable to the Chinese moral foundations dictionary we used. We noted that different versions of Moral Foundations Theory have slightly different numbers and demarcation of the exact moral foundations (Atari et al., 2023 ; Graham et al., 2013 ; Hofmann et al., 2014 ). However, in this study, we did not test hypotheses specific to any single foundation. For the Chinese dictionary, the Chinese Moral Foundation Dictionary 2.0 is one of the most recent endeavors in creating a computational linguistic measure of morality in Chinese text (Cheng and Zhang, 2023 ). However, the researchers who developed this dictionary specifically argued that their dictionary did not distinguish between positively and negatively valenced moral words within each foundation, a feature that would be critical to our method (see below for details). Our choice of the dictionaries was based on the considerations of compatibility and ease of comparison between the English and Chinese analysis. We demonstrated the validity of the moral dictionaries in a validation analysis, where we benchmarked the fluctuations of the moral attitudes toward the U.S.S.R. in the Chinese and American corpora (see Dictionary Validation in the “Results” section).

Data collection and model training

To examine the societal attitudes toward effort and efficiency, we compiled two datasets from the U.S. Congressional speeches from 1873 to 2011 and People’s Daily from 1950 to 2021. The United States Congressional Record includes all speeches delivered on the floors of the United States House of Representatives and the United States Senate, encompassing a wide range of discussions and debates on various policy issues, reflecting the diverse views of American lawmakers. The content includes legislative activity, committee reports, member remarks, petitions, and memorials. We use the bound edition, a permanent, edited version of the daily records of congressional proceedings from the 43 rd to the 111 th Congress. This corpus has provided a reliable source to study sentiments and partisanship changes in the political context over time. For example, the congressional speeches have become increasingly positive and sentimental (Tucker et al., 2020 ). While the partisanship in the speeches remained stable and has become more polarized in recent decades (Enke, 2020 ; Gentzkow et al., 2019 ), parties not in power used more moral language (Wang and Inbar, 2021 ).

People’s Daily is the official outlet of the Chinese Communist Party and reflects a crucial perspective on the Party’s official stance on effort and efficiency in the context of their political and socio-economic environment. It features government policies, economic plans, societal issues, notable events, and official statements. Despite the structural changes in 1956, including the shift from traditional Chinese to simplified Chinese characters, the change in writing format from vertical to horizontal, and the expansion from 8 to 12 pages, the content and genre of the corpus remain stable over time. In that sense, this corpus has good temporal and genric continuity and covers almost the entire period of the People’s Republic of China.

The corpora were split by year and trained into word2vec models using python gensim package with its default hyperparameter settings. The U.S. Congressional speeches corpus has a mean token count of 13.4 million per year with a standard deviation of 6.8 million, ranging from 867,210 to 29,252,016 tokens. The People’s Daily corpus has a mean token count of 12.3 million, with a standard deviation of 5.9 million, ranging from 5,292,965 to 31,038,064 tokens. Year-by-year distribution of token counts across years is displayed in Supplementary Fig. 1 . We employed the following key model hyperparameters: a vector size of 100, which determines the dimensionality of the word vectors; a window size of 5, which defines the maximum distance between the current and predicted word within a sentence; a minimum count of 5, meaning that words occurring less frequently than this threshold were ignored; a negative sampling rate of 5, which specifies the number of “noise words” to be drawn for each target word during training; and a number of iterations (epochs) as 5. The models were trained using the Skip-gram architecture, which is effective for capturing the context of a word in a large corpus. Word2Vec models provided a robust framework for generating meaningful word embeddings, facilitating our subsequent analyses of moral values in the textual data.

Measuring moral values in text corpora

To assess the moral values of effort and efficiency in the above corpora, we adopted the word embeddings bias method, a natural language processing technique widely used in previous studies that quantifies changes in stereotypical bias throughout the U.S. history (Charlesworth et al., 2022 ; Garg et al., 2018 ). First, our analysis required dictionaries representing the concepts of interest, including effort, efficiency, and moral values, detailed in Dictionary Development section above.

Second, to measure bias in word embeddings, we computed the strength of association (or similarity) between the dictionary of a concept (e.g., effort) and the dictionary of the evaluative words (e.g., moral virtues). Specifically, we calculated the average cosine similarity between each concept (effort or efficiency) and the evaluative words, as shown in the formula below:

Here, Sim ( effort, virtue ) represents the average cosine similarity between the effort concept and positive moral values (virtue), while M and N denote the total number of words in the two dictionaries. We used the same approach to calculate the negative moral values (vice) of effort and efficiency. Moral attitude towards effort (or efficiency) is defined as the difference between the positive and negative moral values of effort (or efficiency). Hereafter, we use Effort and Efficiency to denote the moral attitudes towards effort and efficiency, respectively. Moral attitude toward inefficient effort is defined as the difference between the positive moral value of effort and the positive moral value of efficiency. Hereafter, we use Inefficient Effort to denote the moral attitudes towards inefficient effort. This operationalization construes Inefficient Effort as the bias in a society’s positive moral attitudes (i.e., virtue) toward effort relative to the positive moral attitudes toward efficiency. In other words, if a society values efforts precisely because of the outcomes the efforts produce (i.e., efficient effort), then the positive moral attitudes toward efforts should be comparable to the positive moral attitudes towards efficiency, in which case, the bias as we define it would be close to zero. On the other hand, if the bias is positive, then this implies that in such a society, efforts are valued over and beyond the outcome they produce. We refer to this additional positive moral value of effort as the moral value toward inefficient effort (i.e., efforts that do not produce outcomes). This “bias” approach is a standard practice in dictionary-based NLP work, such as stereotypes of groups (i.e., difference in semantic similarity between group names and positive/negative trait words (Charlesworth et al., 2022 , 2024 )), women’s occupation bias (i.e., difference in semantic similarity between occupation names and women/men words (Garg et al., 2018 )).

Other variables

To investigate the relationships between socio-cultural values and the moral values of effort and efficiency across time, we obtained metrices of several socio-cultural values, including individualism/collectivism, cultural tightness/looseness, and economic performance (i.e., per capita Gross Domestic Product, GDP).

Individualism/collectivism

We derived a text-based measure of year-by-year individualism and collectivism from the two countries based on the Google Ngram word frequency data, which provides insight into the prevalence of individualistic and collectivistic terms in published texts over time. The English and Chinese dictionaries are taken from existing studies in historical psychology (Greenfield, 2013 ; Zeng and Greenfield, 2015 ).

Tightness/looseness

Cultural tightness and looseness refer to the extent to which a culture adheres to social norms and tolerates deviant behavior (M. Gelfand, 2019 ; M. J. Gelfand et al., 2006 ; Jackson et al., 2019 ). Tight cultures have strict norms and little tolerance for deviations, whereas loose cultures are more permissive and flexible. Recent advances in research have facilitated the measurement of these constructs in textual content, examining the prevalence and context of norm-related words in various English corpora (Jackson et al., 2019 ). We translated the Chinese dictionary from the English version. A similar Google Ngram-based method as above was used.

We acknowledge that Google N-gram is only an imperfect reflection of the true cultural values of a society (Schmidt et al., 2021 ). We compared the cultural values (individualism, collectivism, looseness, and tightness) based on Google N-gram and another, generically more balanced English corpus (i.e., Corpus of Historical American English, COHA) using ARIMA regression. During the period of history we studied, all the four cultural values based on these two corpora were highly correlated (see Supplementary Methods for detail; Supplementary Fig. 2 ). We decided to use Google N-gram here because, to the best of our knowledge, it is still the most accessible and comprehensive corpus in Chinese. Using Google N-gram as the source of the cultural variables makes the results of the two countries more comparable. More efforts are needed to create more stable and balanced corpora in Chinese and other non-English languages.

GDP per capita

To control economic factors that may influence the attitudes toward effort and efficiency, we utilized GDP per capita data. This information was obtained from the Maddison Project, a comprehensive dataset that provides historical GDP per capita estimates for various countries (Bolt and van Zanden, 2020 ). By including GDP per capita in our analysis, we aimed to account for potential economic influences on the evolution of the examined concepts.

Statistical analysis

Descriptive analysis.

We first displayed the long-term trends in the moral values of effort and efficiency based on the U.S. Congressional speeches and People’s Daily .

Null models as baseline

To establish reference points for linguistic fluctuations over time and demonstrate the moral significance of the concepts, we ran 10,000 simulations. In these simulations, we substituted effort- and efficiency-related words with randomly selected words and extracted their semantic similarities with moral evaluative words (virtue and vice dictionaries, respectively). It yielded a distribution of the association between 10,000 random sets of words (the same size as the effort and efficiency dictionaries, respectively) and the moral evaluative words for each year, forming a 95% confidence interval for these random associations. We then compared these with the moral associations with the concepts we are interested in (Bollen et al., 2021 ; Jones et al., 2020 ).

Bayesian change point detection

To assess the convergent validity of the moral measures, we employed Bayesian Change Point Detection, a statistical technique designed to identify shifts in data patterns by estimating the probability of change points at each timepoint. This approach allows us to pinpoint the precise time points at which moral value shifts occur and examine their correspondence with key historical turning points in each country. Utilizing this method, we can establish a connection between our findings and the broader historical context. The bcp package in R was used for change point analysis (Erdman and Emerson, 2008 ).

Time series

To estimate the long-term trends of moral values associated with effort and efficiency in the U.S. Congressional speeches and People’s Daily , we applied the Autoregressive Integrated Moving Average (ARIMA) modeling, utilizing the auto.arima function from the forecast package in R (Hyndman and Khandakar, 2008 ), to the yearly association data. ARIMA is a time-series model that allows us to account for both the temporal dependencies and random fluctuations within the data, while controlling for GDP per capita.

Granger test

To further analyze the directionality between moral values and cultural changes, we employed Granger causality test to determine whether moral values of effort and efficiency precede cultural values, or vice versa. To ensure the stationarity of the data, we extracted the time series data from ARIMA models. To determine the optimal lag length for the Granger tests, we compared models with lags ranging up to 10 years and selected the one with the lowest Akaike Information Criterion (AIC). The Granger causality test was performed using the grangertest function from the lmtest package in R (Zeileis and Hothorn, 2002 ).

Dictionary validation

To validate the moral measures in the U.S. Congressional speeches and People’s Daily , we employed the embedding bias method to examine the moral values of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (U.S.S.R.) in the two corpora. It is expected that the evolution of moral attitudes toward the U.S.S.R. fluctuates in response to known events in the two countries diplomatic relationships with the U.S.S.R. As illustrated in Fig. 1A , the moral attitudes towards the U.S.S.R. in the U.S. Congressional speeches showed fluctuations in the 1920s and 1930s, with a prominent peak coinciding with the establishment of the U.S.-U.S.S.R. diplomatic ties in 1933, and remained relatively high during World War II, during which the U.S. and the U.S.S.R. were allies against Nazi Germany. However, the moral attitudes towards the U.S.S.R. quickly declined after the end of the war, when the tension between the Socialist Bloc and the West accelerated and the Cold War was in the corner. Of note, Winston Churchill’s Iron Curtain Speech was delivered in 1946 and the Gouzenko Affair (a high-profile U.S.S.R. spy at the Soviet Embassy in Ottawa) went viral in the media between 1945 and 1946. Moving forward, the moral attitudes towards the U.S.S.R. remained negative in the Congressional speech corpus, despite a brief uptick coinciding with Khrushchev’s 1959 visit to the U.S. The moral attitudes towards the U.S.S.R. in the People’s Daily also notably fluctuated in response to historical events, as shown in Fig. 1B . For instance, there have been marked declines since the 1960s, during which the moral attitudes dropped from positive to negative. This downturn reached its lowest point in 1971 following the Sino-Soviet border conflict in 1969. However, there was a resurgence in moral attitude towards the U.S.S.R. in 1980s along with the resumption of diplomatic relations, culminating in a peak when Soviet Communist leader Mikhail Gorbachev paid a state visit to China in 1989 for the Sino-Soviet Summit.

Historical events are marked with vertical dashed lines and annotated with black boxes.

Historical trends of moral attitudes toward effort, efficiency, and inefficient effort

We first showed the descriptive trajectories of the evolution of moral attitudes toward efforts, efficiency, and inefficient effort over the last seven decades of Chinese history and nearly 14 decades of U.S. history, in their respective text corpus. Figures 2 and 3 display the historical evolutions of moral attitudes towards effort, efficiency, and inefficient effort. The results were based on the average of all moral foundations in the dictionary. Results based on each moral foundation are shown in Supplementary Fig. 3 . All the years discussed below in this section were the first three highest probabilities determined by Bayesian Change Point Detection (see Supplementary Fig. 4 for the time series of posterior estimates) (Erdman and Emerson, 2008 ). This method was employed to detect substantial shifts in a data sequence, offering a probabilistic framework to identify the number and location of these changes by calculating the posterior probability of a change at each time point.

A Moral attitudes towards effort and efficiency. B Moral attitudes towards inefficient effort. The shaded regions denote the 95% confidence interval derived from a null model, comprising 10,000 sets of random words matched in length to the English effort/efficiency dictionaries (see the Null Model as Baseline section in Methods ).

A Moral attitudes towards effort and efficiency. B Moral attitudes towards inefficient effort. The shaded regions denote the 95% confidence interval derived from a null model, comprising 10,000 sets of random words matched in length to the Chinese effort/efficiency dictionaries (see the Null Model as Baseline section in Methods ).

As displayed in Fig. 2A , in the U.S. Congressional speeches, the moral attitude towards effort is predominantly positive. An upward surge occurred in 1957 when it increased beyond the predictions of the null model, a year of substantial change identified by Bayesian Change Point Detection. During a period of mostly uprisings in the moral attitude towards effort from 1964 to 2010, there is a marked decline in 1998, coinciding with the Asian Financial Crisis. The trajectory of efficiency mirrors this historical pattern, with a less significant increasing trend starting from 1964. Between 1964 to 2010, 1996 stands out as a year that exhibits an abrupt dip in its moral values. Together, before the 1960s, effort and efficiency appeared relatively indistinguishable from each other and overlapped with the predictions of the null models. Post-1960s, a discernible moralization of these terms emerges, with effort consistently receiving relatively more positive evaluations than efficiency. The trajectory of moral attitude toward inefficient effort (Fig. 2B ) is mainly positive but marked by fluctuations. Before the 1940s, the trajectory largely overlaps with the null model predictions. Since the 1940s, the trajectory has been consistently above the null model predictions.

An important feature of the U.S. Congress is its two-party system. Throughout history, the Republicans and the Democrats represent different social values and ideologies. A question thus arises - is the trajectory of moral attitudes we observed above equally present in the narratives of both parties? To explore this, we trained new embedding models separately on the speeches of Democratic and Republican legislators. We then calculated the cosine similarity between the moral dictionary and the effort/efficiency dictionaries as we did above (see Supplementary Methods for detail). The trajectories of moral attitudes towards effort, efficiency, and inefficient effort based on Democratic and Republican speeches are displayed in Supplementary Fig. 5 . In essence, the trajectories based on the two parties largely overlap with each other throughout the years we studied. Correlation analysis (after removing temporal dependency using ARIMA) showed that the trajectories based on the two parties are strongly and positively correlated (effort: r  = 0.31; efficiency: r  = 0.46; inefficient effort: r  = 0.46; all p s < 0.001). Moral attitudes towards effort and efficiency may also vary geographically at the state or even county level. Recent NLP-based work has begun to take into account finer-grained geographical variations in psychological outcomes (e.g., Atari and Henrich, 2023 ; Y. Chen et al., 2024 ; Lin et al., 2022 ). However, branching out to this question is beyond the scope of the present study. Since there is no equivalent partisanship in the Chinese corpus, we could not carry out a similar analysis there.

As shown in Fig. 3A , in People’s Daily , effort consistently demonstrates a stronger association with virtue words compared to vice words. Notably, the trajectory of moral attitude toward effort is consistently above the levels predicted by the null model. Conversely, while efficiency maintains its positive valuation across most data points, it consistently falls within the 95% confidence intervals of the null model except for the duration from the 1990s to 2000s, suggesting that the observed positive moral values is only distinguishable from mere random occurrences during this specific timeframe. This indicates that the moralization of efficiency may not be as distinct or robust as that of effort in this context. Importantly, in contrast to the U.S. Congressional speeches where both effort and efficiency underwent significant shifts in moral valuation across years, moral values of effort and efficiency in People’s Daily are more stable, as evidenced by the absence of any year where the Bayesian Change Point (BCP) detection probability exceeded 50%. This highlights a distinctive pattern between the two cultural contexts.

Regarding inefficient effort shown in Fig. 3B , its association with positive moral values has been consistently positive over the seven decades that we have data for. The trend for inefficient effort remained relatively stable until 1959, the year marked as a substantial change point identified by Bayesian Change Point Detection method. Between 1959 and 1978, we observed some fluctuations but gradually a downward trend emerged after 1978, paralleling China’s period of profound economic reform and transition to a more market-oriented economy, which emphasizes the importance of efficiency. The period from 1992 onward witnessed an even steeper decline in the positive moral attitudes towards inefficient effort, during which China’s economic reform and opening moved to a “fast track.” Notably, in 1992, the then paramount leader of the Chinese Communist Party, Deng Xiaoping, delivered a series of speeches that emphasized the importance of economic reform in the survival and thriving of the country and its people. In one of the speeches, he remarked that “whoever is against reform will be driven out of power,” putting pressure on the government and party leadership to carry out economic reforms and marketization (Chatwin, 2024 ).

One might argue that the construct of effort is related to other constructs in social-personality and cultural psychology. For example, a recent cross-cultural work examined the “difficulty-as-improvement” mindset (seeing difficulties and hardship as opportunities for self-betterment) in several cultures (Yan et al., 2023 ). In particular, this work showed that the “difficulty-as-improvement” mindset was associated with the Protestant Work Ethics, which is also related to how people view effort and efficiency. To ascertain the relationship between the moral attitudes towards effort and difficulty-as-improvement mindset during the period of times covered by our Chinese and American corpora, we calculated the cosine similarity between the difficulty word list and the improvement word list reported in Yan et al. ( 2023 ) for all the years (Supplementary Fig. 6 ). We then fit ARIMA models to the two time series data separately and obtained the residuals for each year. This is to remove the autocorrelation and temporal dependency of each time series. To estimate the statistical association, we test the correlation between the residuals for each year between the moral attitude towards effort and the “difficulty-as-improvement” mindset. In the U.S. Congressional speech corpus, these two time series were not significantly related ( r  = 0.092, p  = 0.285). In contrast, in the People’s Daily corpus, these two time series were positively related ( r  = 0.557, p  < 0.001). These results indicated that the relationship between the “difficulty-as-improvement” mindset and the moralization of effort is culturally dependent. Future research is needed to further delineate the modulatory role of specific cultural values in this relationship.

In a similar vein, another supplementary analysis showed that the moral attitudes towards effort and efficiency are largely independent of the sentiments associated with these constructs in both the U.S. context and the Chinese context (except for the association between positive sentiment and moral attitudes towards effort in the Chinese corpus; for detail, see Supplementary Methods and Supplementary Fig. 7 ).

Some of the words in the effort and efficiency dictionaries are missing from some of the years we studied here (see Supplementary Tables 5 and 6 for the information of missing words from the U.S. and the Chinese corpora, respectively). We therefore pruned the dictionaries by removing the words that are absent from more than 50% of the time across the period we studied. The temporal evolution patterns of the moral attitudes towards effort, efficiency, and inefficient effort were nearly identical to the patterns we reported in Figs. 2 and 3 (Supplementary Fig. 8 ).

ARIMA models

Next, we used a time series analysis (ARIMA model) to examine the association between the fluctuations of the moral attitudes toward effort, efficiency, and inefficient effort on the one hand, and four cultural values (i.e., individualism, collectivism, cultural looseness, and cultural tightness) on the other hand. We computed the mean vector coordinates for seed words using pre-trained models, which are trained on Google News (Mikolov et al., 2013 ), Wikipedia (Bojanowski et al., 2017 ), and Twitter (Pennington et al., 2014 ) for English, and Renmin, Wikipedia and Weibo for Chinese (Li et al., 2018 ), to represent seed words in high-dimensional semantic spaces and identify similar terms. As shown in Table 1 , during the period of U.S. history we examined here (1873–2011), positive moral attitude toward effort is positively correlated with Looseness ( b  = 0.03, 95% CI [0.01, 0.05], p  < 0.001), even after controlling for GDP per capita ( b  = 0.03, 95% CI [0.01, 0.04], p  < 0.001). This suggests that in the society with a higher tolerance of deviance (i.e., higher cultural looseness), we can expect a significant increase in the positive moral attitude towards effort.

For the moral attitude toward efficiency, collectivism is a significant predictor ( b  = −0.01, 95% CI [−0.02, −0.01], p  < 0.001). However, the significant relationship disappeared after controlling for GDP per capita ( b  = −0.01, 95% CI [−0.03, 0.00], p  = 0.099). This implies that as collectivist values decrease in U.S. society, the moral attitudes toward efficiency in the U.S. Congressional speeches increase, but this relationship appears to be dependent on the society’s economic performance. In contrast, Individualism is not in itself a significant predictor of the moral attitude toward efficiency ( b  = −0.01, 95% CI [−0.03, 0.01], p  = 0.195). Interestingly, however, when adjusted for GDP per capita, Individualism became a significantly negative predictor ( b  = −0.01, 95% CI [−0.03, −0.00], p  = 0.027). This suggests that when the economic performance is held constant, the more prevalent the individualist values are in U.S. society, the more negative the moral attitude toward efficiency is, as observed in Congressional speeches.

For the moral attitude toward inefficient effort, after controlling for GDP per capita, Looseness became a negative predictor ( b  = −0.06, 95% CI [−0.07, −0.05], p  = < 0.001). This suggests that in the relatively culturally looser periods in the U.S. history, inefficient effort in the U.S. congressional speeches becomes more morally negative statistically, possibly indicating a greater condemnation of wastefulness and inefficiency in their public discourse.

For People’s Daily (1950–2021), the effort models show that collectivism was a significantly positive predictor of effort after controlling for GDP per capita ( b  = 0.04, 95% CI [0.02, 0.06], p  < 0.001) (Table 2 ). The significant influences of collectivism on the moral attitudes towards effort reflect the intrinsic cultural appreciation for hard work and diligence that is deeply ingrained in Chinese culture (Heine, 2001 ; Leong et al., 2014 ).

In the basic efficiency models, Looseness emerged as a positive predictor of Efficiency before ( b  = 0.03, 95% CI [0.02, 0.05], p  < 0.001) and after controlling for GDP per capita ( b  = 0.05, 95% CI [0.00, 0.10], p  = 0.040). This association can be interpreted in light of the societal transformation, where flexible norms and behaviors (indicative of looseness) might lead to a favorable valuation of efficiency during China’s shift toward a market economy.

Most notably, in the inefficient effort models, Collectivism was a significantly positive predictor only before controlling for GDP per capita ( b  = 0.06, 95% CI [0.02, 0.10], p  = 0.005). Interestingly, Looseness emerged as a negative predictor of Inefficient Effort only after adjusting for GDP per capita ( b  = −0.15, 95% CI [−0.22, −0.08], p  = < 0.001). The negative impact of Looseness on moralization of inefficient effort observed in the People’s Daily echoes findings from the U.S. congressional speeches, suggesting a broader, cross-cultural trend. This pattern could imply that societies with more flexible norms and behaviors might value inefficiencies less and view them as counterproductive in rapidly changing environments.

Granger tests

Did cultural values lead to changes in the moral valuation of effort and efficiency, or did these moral values trigger shifts in cultural norms? To examine the existence and directionality of these relationships, we applied Granger analysis to the time series of cultural variables and moral attitudes.

Our findings, as shown in Table 3 , revealed that within the U.S. Congressional speeches, Individualism significantly influenced Effort ( F (9, 220) = 3.05, p  = 0.002) and Efficiency ( F (9, 220) = 2.56, p  = 0.008), without significant reverse causality from Effort ( F (9, 220) = 1.28, p  = 0.251) or Efficiency ( F (9, 220) = 0.61, p  = 0.785) back to Individualism. Similarly, Collectivism significantly influenced Effort ( F (10, 214) = 2.89, p  = 0.002) and Efficiency ( F (10, 214) = 3.12, p  = < 0.001), without notable reverse causality from Effort ( F (10, 214) = 0.86, p  = 0.571) or Efficiency ( F (10, 214) = 1.00, p  = 0.442) to Collectivism. In contrast, Inefficient Effort was a significant precursor of shifts in cultural values including Individualism ( F (9, 220) = 1.93, p  = 0.049) and Collectivism ( F (10, 214) = 3.30, p  = < 0.001). Meanwhile, cultural norms such as Tightness and Looseness did not show a causal influence on Inefficient Effort. In contrast, Inefficient Effort significantly predicted changes in Tightness ( F (10, 214) = 2.45, p  = 0.009).

The interplay between cultural variables and moral attitudes toward effort and efficiency showed different patterns in People’s Daily . Specifically, Individualism had a significant causal influence on Effort ( F (9, 82) = 2.07, p  = 0.042) with no significant reverse causality ( F (9, 82) = 1.19, p  = 0.314). Similarly, changes in Collectivism drove shifts in Effort ( F (9, 82) = 2.97, p  = 0.004) with no reverse relationship ( F (9, 82) = 0.82, p  = 0.599). Neither Looseness nor Tightness showed a significant causal influence on Effort. There was a significant impact of Effort on the change of Tightness ( F (9, 82) = 2.01, p  = 0.048). This suggests that increased valuations of effort might have some influence on adherence to norms and regulations. None of the cultural variables demonstrated a significant causal influence on Efficiency. However, intriguingly, Efficiency had a significant causal influence on Individualism ( F (9, 82) = 2.33, p  = 0.021).

In analyzing Inefficient Effort, a robust causal relationship was identified where Collectivism showed a causal relationship with Inefficient Effort ( F (9, 82) = 2.94, p  = 0.004) and vice versa ( F (9, 82) = 2.37, p  = 0.020) in the Chinese narrative. This bidirectional causality indicates a dynamic interplay between collective values and the moralization of inefficient efforts. Additionally, Looseness preceded the changes of Inefficient Effort ( F (2, 124) = 3.73, p  = 0.027) with no significant reverse causality ( F (2, 124) = 1.76, p  = 0.176). Complemented by the ARIMA models, the results indicated that collectivism positively influenced the moral values associated with effort. Furthermore, there was a positive bidirectional relationship between collectivism and the moralization of inefficient effort (Table 3 ).

For robustness checks, we reran the ARIMA models and Granger tests with the pruned effort and efficiency dictionaries (i.e., removing words that are missing from more than 50% of the years we studied) (Supplementary Tables 7 – 10 ). We also reran the ARIMA models and Granger Tests for the U.S. corpus using cultural variables derived from COHA (Supplementary Tables 11 and 12 ). The results remained qualitatively consistent.

In this study, we combined a computational linguistic approach (Atari and Dehghani, 2022 ; Caliskan et al., 2017 ; Garg et al., 2018 ; Hamilton et al., 2016 ; Kennedy et al., 2021 a; Xu et al., 2021 ) and historical text corpora in China and the U.S. (Atari and Henrich, 2023 ; Muthukrishna et al., 2021 ) to examine the historical trend of the moral attitudes towards effort and efficiency (Celniker et al., 2023 ). The two societies exemplify two distinctive cultures: the Protestant Work Ethic (PWE) predominant in the U.S. (Furnham, 1984 ; Uhlmann and Sanchez-Burks, 2014 ), and Confucian values that characterize China (Hwang, 2012 , 2015 ). By examining the historical trend of these moral attitudes in the U.S. and China, we offer insights into the evolving cultural narratives of hard work and productivity.

The U.S., deeply influenced by the PWE, has historically valued hard work as a moral virtue during the rise of capitalism. Yet, our study discerns a more intricate narrative. Up until the end of the 1940s, the moral attitudes toward effort and efficiency were indistinguishable, at least in the Congressional speech corpus, often overlapping with null models. However, marked increases in the positive moral values of effort and efficiency emerged starting from the 1950s and continued into the 1960s and 1970s, with effort surpassing efficiency in moral values. Intriguingly, during this period, the moral attitude toward inefficient effort starts to increase. This trend coincides with America’s post-World War II economic boom, material prosperity, and optimism and confidence. Directly relevant to the Congressional speech corpus we used, during this time, the Congress established the Council of Economic Advisors to encourage high employment, substantial profits, and low inflation. Within this context, pure effort, even if not always immediately efficient or productive, gained increasingly positive moral values. Future work is needed to ascertain the relationships between these different political and economic trends (zeitgeist) on the one hand, and the society’s moral attitudes towards efforts and efficiency on the other.

As for China, our findings depict a narrative that is different from that of the American one. The moral value of effort remains consistently positive and above the confidence interval of the null model throughout our period of observation. In contrast, the moral value of efficiency is mostly within the confidence interval of the null model, indicating that the concept of efficiency is not consistently and meaningfully associated with morality during this period of history. The lack of moral value associated with efficiency may be related to China’s long-standing adherence to Confucian values, which emphasize collective obligations irrespective of their outcomes. This philosophy is captured by sayings such as “Heroes are not judged solely by success or failure.” Indeed, Confucius himself is proud of being someone who “knows the impracticable nature of the times and yet will be doing in them” ( Analects ). A significant decline of positive moral attitude toward inefficient effort began at the turn of the 1960s, when China’s leadership became aware of the detrimental effects of unrealistic ideological zeal and rolled back some of the inefficient policies mandated during the Great Leap Forward. Another decline occurred in the early 1990s and coincided with the implementation of market reform policies. The zeitgeist of this period is best illustrated by the motto of the City of Shenzhen, one of the pioneering regions of China’s economic reform, “Time is money, efficiency is life.” This trajectory, perhaps, mirrors China’s transition to a rapidly modernizing and industrializing country.

The findings from our time series analysis reveal intriguing cultural insights. Both in the U.S. and in China, a consistent negative relationship was observed between cultural looseness and the moral attitudes toward inefficient effort. This suggests that when a society is less culturally loose, it will place more moral value on effort relative to efficiency. Another commonality emerging from the Granger tests is that it was individualism and collectivism, rather than cultural tightness or looseness, that preceded shifts in the moral values of effort. This indicates that while loosening cultural norms might influence attitudes toward work efficiency, the driving factors behind moral values of effort are rooted more in the individualistic or collectivistic tendencies of these societies.

Our results from the exploratory time series analysis (ARIMA and Granger tests), reveal distinct patterns of associations and precedence between cultural variables (i.e., individualism, collectivism, cultural tightness/looseness) and the moral attitudes towards effort and efficiency (i.e., effort, efficiency, and inefficiency effort) in the U.S. and China. Specifically, in the U.S., cultural looseness is positively correlated with moral values of effort and negatively with moral values of inefficient effort. Additionally, individualism is negatively correlated with moral values of efficiency. This suggests that in U.S. society, where cultural looseness prevails, there may be a greater emphasis on productive effort. Meanwhile, the change of individualism could be associated with the devaluation of efficiency. On the other hand, in China, collectivism upholds the moral importance of effort, even when its outcomes appear insignificant. This is evident from the positive and bidirectional relationship between collectivism and the moralization of inefficient effort. However, cultural looseness is negatively associated with and precedes positive moral value of inefficient effort, independent of the society’s economic performance. This might reflect Confucian values that emphasize individuals’ obligations to the group and social ideal, valuing effort to fulfill these obligations, regardless of its outcomes, is challenged by the shifting dynamics brought about by cultural looseness.

Furthermore, the results combining ARIMA models and Granger tests highlight distinct cultural dynamics in the U.S. and China. Cultural looseness is mainly positively associated with the moral values of effort in the U.S., while mainly positively correlated with moral values of efficiency in China, although no causal significance was detected in these relationships. Notably, both countries displayed a negative correlation between cultural looseness and the moral values of inefficient effort. Another distinct pattern emerged when examining collectivism. While in the US, collectivism showed a negative unidirectional influence on the moral value of efficiency, in China, collectivism had a positive driving impact on the moral values of effort and inefficient effort. This suggests different mechanisms may explain how cultural looseness and collectivism shape work ethics across the two cultures.

These findings not only underscore the intricate relationships between cultural dimensions and moral values but also highlight the divergent paths through which these associations manifest in different socio-cultural contexts. However, we acknowledge that our time series analyses are largely exploratory and descriptive. For the Granger tests, we noted that the analysis of mutual influence between cultural variables and moral attitudes without examining other complex external variables (such as politics, economics) is limited in revealing the mechanisms that underlie those changes in these variables. Future research is needed to more closely address the mechanisms underlying the relationship between societal and cultural variables and moral attitudes towards effort and efficiency.

One may notice that in some of the ARIMA models, individualism and collectivism have the same direction of an effect. While it is true that individualism and collectivism sometimes exhibit similar trends in the ARIMA analyses, there are no significant same-direction effects for any given analysis. It is not unexpected that these two cultural values sometimes may have similar effects on moral attitudes towards effort and efficiency. Our dictionaries of effort concept and efficiency concept do not specify the beneficiary of the effort or efficiency. In that sense, our analysis was agnostic of goals of effort or efficiency. For example, an effortful and/or efficient endeavor could be exerted to obtain collectivist goals (e.g., as a slogan during the “Great Leap Forward” movement in China goes, “Work hard, strive for the upper reaches, and build socialism as quickly, efficiently, and economically as possible”) or individualist goals (e.g., as exemplified by meritocracy narratives, “The American Dream I believe in is one that provides anyone willing to work hard enough with the opportunity to succeed” - U.S. Senator Tammy Duckworth). In sum, it is conceivable that individualism and collectivism values correlate with moral attitudes towards effort/efficiency in the same direction.

There are several limitations in the present research. First, our text corpora are exclusively drawn from U.S. Congressional speeches and Chinese newspapers. Both sources are formal, politically oriented narratives and texts. While these texts offer rich insights into their respective societies and times, future investigations should also diversify the source materials to include non-political content such as literature, local newspapers, magazines, and other popular media outlets, to capture a more comprehensive and representative understanding of work ethics. More broadly, before the widespread use of the internet and social media, a society’s written records (e.g., books, newspapers, magazines) were generally produced (and consumed) by political, economic, and/or cultural elites (Muthukrishna et al., 2021 ). Even the texts from more accessible online social media of our time do not reflect the entire society’s (offline) view faithfully (Robertson et al., 2024 ). This is a common challenge that most text-based historical psychology research faces and one should keep this in mind when conducting and interpreting such research.

Another limitation is the restricted time frame of our study. Although this period witnessed momentous societal shifts in both the U.S. and China, a deeper historical dive would no doubt unravel even richer evolutionary patterns. In the West, epochs such as the Renaissance, Age of Exploration, Reformation—which heralded the rise of the PWE—and the Industrial Revolution, and Age of Enlightenment likely have enormous influences on the moral values of effort and efficiency. Likewise, China’s transition from millennia of imperial rule to the republic regime at the turn of the 20th century, the New Culture Movement, World War II, and the Chinese Civil War, may have profoundly shaped the moral landscapes of effort and efficiency. Future research is needed to examine the evolution of moral attitudes towards effort and efficiency during these historical times.

Lastly, our moral evaluative words were based on the Moral Foundations Dictionary (MFD). This dictionary, while grounded in the Moral Foundations Theory (MFT) (Graham et al., 2013 ), only represents one of various computational linguistic measures of morality, such as the moral judgment dictionary from The Development and Psychometric Properties (Boyd et al., 2022 ; Brady et al., 2020 ) or other versions of the Moral Foundations Dictionary (Hopp et al., 2020 ). For example, the Extended Moral Foundations Dictionary (eMFD) was based on a more comprehensive, crowd-sourced annotation procedure instead of expert-driven content analysis (Hopp et al., 2020 , 2021 ; Weber et al., 2021 , p. 201). The present study does not aim to advocate one theoretical framework or tool over another but utilizes the MFD for its established efficacy in analyzing both English and Chinese texts. It is also worth noting that the field of computational linguistics has been burgeoning, with novel tools being developed for moral content analysis in textual data (Hoover et al., 2018 ; Vaisey and Miles, 2014 ). Future studies that integrate and compare these advanced tools will be able to bring about a richer, more nuanced exploration of morality from textual data.

Our language-based historical psychology approach to understanding moral attitudes towards effort and efficiency adds a cross-cultural and historical dimension to recent work on the perception and evaluation of work and effort (Graeber, 2018 ; Steger et al., 2013 ; Ward, 2024 ). Inefficient effort is work done for the sake of it being done instead of some useful products or outcomes, and therefore is an essential part of meaningless work. Our research provides insights that the moral outlooks of meaningful or meaningless work varies across cultures and times. Critically, in our own time, we are witnessing perhaps one of the most important revolutions in human history: with the rapid growth of artificial intelligence in various domains of work and life, the necessity and meaning of human work in its traditional sense is inevitably facing fundamental challenges. What are the unique roles of human effort and agency in future work? How will people’s moral attitudes towards effort and efficiency change when more human efforts can be replaced and improved by AI-powered automation? Future research is needed to ascertain these theoretically and practically important questions.

In sum, we investigated the evolving patterns of moral attitudes toward effort, efficiency, and inefficient effort in the recent history of China and the U.S., by combining an effective computational linguistic tool and historical text corpora. We found that the fluctuations of moral attitudes towards inefficient effort roughly corresponded to critical historical events or periods in both societies that mark significant social changes in world view and ideology. Further investigation through time series analysis suggests associations and possible influences of social and cultural factors, such as collectivism/individualism and cultural looseness, on the evolution of moral attitudes toward inefficient effort. Our study not only provides insights into the historical and sociocultural origins of the moralization of inefficient effort but also has implications for historical psychological investigations into the evolution of morality.

Data availability

Data and analysis code for reproducing the results reported in this paper can be accessed at https://osf.io/aghpk .

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Acknowledgements

This research is funded by UCSB ISBER Collaborative Research Initiative Grant (awarded to H.Y.). S.S. is supported by a China National Social Science Foundation grant (22BXW045). The authors would like to thank Ji Cao for curating the Chinese text corpus. We also thank Christina Kushnir and Annabel Dang for their evaluation of the words in the dictionaries, and Tianhao Qin for checking the analysis codes. Furthermore, we thank Yingyi Luo for constructive feedback on an earlier version of the manuscript.

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Chen, A.X., Sun, S. & Yu, H. Moral attitudes towards effort and efficiency: a comparison between American and Chinese history. Humanit Soc Sci Commun 11 , 1085 (2024). https://doi.org/10.1057/s41599-024-03603-3

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Cultural changes as seen in Chinese urban TV series

• Published: 27 August 2024

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• Tengfei He 1 ,
• Huijie Shi 2 ,
• Samantha Shang 3 &
• Li-Jun Ji   ORCID: orcid.org/0000-0002-6319-0580 3  

China has experienced substantial transformations since the Economic Reform in 1978, as echoed by cultural changes in many facets of life. Previous research has examined cultural changes in China by focusing on books and other cultural products, albeit with a limited scope across various life domains. In the current study, we aim to explore a more comprehensive range of realms encompassing diverse aspects of Chinese life. To achieve this, we utilize an informative yet underexamined cultural product: TV dramas. Successful TV dramas appeal to the audience’s preferences and needs and reflect cultural characteristics of the time. We collected information on top-rated Chinese urban TV dramas between 1980 and 2019 and coded them into 17 common themes reflecting various aspects of life. We then examined the trajectory of each theme over time from 1980 to 2019. Overall, the following themes became more prevalent in TV dramas over time: affair, divorce, family, romantic love, wedding, the pursuit of wealth, dinner party, house rental, house purchase, shopping, and death. The early 1990s mark a pivotal period. Specifically, the depiction of career pursuit in TV dramas switched from decreasing to increasing in the early 1990s. Around the same period, the depiction of survival stopped increasing and started to go down. Consistent with past literature, we found rising trends for themes indicating both traditional (e.g., family) and modern values (e.g., divorce), suggesting the coexistence of modernity and traditionality in China.

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Cross-Cultural Research: Methods, Challenges, & Key Findings

Understanding cultural differences isn’t just a nice-to-have; it’s essential. As a business leader navigating global markets, as an educator working with diverse students, or simply curious about how culture shapes our lives, cross-cultural research offers invaluable insights. 

This field of study digs deep into how people from different cultures think, behave, and interact, revealing patterns that can transform how we approach everything from communication to problem-solving.

But how do researchers tackle the complexities of studying such diverse groups? What challenges do they face, and what fascinating discoveries have they made along the way? In this blog, we’ll explore cross-cultural research methods, challenges, and key findings, giving you a front-row seat to this fascinating and ever-relevant field.

What is Cross-Cultural Research?

Cross-cultural research explores and compares different cultures to understand how cultural factors shape people’s behaviors, thoughts, and social practices.

Formerly behavior science research, cross-cultural research now extends beyond individual behaviors to explore how cultural contexts influence diverse social practices and interactions globally.

It involves studying and analyzing various cultures to uncover how cultural differences and similarities influence human behavior and social dynamics. It helps us see beyond our cultural perspective and gain insights into how people in different parts of the world live and interpret life.

An example is when we want to understand how different cultures celebrate the New Year. A cross-cultural study would involve studying various New Year traditions worldwide, such as fireworks in the U.S., the Lunar New Year celebrations in China, and the unique customs in Brazil. By comparing these practices, we can learn what different cultures value and how they express their hopes and dreams for the coming year.

Why Cross-Cultural Research Important for Your Business

Cross-cultural study is essential for businesses operating in a global marketplace because it provides critical insights into how cultural differences impact various aspects of business. Here’s why it’s important:

1. Helps to Understand Consumer Preferences

Cross-cultural research helps businesses adapt to meet consumers’ specific needs and preferences in different cultures.

• Marketing strategies

It also improves the chances of successful market entry by aligning offerings with local tastes and expectations.

2. Offer Effective Communication and Marketing

This research ensures that marketing messages, advertisements, and brand perception are culturally appropriate and resonate with local audiences, avoiding potential misunderstandings or offenses. It allows businesses to create marketing campaigns that appeal to diverse cultural groups, increasing customer engagement and effectiveness.

3. Improve Customer Experience

Cross-cultural research provides insights into cultural expectations for customer service , helping businesses create their support approaches to different cultural norms. It Increases customer satisfaction by addressing cultural nuances in service delivery and interactions.

4. Helps to Navigate International Business Practices

Cross-cultural research aids in understanding different negotiation styles and business practices across cultures, which is crucial for successful international deals and partnerships. This research helps businesses navigate local regulations and business practices that vary from one culture to another.

5. Build Stronger Global Teams

Promotes better teamwork and collaboration among employees from diverse cultural backgrounds by creating mutual understanding and respect. It also enhances leadership and management practices to effectively lead teams in different cultural contexts.

8. Facilitate Global Expansion

Cross-cultural research assists in developing strategies for entering and establishing a presence in new international markets by understanding local cultural dynamics. It helps to 

• Improves the ability to build successful partnerships
• Alliances with local businesses and stakeholders.

Methods of Cross-Cultural Research

By employing a cross-cultural method, scholars and businesses can gain valuable insights into how culture shapes experiences and interactions. Here, we will explore the key methods used in cross-cultural study and their applications.

1. Surveys and Questionnaires

Surveys and questionnaires are widely used in cross-cultural research to collect quantitative data from many participants across different cultures. These tools help researchers gather information on attitudes, beliefs, and behaviors.

How It Works:

• Design: Develop culturally relevant questions and ensure they are translated accurately to avoid misunderstandings.
• Distribution: Administer the survey across multiple cultural groups.
• Analysis: Compare responses to identify cultural differences and similarities.

Example: A survey examining attitudes towards work-life balance across different countries can reveal how cultural values influence workplace expectations and employee satisfaction.

2. Interviews

Interviews provide in-depth qualitative data and allow researchers to explore individuals’ experiences and perspectives in detail. They are particularly useful for understanding complex cultural phenomena.

• Format: Conduct structured, semi-structured, or unstructured interviews depending on the research goals.
• Cultural Sensitivity: Be aware of cultural norms related to communication and interaction.
• Analysis: Analyze interview transcripts to identify themes and cultural patterns.

Example: Interviews with business professionals from different countries can uncover how cultural values influence negotiation styles and decision-making processes.

3. Observational Studies

Observational studies involve watching and recording behaviors in natural settings without interfering. This method provides insights into real-world cultural practices and social interactions.

• Setting: Choose a naturalistic or controlled setting where cultural behaviors can be observed.
• Data Collection: Record behaviors and interactions while taking note of cultural context.
• Analysis: Analyze observations to understand cultural norms and practices.

Example: Observing social gatherings in various cultures can help researchers understand cultural norms around hospitality, etiquette, and group dynamics.

5. Experiments

Experiments in cross-cultural research test hypotheses about how cultural factors affect behavior by manipulating a dependent variable and observing outcomes.

• Design: Create experiments that are culturally relevant and ensure that experimental conditions are equivalent across cultures.
• Implementation: Conduct the experiment in different cultural settings.
• Analysis: Compare results to determine how cultural factors influence the outcomes.

Example: An experiment testing the impact of different advertising messages on consumer behavior across cultures can reveal how cultural values affect marketing effectiveness.

6. Case Studies

Case studies involve in-depth analysis of a single or a few cultural cases to explore specific phenomena or issues in detail.

• Selection: Choose cases that represent significant cultural practices or social issues.
• Data Collection: Use multiple methods such as interviews, observations, and document analysis.
• Analysis: Provide a detailed account of the case, highlighting cultural influences.

Example: A case study of a successful international joint venture can provide insights into how cultural compatibility and differences affect business partnerships.

Applications of Cross-Cultural Research

Understanding how cultural differences and similarities influence human behavior can lead to more effective strategies, policies, and practices. Here’s a look at some key applications of cross-cultural research:

1. Global Business Strategy

Cross-cultural research helps businesses to:

• Create their products 
• Improve their services 
• Set their marketing strategies 

It also helps to align with local cultural preferences and market conditions. It provides insights into how cultural factors influence purchasing decisions, enabling companies to design more effective products and marketing campaigns. Additionally, it improves understanding of negotiation styles and business practices across different cultures.

2. Marketing and Advertising

In marketing and advertising, cross-cultural research guides the creation of messages and campaigns that are sensitive to and respectful of cultural norms. This approach helps businesses position their brands in a way that appeals to diverse cultural groups, enhancing brand acceptance and customer loyalty.

3. Human Resources and Management

In human resources, understanding cultural differences in communication styles, work ethics, and leadership preferences helps in managing a multicultural workforce more effectively. It also informs the design of cross-cultural training programs, which are crucial for employees working in diverse teams and international settings.

4. Product Development and Design

Designing products for a global market involves more than just functionality; it requires an understanding of cultural differences such as. 

• How can cross-cultural research help identify local preferences and needs for product design?
• What cultural factors should be considered to ensure a product is intuitive for users from different backgrounds?
• How can understanding cultural differences enhance user satisfaction and product acceptance?

Cross-cultural research helps ensure that products are build to various cultural contexts, making them more intuitive and user-friendly for people around the world. By addressing these cultural factors, designers can create products that resonate with a diverse audience and enhance overall satisfaction.

5. Healthcare and Public Health

In healthcare and public health, cross-cultural research informs the development of practices and policies that respect diverse cultural beliefs and practices. It also guides the creation of effective health education and promotion campaigns build to different cultural contexts.

6. Education

In education, cross-cultural research supports the development of inclusive curricula that reflect diverse cultural perspectives and address the needs of students from various backgrounds. It also enhances teaching methods by incorporating culturally relevant materials and approaches, improving educational outcomes for students from different cultures.

7. Policy Making

Cross-cultural research assists in crafting policies that consider cultural diversity and address the needs of different cultural groups. This leads to more equitable and effective governance. Additionally, it enhances diplomatic efforts by creating mutual understanding and respect between nations through awareness of cultural differences and commonalities.

8. Research and Academic

In academic research, cross-cultural studies provide a foundation for: 

• Comparing cultural phenomena across societies.
• Contributing to a broader understanding of human behavior and social practices. 

It also informs the development of theories that account for cultural diversity, enriching academic knowledge and research across various fields.

Challenges of Cross-Cultural Research

Conducting cross-cultural study comes with a set of complex challenges that can affect the accuracy and validity of findings. Understanding these challenges is essential for researchers aiming to produce reliable and respectful research outcomes. Here’s a closer look at the key challenges and how to navigate them.

1. Cultural Bias and Ethnocentrism

Researchers might unintentionally view other cultures through the lens of their own culture, which can skew the results. For example, they might assume their own way of doing things is the best or only way.

Researchers should be aware of their own biases and try to understand the culture they’re studying from the inside out. Working with local experts can help provide a more accurate perspective.

2. Language and Translation Issues

Translating research materials like surveys and interviews can be tricky. Words and meanings might get lost or changed during translation.

Use professional translators who understand both the language and cultural context. Checking translations with back-translation (translating back to the original language) and testing them before use can help ensure they’re accurate.

3. Methodological Differences

Different cultures might have different ways of doing research or different norms. What works well in one culture might not be suitable in another. 

Adapt research methods to fit the cultural context while keeping scientific standards. Combining different methods, like surveys and interviews, can provide a fuller picture.

4. Data Interpretation and Analysis

Understanding data from different cultures can be challenging. Without cultural knowledge, it’s easy to misinterpret findings. 

Combine quantitative data (numbers) with qualitative insights (detailed information) for a better understanding. Collaborate with local experts to ensure accurate interpretation.

How QuestionPro Helps in Cross-Cultural Research?

Cross-cultural research helps us understand how people from different cultures think and behave. Doing this well can be tricky, but QuestionPro offers tools that make the process easier and more effective. Here’s how QuestionPro helps researchers tackle the challenges of studying diverse cultures:

1. Multi-Language Surveys

One of the critical aspects of cross-cultural study is the ability to reach participants in their native languages. QuestionPro supports surveys in multiple languages, allowing researchers to create and distribute surveys that cater to diverse linguistic groups. This feature ensures that participants fully understand the questions, leading to more accurate and reliable data.

2. Cultural Adaptation

QuestionPro allows for the cultural adaptation of surveys. This involves more than just translating the text; it includes adjusting the content to ensure that it is culturally relevant and appropriate. QuestionPro’s platform supports the customization of survey content to match cultural contexts, enhancing the validity of the research.

3. Global Reach with Online Panels

QuestionPro provides access to a vast network of online panels, enabling researchers to target specific cultural groups across the globe. This feature is particularly valuable for comparative studies that require large and diverse sample sizes. Researchers can filter participants based on demographic criteria such as: 

• Location and more

4. Data Segmentation and Analysis

Once data is collected, QuestionPro offers advanced data segmentation and analysis tools that allow researchers to compare responses across different cultural groups. These tools make it easy to identify patterns, trends, and significant differences between cultures. The platform supports: 

• Cross-tabulation
• Advanced statistical analysis

It helps researchers draw meaningful insights from their data.

5. Cultural Sensitivity in Survey Design

QuestionPro provides guidelines and best practices for designing surveys that are culturally sensitive. This includes advice on question-wording, avoiding cultural biases, and using neutral language. The platform’s templates and question libraries can also be created to fit the cultural context of the comparative study, ensuring that the research is respectful and considerate of cultural differences.

6. Real-Time Collaboration

Cross-cultural research often involves collaboration between researchers from other countries or regions. QuestionPro’s platform supports real-time collaboration, allowing teams to work together on: 

• Survey design
• Data collection 

This feature creates international cooperation and ensures that all team members are on the same page throughout the research process.

7. Mobile-Optimized Surveys

In many cultures, especially in developing regions, mobile devices are the primary means of accessing the internet. QuestionPro’s mobile-optimized surveys ensure that participants can easily respond to surveys using their smartphones or tablets, increasing response rates and making it easier to reach diverse cultural groups.

Cross-cultural research is a powerful tool for understanding the diversity of human behavior and the ways in which culture shapes our lives. By using a variety of methods and being mindful of the challenges involved, researchers can uncover valuable insights that contribute to a more inclusive and culturally aware world. As our world becomes increasingly interconnected, the importance of cross-cultural study will only continue to grow.

QuestionPro is an invaluable tool for cross-cultural research, offering features that address the unique challenges of studying diverse cultures. QuestionPro equips researchers with the tools they need to conduct rigorous and culturally sensitive cross-cultural studies. Researchers can gain deeper insights into cultural differences and contribute to a better understanding of global diversity. Contact with QuestionPro to learn more!

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• Study Protocol
• Open access
• Published: 28 August 2024

ALLin4IPE- an international research study on interprofessional health professions education: a protocol for an ethnographic multiple-case study of practice architectures in sites of students’ interprofessional clinical placements across four universities

• Annika Lindh Falk 1 ,
• Madeleine Abrandt Dahlgren 1 ,
• Johanna Dahlberg 1 ,
• Bente Norbye 2 ,
• Anita Iversen 2 ,
• Kylie J. Mansfield 3 ,
• Eileen McKinlay 4 ,
• Sonya Morgan 4 ,
• Julia Myers 4 &
• Linda Gulliver 4  

BMC Medical Education volume  24 , Article number:  940 ( 2024 ) Cite this article

Metrics details

The global discourse on future health care emphasises that learning to collaborate across professions is crucial to assure patient safety and meet the changing demands of health care. The research on interprofessional education (IPE) is diverse but with gaps in curricula design and how IPE is enacted in practice.

Purpose and aims

This research project will identify. 1) how IPE in clinical placements emerges, evolves, and is enacted by students when embedded in local health care practices, 2) factors critical for the design of IPE for students at clinical placements across the four countries.

A study involving four countries (Sweden, Norway, Australia and New Zealand) using the theory of practice architectures will be undertaken between 2023 and 2027. The project is designed as an international, collaborative multiple-case ethnographic study, using the theoretical framework of practice architectures (TPA). It will include four ethnographic case studies of IPE, one in each country. Data will be collected in the following sequence: (1) participant observation of students during interprofessional placements, (2) interviews with students at clinical placement and stakeholders/professionals, (3) Non-clinical documents may be used to support the analysis, and collection of photos may be use as memory aids for documenting context. An analysis of “sayings, doings and relatings” will address features of the cultural- discursive, material-economic, social-political elements making up the three key dimensions of TPA. Each of the four international cases will be analysed separately. A cross case analysis will be undertaken to establish common learning and critical IPE design elements across the four collaborating universities.

The use of TPA framework and methodology in the analysis of data will make it possible to identify comparable dimensions across the four research sites, enabling core questions to be addressed critical for the design of IPE. The ethnographic field studies will generate detailed descriptions that take account of country-specific cultural and practice contexts. The study will also generate new knowledge as to how IPE can be collaboratively researched.

Peer Review reports

The global discourse on future health care emphasizes interprofessional collaborative capability as being crucial to meet changing demands on health care systems. These demands are the result of aging populations, increasing inequities in health care outcomes, the increasing number of those with complex health conditions and shortage of health care personnel [ 1 , 2 ]. The World Health Organisation (WHO) [ 2 ] states interprofessional education (IPE) “occurs when students from two or more professions learn about , from and with each other to enable effective collaboration and improve health outcomes” (p. 10), signalling that IPE involves interaction between students in learning activities. When the students understand the value of collaborative practice, they are better prepared to become a member of the collaborative practice team and provide better health services. The rationale for IPE, according to WHO [ 2 ] is that health professions should strive to design IPE activities to develop and optimize students’ collaborative competences to prepare them for the above challenges in their future working life [ 2 ], something that is also emphasized in the Winterthur/Doha declaration of Interprofessional. Global 2023 [ 3 ].

Efforts to explore IPE from the international research community are rapidly growing [ 4 ]. Meta-analyses and scoping reviews of IPE initiatives indicate a diverse picture of IPE programmes [ 5 , 6 , 7 ]. Vuurberg et al. [ 8 ], in their review of research studies on IPE between 1970 and 2017, point to a paucity of research regarding the influence of collaborative work on the development of professional interpersonal skills. In recent years it has been argued that there is a potential to offer IPE in clinical placements thus providing authentic learning opportunities for students in the context of complex health care practices [ 9 ]. Interprofessional learning during clinical placements is a step forward to develop and strengthen students’ interprofessional competencies, professional identity, and confidence [ 10 , 11 ].

Several reviews regarding students’ perceptions about IPE in clinical placements mostly report positive experiences, e.g., increased communication skills and increased knowledge of each other’s roles [ 12 , 13 , 14 ]. Results also indicate increased abilities with regard to working within a team and improved communication [e.g., 15 – 16 ]. Longer periods of IPE activities seem to strengthen students’ professional identity formation and overcome traditional hierarchical prejudices that can exist in interprofessional teams [e.g., 17 – 18 ]. On the other hand, it has also been suggested [ 19 ] that the lack of attention to power and conflict in the IPE literature might indicate a neglect of the impact of organizational, structural and institutional issues; and thereby might veil the very problems that IPE attempts to solve.

Published examples of IPE activities in clinical placements have covered a wide range of types of activities as well as numbers of hours and days. Initiatives have been developed that extend over a few hours or a day. Students taking responsibility for a team round in clinical placement [ 20 ] or structured interprofessional workshops about falls prevention [ 21 ], are both examples of formal activities arranged during clinical placement periods. A workplace-driven, informal, arrangement where students on uni-professional clinical placement were engaged in interprofessional teamwork for one day [ 22 ] is another example. Interprofessional activities where students practice together for a longer period have been developed and implemented during the past 25 years. Interprofessional training wards where students work together, often for a period of around two weeks, with the overall responsibility for patients’ care, have been a successful activity developed worldwide [ 23 , 24 , 25 ]. The heterogeneity of activities, educational approaches, and outcome measures, makes it difficult to compare between programmes, both at national and international levels [ 26 , 27 , 28 , 29 , 30 ]. To overcome this, the importance of international collaborative efforts to research interprofessional education practices has been emphasized [ 31 ] but to date, such collaborations are scarce. In particular, there is a need for theory-based research and observational methods to discover and understand the basis of interprofessional actions and interactions [ 7 , 32 ]. Moreover, multiple site studies are needed to inform IPE educational design, since the heterogeneity of learning activities and practices varies with the different health care systems. Visser, et al. [ 33 ] in their systematic review, described barriers and enablers of IPE at an individual level but also at a process/curricular and cultural/organizational level of the educational programmes, while Pullon et al. [ 34 ] discussed the importance of paying attention to both individual and contextual factors for sustainable collaborative practice. This indicates a need for research approaches that allow broader perspectives considering not only the experiences of the individual, but also those of the local contexts where IPE is occurring. Recent theories on research on professional learning emphasize the importance of considering the complexity and dynamics of the practices and contexts, i.e., the social and material conditions under which the learning takes place [ 35 , 36 , 37 ]. A scoping review highlighted the use of socio-material approaches as a theoretical lens to understand professional learning practices in IPE and interprofessional collaboration (IPC) [ 38 ]. Using a socio-material perspective makes it possible to gain a deeper understanding of how IPE practices emerge within a clinical setting, and furthermore, to develop an understanding of complex situations such as power relationships, human resource shortages in health care, patient safety and more.

In this study, the focus is on identifying how interprofessional collaboration and learning emerge when embedded in clinical practice placements designed for such purposes. The study is designed as an international, collaborative multiple-case ethnographic study. It will involve four sites of health care clinical practice situated locally in Sweden, Norway, Australia, and New Zealand. The multiple case study ethnographic research design [ 39 ] will be used in combination with Kemmis’ theory of practice architectures (TPA) [ 40 ]. This approach will make it possible to identify similarities and differences across the four countries and different sites of IPE.

Context of study

Each country has endorsed the WHO’s global call for Interprofessional Education and Collaborative Practice (IPECP) in different ways, which has been influenced by their national and local health care organization [ 2 ]. The local experience of teaching IPE, how the learning experience is designed, and for how long the students have an IPE clinical placement, varies between the four universities. Linköping University (Sweden) has long-standing experience of an IPE-curriculum including all health education programmes. UiT The Arctic University of Norway has a long history of IPE and builds on selected interprofessional learning activities including 13 health – and social programmes at the most. The University of Otago (New Zealand) has centrally organized IPE with a staged implementation strategy for all health and social services students to undertake IPE learning activities, while the University of Wollongong (Australia) is at an early phase of developing and implementing IPE across a variety of health and social programmes. The different contexts and establishment of IPE at the four sites make up a natural variation suitable for multiple case study research [ 39 ]. A summary of key contextual issues provides a background to each country (Table  1 ).

Theoretical framework – theory of practice architecture (TPA)

We will use a theoretical framework based on Kemmis’ TPA [ 36 , 40 ] (see Fig.  1 ). The TPA is increasingly being used to understand professional practice and the potential to learn in new ways. [ 36 , 37 , 40 ]. The theoretical framework uses the three recognized practice architecture dimensions of cultural-discursive, material-economic and social-political, along with their associated elements. The cultural-discursive dimension includes the interactions, discourses, and words (‘sayings’) which make the professional practice understandable; this reveals what to say and think in or about a practice, and what it means. The material-economic dimension enables and constrains how people can act and interact in physical and material space (‘doings’); this reveals the different types of activities and work performed by the professionals within a physical environment and the way these ‘doings’ influence others in the same practice. The social-political dimension describes the relationships that form between individuals and groups (‘relatings’); this reveals how relationships between certain arrangements of professionals develop, their roles, and whether and how relations continue to exist or not [ 44 ]. The emphasis is therefore on the relationships between material arrangements and human actions and what these produce [ 37 ], and that these relationships are more, or less likely to happen, in certain circumstances [ 45 ].

Kemmis´ theory of practice architectures (TPA) [ 40 ] p.97. (with permission from the author)

According to TPA, IPE in clinical placements can be viewed as an organized set of actions and interactions embedded in a professional practice. This means that both human and non-human factors are considered. The focus of the study is the students’ sayings, doings and relatings with fellow students, patients, supervisors, and staff, in the complex dynamic and relational dimensions of practice, i.e. the social and material conditions under which the clinical placement or learning activity is arranged.

The aims of this research project are to identify:

how IPE in clinical placements emerges, evolves, and is enacted by students when embedded in local health care practices,

factors critical for the design of IPE for students at clinical placements across the four countries.

Four research questions (RQ) will be explored:

How do interprofessional clinical placements enable students collaborative learning activities? RQ2. How do students’ sayings, doings and relatings in practice shape interprofessional collaboration and learning?

What challenges do interprofessional clinical practice placements bring to established health care practices?

What lessons from the case studies can inform the global discourse on interprofessional educational practice?

Case study site selection

Each case study site has been purposively selected within each country and across the four countries (see Table  2 ). Purposive selection has been used to ensure maximal variation [ 46 ].

Data collection

Methodology.

Four case studies will be undertaken, one each by the local research groups based in Sweden, Norway, Australia, and New Zealand and using a common ethnographic methodology.

An ethnographic approach focuses on understanding the social processes and cultures of different contexts [ 47 ], and usually comprises a range of qualitative methods. It is recognized as a suitable research method for acquiring knowledge about how practices are arranged and interrelated within naturally occurring physical and social environments, and about the contexts in which activities and knowledge-sharing can take place [ 45 , 48 ].

The initial site visits by each respective country’s local research team will take place in late 2023 and early 2024. At each case site the researcher(s), all connected to health profession education, will use the case study observational research (CSOR) method where non-participant observation guides data collection. In the CSOR method, the direct observations of participants’ behaviours and interactions are given priority and precedence over self-reported forms of data collection, and collection of non-observational data is informed by the analysis of the observational data to enable further investigation of observations [ 49 , 50 ].

Direct observation allows the researcher to see what is occurring rather than having participants describe what they do through interviews. Observations of students will follow the naturally occurring rhythm of interprofessional activities during the day. Examples of such activities are the students planning together their daily work, encounters with patients, deliberations following their work on what seems to be proper treatment and advice for the patient in question, students interactions with staff and supervisors, and their daily reflections on how they have been working together and what they have learned. Each case site is different, and the IPE learning activities is of different length and with different learning outcomes. In each case site, researchers will act as observers of interprofessional students in action and write detailed fieldnotes or record audio memos on the interactions and their context. Field notes will also incorporate the researcher’s reflections “including feelings, actions and responses to the situation” [ 39 ]. Brief informal conversations with students may be conducted during or immediately after the observations if clarity is needed about what has been observed, and these will be recorded in the field notes [ 47 ]. Non-clinical documents may be used to support the analysis, and photographs may be collected for documenting context and to aid recall. These comprehensive observations will facilitate the systematic collection of data while still acknowledging the influence and interpretations of the researcher in the data collection process. The CSOR method will make it possible to gain access to observed actions, interactions and discussions that take place between students (sayings, doings and relatings), and between students and patients, staff, and others.

In each case, the observational data and field notes (and if needed non-clinical documentation and/or photographs for context) will be immediately circulated to the local research team and reflexive feedback provided for inclusion in the analysis. Following this rapid analysis of observational data and guided by what further data is needed or needing to be corroborated, formal interviews will be booked as soon as possible with students, patients, clinical tutors, IPE teachers and others, Formal interviews (audio recorded) will be guided by a template of core questions developed by the research project team. This common template will be augmented by other questions informed by each initial case analysis. Data will be transcribed either selectively or fully; English language translation will occur where data are being analysed for comparative analysis.

Theoretical approach

Data analysis will use TPA [ 40 ] including an analysis “tool kit” [ 51 ]. The tool kit is a theory and method package to investigate practices by the systematic interpretation of the case study data. A “zooming in – zooming out” methodological approach [ 51 ], will make visible details in a specific local practice; “zooming in” allows getting close to the practices being observed (to answer RQ1 and RQ2) and then “zooming out” allows the researcher to expand their scope and look for connections between different practices (RQ3 and RQ4). The connections between practices in the research study will be identified through focusing on the three dimensions of practice architectures: the cultural-discursive, material-economic, and social-political. The agreed tool kit approach will include a layered, purposeful constant comparative analysis [ 52 ], comprising three phases of individual and collaborative activities, using English as the common language. First the systematic collection and analysis of observations and field notes of those observations and other qualitative data by each local research team, will be guided by the theoretical perspective on how students interact in relation to social and material arrangements. Second, the data in each of the four case study sites will be analysed by each local research team and verified locally and collectively; this will lead to site-specific findings. Third, comparisons will be made between the four different sites by cross-checking and developing and refining the interpretations of all the data.

Practical approach

Each country will follow the data collection and analysis process outlined in the methods for their case site and each case site will be analysed separately. Each local research team will have regular meetings to ensure that a reflexive, but uniform approach is undertaken as data is collected. These meetings will also include workshops for collaborative data analysis. Monthly meetings will also be held between the four countries’ project research teams as case data collection and analysis progresses and a similar reflexive process used. This will ensure the analyses of each case follows the same process and will provide assurance of mutual understanding across sites. To enable this, anonymized observational data (and fieldnotes), interview data and photographic or document extracts will be shared, analysed and reviewed in workshops. Following completion of each case study in the four different countries, a cross-case process [ 39 ] will be undertaken. Each local research teams will first have undertaken the primary analysis, combining data from fieldnotes and interview transcript generating preliminary themes to identify the sayings, doings and relatings are emerging and connected in the efforts of collaborate around the patient. As the findings are first collated, observed aspects from students’ sayings, doings and relatings, projects and dispositions will be revealed. As a second layer of analysis, the findings will analytically be connected to practice architectures, such as the cultural-discursive, the material-economic and the socio-political arrangements. The use of a common scheme for how to document the analysis is important for comparative reasons and indicate points for shared analyses across the research teams to consider the respective results, identify similarities and differences across the four sites, and explore any learning principles that might apply to IPE internationally. It is intended for each country to use the same processes to anonymize, catalogue and code the transcribed data. The research agreement also includes a process to enable sharing of selected portions of data and coding software databases using password-protected systems [ 53 ].

Ethical approval and consent

The research group in each country will be responsible for (1) seeking ethical approval for their respective case, (2) gaining consent from each local site to undertake the respective case study, (3) establishing rules for storage of the data. The following countries have received ethical approval to proceed: Sweden (Dnr 2023-02277-01), Norway (No.889163), New Zealand (No. H23/035), Australia (underway).

Establishing trustworthiness

The following processes and definitions proposed by Korstjens and Moser [ 54 ] based on Lincoln and Guba [ 55 ] will be used to ensure trustworthiness in the implementation of this study (Table  3 ).

A timeline for the research project has been established (Table  4 ).

This research project is innovative as it takes an international approach to a globally identified educational challenge regarding methods to design and implement IPE in clinical practice settings. The approach, using case studies in four different countries, will explicitly acknowledge that educational phenomena and learning are contextually bound and situated and that although each country involved is different, common learning can be gained.

It is hoped that the four case studies will lead to new understanding and conceptualization of how IPE can be arranged within and across diverse contexts, languages, and local conditions. Furthermore, the cases may establish some of the challenges interprofessional clinical placements for students may bring to existing or established health care practices.

It is recognized however that while each country’s case will lead to new understanding for that country, it may be challenging to establish cross country learning as the context of each may be very different. Although English language will be adopted for communication, there may be subtle differences in how language is used and understood between English and non-English speaking countries, as well as between English speaking countries.

Taking account of local context as well as developing joint findings will be a challenge. The TPA will give opportunities to identify and analyse how students´ interprofessional clinical activities are embedded in the complex practice of routine health care at a local level within each country, and between countries. The theory will make it possible to capture how the students act in practice and how they relate to each other in clinical placements. It is hoped it will also show how clinical and interprofessional practices are influenced through the three different dimensions (cultural-discursive, material-economic, and social-political) and if these may construct, enable, or constrain practice work and knowledge-sharing. Possible examples may include: (1) the influence of a discipline’s language or discourse; the way of speaking that forms the framework for understanding themselves and others, (2) the arrangement of a health care setting; the way the environment influences where students can meet and work together (e.g. patient care rooms, rooms used for ward rounds and corridors), and (3) the development of relationships; the way social norms and political influences impact on relationships between different disciplines and groups [ 40 , 45 ]. It is possible when the analysis progresses that the three dimensions referred to above may show nuanced differences between countries which previously have been difficult to articulate and account for.

Undertaking this international collaborative research is important for IPE research going forward. International collaborative research projects in IPE are rare but have been recommended for the consolidation and growth of the IPE research knowledge base [ 31 ].

The design of IPE in clinical placements should be informed by evidence and best practice. This includes using theoretical approaches which can be replicated or further developed, such as the TPA.

This research will advance a model of IPE based on TPA. It will provide new understanding and conceptualization of how IPE can be arranged across diverse contexts and local conditions, but with a common aim to provide collaborative practice-ready graduates able to respond to the increasing healthcare demands of the future.

Therefore, the broader impact of the proposed study is expected to contribute to: (1) the local and international educational IPE community regarding design of IPE in clinical practice, and (2) the international IPE research community regarding how IPE in practice can be collaboratively researched.

Data availability

Selected data will be reported in the Results section but will not be available as datasets.

Abbreviations

Case Study Observational Research

Interprofessional Education

Interprofessional Education and Collaborative Practice

Interprofessional Collaboration

Theory of Practice Architectures

World Health Organisation

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Acknowledgements

The research team gratefully acknowledge the contribution of the advisor: Nick Hopwood, Professor of Professional Learning, University of Technology, Sydney, Australia.

Open access funding provided by Linköping University. This study is funded by the Swedish Research Council: 2022–03210. The funder had no role in the study design, collection, analysis and interpretation of the data; writing of the protocol, or in the decision to submit the paper for publication.

Open access funding provided by Linköping University.

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ALF, MAD, JD, BN, AI, KM, EM & LG contributed to the conception and design of the overall study. ALF is the overall Principal investigator (PI) and PI of the Swedish case study; AI is the PI of the Norwegian case study, KM is the PI of the Australian case study, EM is the PI of the New Zealand case study. ALF, MAD & JD developed the analysis plan. JD drafted the initial protocol. ALF, MAD, JD, BN, AI, KM, EM, LG, SM & JM revised the protocol critically for important intellectual content and read and approved the final version of the manuscript to be published.

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Ethical approval.

Sweden: Approved by Swedish Ethical Review Authority. Dnr 2023-02277-01. Each participant will be asked to give signed consent to take part in the case study.

Norway: Approved by Norwegian Agency for Shared Services in Education and Research, reference number: 889163. Each participant will be asked to give signed consent to take part in the case study.

Australia: Ethical approval is underway.

New Zealand: Approved by the University of Otago Ethics Committee reference number H23/035. Each participant will be asked to give signed consent to take part in the case study.

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Lindh Falk, A., Abrandt Dahlgren, M., Dahlberg, J. et al. ALLin4IPE- an international research study on interprofessional health professions education: a protocol for an ethnographic multiple-case study of practice architectures in sites of students’ interprofessional clinical placements across four universities. BMC Med Educ 24 , 940 (2024). https://doi.org/10.1186/s12909-024-05902-4

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Parenting and child mental health: a cross-cultural perspective

In its most general instrumental sense, parenting consists of care of the young in preparing them to manage the tasks of life. Parents provide childhood experiences and populate the environments that guide children's development and so contribute to child mental health. Parenting is expressed in cognitions and practices. However, parents do not parent, and children do not grow up, in isolation, but in multiple contexts, and one notable context of parenting and child mental health is culture. Every culture is characterized, and distinguished from other cultures, by deep-rooted and widely acknowledged ideas about how one needs to feel, think, and act as an adequately functioning member of the culture. Insofar as parents subscribe to particular conventions of a culture, they likely follow prevailing “cultural scripts” in childrearing. Broadening our definition, it is therefore the continuing task of parents also to enculturate children by preparing them for the physical, psychosocial, and educational situations that are characteristic of their specific culture. Cross-cultural comparisons show that virtually all aspects of parenting children are informed by culture: culture influences when and how parents care for children, what parents expect of children, and which behaviors parents appreciate, emphasize and reward or discourage and punish. Thus, cultural norms become manifest in the mental health of children through parenting. Furthermore, variations in what is normative in different cultures challenge our assumptions about what is universal and inform our understanding of how parent-child relationships unfold in ways both culturally universal and specific. This essay concerns the contributions of culture to parenting and child mental health. No study of a single society can address this broad issue. It is possible, however, to learn lessons about parenting and child mental health from the study of different societies.

Parenting contributes in central ways to the course and outcome of child development ( 1 - 3 ). Parental caregiving plays influential parts in children's mental health because it regulates the majority of child-environment interactions and helps to shape children's adaptation. During early childhood, more than 100 billion neurons develop and connect to configure brain networks through interactions of genetics, environment, and experience ( 4 ). Parenting plays key parts in this process and so shapes mental and physical health, behavior and academic skills, and even labor market participation over the life course ( 5 , 6 ). But parenting itself is shaped and afforded meaning by culture ( 7 ).

Just as cultural variation clearly dictates the language children eventually speak, cultural variation exerts significant and differential influences over mental, emotional, and social development of children. Every culture is characterized, and distinguished from other cultures, by deep-rooted and widely acknowledged ideas about how one needs to feel, think, and act as a functioning member of the culture. These beliefs and behaviors shape how parents rear their offspring. Culture helps to construct parents and parenting, just as culture helps to define mental health. Culture is also maintained and transmitted by influencing parental cognitions that in turn shape parenting practices ( 7 , 8 ). Whether culturally universal or specific, controls are in place to ensure that each new generation acquires culturally appropriate and normative patterns of beliefs and behaviors.

In this article, I describe the intersection between parenting and culture, and its significance to child mental health.

PARENTING AND CULTURE

In its most general instrumental sense, parenting consists of care of the young in preparing them to manage the tasks of life. Parents provide childhood experiences and populate the environments that guide children's development. Biological parents contribute directly to the genetic makeup of their children, and biological and social parents alike directly construct children's experiences.

In the minds of most observers, mothers are unique, the role of mother universal, and motherhood unequivocally principal to child development ( 9 ), even if historically fathers' social and legal claims and responsibilities on children were pre-eminent ( 10 ). Cross-cultural surveys attest to the primacy of maternal caregiving ( 11 , 12 ). On average, mothers spend between 65 and 80 percent more time than fathers do in direct one-to-one interaction with young children ( 13 ). Fathers may withdraw from their children when they are unhappily married; mothers typically never do ( 14 ).

Fathers are neither inept nor uninterested in child caregiving, of course. Mothers and fathers tend to divide the labor of caregiving and engage children emphasizing different types of interactions, mothers providing direct care and fathers serving as playmates and supports ( 9 , 15 ). Research involving both traditional ( 16 ) and non-traditional (father primary caregiver) families ( 17 ) shows that parental gender exerts a greater influence than parental role or employment status. Western industrialized nations have witnessed increases in the amount of time fathers spend with their children; in reality, however, most fathers are still primarily helpers ( 18 ).

Notably, different cultures sometimes distribute the responsibilities of parenting in different ways. In most, mother is the principal caregiver; in others, multiple caregiving may be the norm. Thus, in some cultures children spend much or even most of their time with significant other caregivers, including siblings, non-parental relatives, or non-familial adults. Various modes of child caregiving, like nurturance, social interaction, and didactics, are distributed across diverse members of a group.

Parenting is expressed in cognitions and practices. Parents' beliefs – their ideas, knowledge, values, goals, and attitudes – hold a consistently popular place in the study of parenting and child mental health ( 19 - 21 ). Parental beliefs serve many functions; they generate and shape parental behaviors, mediate the effectiveness of parenting, and help to organize parenting ( 22 , 23 ). More salient in the phenomenology of the child are parents' practices – the actual experiences parents provide children. Most of young children's worldly experience stems directly from interactions they have within the family. Parenting cognitions and attainment of parenting goals are achieved through parenting practices.

Human beings do not grow up, and adults do not parent, in isolation, but in multiple contexts ( 24 ), and one notable context of parenting and child mental health is culture. Paradoxically, culture is notoriously difficult to define. Some have considered it a complex of variables ( 25 - 27 ), whereas for others culture constitutes learned meanings and shared information transmitted from one generation to the next, that is “… as set of control mechanisms – plans, recipes, rules, instructions … – for the governing of behavior” ( 28 ). Culture, therefore, consists of distinctive patterns of norms, ideas, values, conventions, behaviors, and symbolic representations about life that are commonly held by a collection of people, persist over time, guide and regulate daily living, and constitute valued competencies that are communicated to new members of the group.

Each society prescribes certain characteristics that its members are expected to possess or act on, and proscribes others they must not do, if they are to function adequately and normally as members of that society. Some prescriptions and proscriptions may be universal and cross cultures; an example might be the requirement for parents (or specified parent surrogates) to nurture and protect children ( 2 ). Other standards and values vary greatly from one culture to another; an example might be whether and how to discipline children ( 29 ).

Parental caregiving blends intuition and tuition. Parents sometimes act on their intuitions about caregiving. For example, almost everywhere parents speak to their infants even though they know that babies cannot yet understand language. However, parents also acquire understandings of what it is to parent effectively by living in a culture: generational, social, and media images of parenting, children, and family life play significant roles in helping people form their parenting cognitions and guide their parenting practices. Parents in different cultures receive many different kinds of guidance about how to rear children properly, whether in the form of books of advice, suggestions from family and friends, or direct training by example. Insofar as parents belong to a culture and subscribe to particular conventions of that culture, they likely follow prevailing “cultural scripts” in childrearing.

Variations in culture make for subtle as well as manifest, but always impressive and meaningful, differences in patterns of parenting and child mental health. Cross-cultural comparisons show that virtually all aspects of parenting children are informed by culture. For example, mothers in rural Thailand do not know that their newborns can see, and often during the day they swaddle infants on their backs in a fabric hammock that allows the baby only a narrow slit view of ceiling or sky ( 30 ). New mothers from Australia and Lebanon living in Australia expect very different timetables of child development, and their culture shapes mothers' expectations much more than other factors, such as experiences observing their own children or directly comparing their children to other children ( 31 ).

Culture pervasively influences when and how parents care for children, the extent to which parents permit children freedom to explore, how nurturant or restrictive parents are, which behaviors parents emphasize, and so forth. Japan and the United States maintain reasonably similar levels of modernity and living standards and both are highly child-centered societies, but the two differ in terms of childrearing ( 32 - 34 ). Japanese mothers expect early mastery of emotional maturity, self-control, and social courtesy in their children, whereas American mothers expect early mastery of verbal competence and self-actualization in theirs. American mothers promote autonomy and organize social interactions with their children so as to foster physical and verbal assertiveness and independence. By contrast, Japanese mothers organize social interactions with children so as to consolidate and strengthen closeness and dependency within the dyad, and they tend to indulge young children. These contrasting styles are evident in mother-infant interactions as early as 5 months ( 35 ).

Parents normally caregive faithful to indigenous cultural belief systems and prevailing cultural behavior patterns. Indeed, culturally constructed attitudes can be so powerful that parents are known to act on them, setting aside what their senses might tell them about their own children. For example, parents in Samoa think that all young children have an angry and willful character, and, independent of what children might actually say, parents consensually report that their children's first word is “tae” – Samoan for “shit” ( 36 ).

Importantly, culture-specific patterns of childrearing can be expected to adapt to each specific society's setting and needs. What parenting is and how it works reflect cultural context. Parenting is a principal reason why individuals in different cultures are who they are and often differ so from one another. Central to a concept of culture, therefore, is the expectation that different cultural groups possess distinct beliefs and behave in unique ways with respect to their parenting.

Parents in different cultures typically harbor different beliefs about their parenting as well as about children ( 19 , 37 ). In a study in seven cultures (Argentina, Belgium, France, Israel, Italy, Japan, and the United States), mothers evaluated their competence, satisfaction, investment, and role balance in parenting and attributed their successes and failures in parenting to ability, effort, mood, parenting task difficulty, or child behavior ( 38 ). Systematic country differences for both self-evaluations and attributions emerged that were interpretable in terms of cultural orientations. For example, Argentine mothers rated themselves relatively low in parental competence and satisfaction and blamed parenting failures on their lack of ability. Their insecurity about mothering appeared to be consistent with the relative lack of social supports, particularly help and advice about childrearing available to them. By contrast, Belgian mothers rated themselves as highly satisfied with their caregiving, which might be expected in light of Belgium's strong childcare supports provided to parents (e.g., periodicals, consultancies, home visits, health care information workshops, and parenting demonstration classes).

Culture-based expectations about developmental norms and milestones (when a child is expected to achieve a particular developmental skill, for example) in turn affect parents' appraisals of their child's development. Hopkins and Westra ( 39 , 40 ) surveyed English, Jamaican, and Indian mothers living in the same city and found that Jamaican mothers expected their children to sit and to walk earlier, whereas Indian mothers expected their children to crawl later. In each case, children's actual attainment of developmental milestones accorded with their mothers' expectations.

Parents' beliefs have power. Parents in most societies speak to babies and rightly see them as comprehending interactive partners long before infants produce language, but parents in some societies think that it is nonsensical to talk to infants before children themselves are capable of speech and so do not speak to them ( 36 ). Parents in some societies think of young children as interactive partners and play with them, whereas parents in other societies think that such behavior is pointless ( 41 ). Indeed, cultural differences in some parenting beliefs appear to persist even among people born and reared in one culture who then relocate to another culture with different childrearing norms. Pachter and Dworkin ( 42 ) asked mothers from minority (Puerto Rican, African American, West Indian/Caribbean) and majority (US European American) cultural groups about normal ages of attainment of typical developmental milestones during the first 3 years of life: differences emerged among ethnic groups for more than one-third of developmental milestones assessed. Cognitions of the majority group are therefore not always readily adopted, and culturally significant parenting beliefs and norms often also resist change ( 43 ). In the United States, Japanese immigrant mothers' cognitions tend to be similar to those of Japanese mothers or intermediate between Japanese and US mothers; however, South American immigrant mothers' parenting cognitions more closely resemble those of US European American than South American mothers ( 44 ). Different immigrant groups adopt and retain specific cognitions and practices differently ( 45 ).

Although much theoretical and empirical emphasis is now placed on cross-cultural differences, many developmental milestones, parenting strategies, and family processes are likely to be similar across cultures. Evolutionary thinking appeals to the species-common genome, and the shared biological heritage of some psychological processes presupposes their universality ( 46 ) as do shared historical and economic forces ( 47 ). Thus, some demands on parents are common. For example, parents in all societies must nurture and protect their young ( 2 ), and at the end of the day all parents must help children meet similar developmental tasks, and all parents (presumably) wish physical health, social adjustment, educational achievement, and economic security for their children, however these successes may be instantiated in a particular culture.

Furthermore, the mechanisms through which parents likely influence children are universal. For example, social learning theorists have identified the pervasive roles that conditioning and modeling play as children acquire associations that subsequently form the basis for their culturally constructed selves. By watching or listening to others who are already embedded in the culture, children come to think and act like them. Attachment theorists propose that children everywhere develop internal working models of social relationships through interactions with their primary caregivers and that these models shape children's future social relationships with others ( 48 ). Moreover, social and economic development and information globalization present parents today in different cultural groups with many (increasingly) similar socialization issues and challenges (e.g., Internet safety).

Whether culturally common parenting patterns reflect factors indigenous to children and their biology, biological bases of caregiving, the historical convergence of parenting styles, shared economic or ecological factors, or the increasing prevalence of migration or dissemination via mass media is difficult, if not impossible, to determine. Modernity has witnessed a worldwide pattern of change toward urbanization, media homogeneity, and Westernization that cumulatively contributes to dissolution of traditional cultural patterns. In the end, different peoples (presumably) wish to promote similar general competencies in their young and some do so in qualitatively and quantitatively similar ways.

When different parenting cognitions or practices connote different meanings or serve different functions in different settings, this provides evidence for cultural specificity. For example, mothers in China and India use authoritative (high warmth, high control) and authoritarian (low warmth, high control) parenting practices, respectively, in ways that relate to differences in their goals of social and emotional development in their children ( 49 ). Initiation rites deemed harmless to children in some cultures may be judged abusive in others.

Unsurprisingly, the determinist arguments marshaled by culture-specifists resemble those invoked by culture-universalists. Adults in different cultures could parent differently because of their biological characteristics, for example, their differential threshold sensitivities or attention to child signals. Certain culturally specific biological characteristics of children, such as constitutionally based temperament, could promote culture-specific parental attitudes and/or activities. Finally, ecological or economic conditions specific to a given cultural setting might promote parental beliefs and behaviors indigenous to that culture, ones evolved differentially to optimize adjustment and adaptation of offspring to the circumstances of the local situation.

PARENTING, CULTURE AND CHILD MENTAL HEALTH

In what may be called the “standard model”, expectations regarding what is culturally acceptable and what is not shape parents' caregiving cognitions, that in turn shape their childrearing practices and, ultimately, children's experiences and development. Thus, cultural norms become manifest in mentally healthy children through parenting. For example, US European American mothers of 1-year-olds encourage the development of individual child autonomy, whereas Puerto Rican mothers focus on maternal-child interdependence and connectedness ( 50 ). These cultural differences are embedded in caregivers' behaviors, with US European American mothers using suggestions and other indirect means of structuring their children's behavior, and Puerto Rican mothers using more direct means of structuring, such as commands, physical positioning, and restraints. Consider child behavioral inhibition, Chinese and Canadian parents' responses to this behavioral constellation, and children's further development. Both cultures have inhibited children, but traditional Chinese mothers have more warm and accepting attitudes, whereas Canadian mothers are more punitive. In school, shy and sensitive Chinese children do better academically and are rated more positively by their teachers and peers, in contrast to shy Canadian children who fare worse ( 51 , 52 ). Of course, beliefs do not always map to behaviors directly, but the two coexist in complex ways, and cultural meaning assigned to each is critical.

It is imperative to learn more about culture and parenting, so that scientists, educators, and practitioners can effectively enhance child mental health. Insofar as (some) systematic relations are established in a culture between how people parent and how children develop, the possibility exists for identifying some “best practices” in how to promote positive parenting and positive child mental health. Some parental practices are perceived as offensive in some cultures, but in others the same behaviors are thought to be benign to children's adjustment. For example, parenting practices in some cultural contexts include folk remedies, which are meant to help children recover from illness, but leave burns or other marks in the process ( 53 , 54 ). These parenting practices become problematic only when parents use them outside of their normative context (e.g., after immigrating to another culture where these behaviors conflict with mainstream cultural definitions of child maltreatment) ( 55 ). Legal cases involving such scenarios sometimes invoke cultural evidence ( 56 ): one judge dismissed a case in which a mother made small cuts on the cheeks of her two sons to signify that the boys had been initiated into her native tribe ( 57 ). Ear piercing illustrates a parenting practice that is normative in one culture (the United States) and that may physically hurt children in the short-term and permanently alter their appearance; nevertheless, parenting that countenances ear piercing is not defined as abusive, and there is no presumption that it has long-term negative effects on children's mental health. Contrariwise, some parenting practices may be detrimental to children even if they are sanctioned by the cultural group. Female circumcision is widely criticized as being abusive and having long-term negative effects on female health, despite its normativeness in certain cultural contexts ( 57 , 58 ). The global community has increasingly taken a stand that children have particular rights regardless of their culture and that it is sometimes necessary to intervene with parents to prevent serious harm. In 1990, the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child (CRC) placed the protection of children's rights at the forefront of the international community. The CRC exemplifies how the global community adopts positions that are meant to shape parenting worldwide.

Consistent parenting beliefs and behaviors help to promote children's mental health around culturally acceptable norms. Thematicity (the repetition of the same cultural idea across mechanisms and contexts) has special importance in culture as an organizer of behavior ( 59 ). So, for example, in the United States personal choice is closely bound up with how individuals think of themselves and make sense of their lives. Personal choice is built firmly on principles of liberty and freedom and is a persistent and significant psychological construct in the literature on US parenting and child mental health ( 60 ).

What is normative in a society matters. For example, the cultural climate in which child discipline occurs is as important as discipline per se in predicting mental health of children ( 61 ). In an empirical test of the role of cultural normativeness on parent-child relationships, the moderation link between mothers' use of physical discipline and children's adjustment was studied in six countries ( 62 ). Children's more frequently experiencing physical discipline was associated with anxiety, and more frequent use of corporal punishment related to adult violence and endorsement of violence ( 63 ). However, countries differed in their reported normativeness of physical discipline and in the way that physical discipline related to children's adjustment. Children's perceived normativeness of physical discipline moderated the association between experiencing physical discipline and child anxiety and aggression. Children who perceived the use of physical discipline as being culturally normative expressed higher levels of aggression, regardless of whether they personally experienced high or low levels of physical discipline. More frequent use of physical discipline was less strongly associated with adverse child outcomes in contexts of greater perceived cultural normativeness. In short, the association between mothers' use of physical discipline and child mental health was moderated by the cultural normativeness of physical discipline.

US European American parents of adolescents are more likely to engage in authoritative parenting that emphasizes the growth of separation and autonomy within a supportive and responsive relationship, whereas Latin American, African American, and Asian American parents tend to engage in authoritarian parenting, with its greater emphasis on obedience and conformity ( 64 ). US American children are encouraged to discuss their own feelings and those of others as a way of increasing their understanding of emotion and ability to regulate it; Chinese families encourage attunement to the feelings of others, but restraint in the expression of own feelings, as key to group harmony ( 65 ). Chinese parents remind children of their past transgressions using story-telling, for example, to teach social norms and behavioral standards and to engender a sense of shame over bad behavior. In contrast, American parents avoid stories of transgression so as not to damage their children's self-esteem ( 66 , 67 ).

Some parenting-child mental health relations regularly recur even across very different cultures. When a particular parenting cognition or practice connotes the same meaning and serves the same function in different cultures, it likely constitutes a cultural universal. Parental psychological control of adolescents appears to have negative correlates across a wide variety of cultural contexts. In a study of 11 countries, including at least one each from Africa, Asia, Europe, the Middle East, North America, and South America, virtual unanimity was observed in the direction and significance of associations of parental monitoring with less, and psychological control with more, adolescent antisocial behavior ( 68 ).

However, the same parenting cognition or practice can also assume different meanings or functions in different cultural contexts. For example, in some cultures mutual eye contact sets the stage for interpersonal communication and social interaction ( 69 ), but in others mutual eye contact signals disrespect and aggression ( 70 , 71 ). Different meanings attached to particular behaviors can cause adjustment problems for children whose parents expect them to behave in one way that is encouraged at home (e.g., avoiding eye contact to show deference and respect) when children find themselves in contexts where adults attach different (sometimes negative) meanings to the same behavior (e.g., appearing disrespectful and unengaged with a teacher at school).

Conversely, different parenting cognitions and practices may connote the same meaning or serve the same function in different cultural contexts. In some cultural groups parents show affection predominately through their tone of voice, whereas in others parents demonstrate affection physically. These different displays serve the same function of making children feel loved, valued, and approved of by parents in their respective cultures. Interrelatedness and autonomy are important in all cultures, but the ways in which parents foster them in children vary as a function of the values and goals that exist in particular cultures ( 72 , 73 ). US American infants use mothers as a secure base from which to explore the world, and Japanese infants enjoy their mothers' indulgence of their needs ( 74 ). In essence, wholesome relationships are central in both cultures, but they assume different forms as a function of contrasting cultural emphases on individuation and accommodation. An authoritative parenting style leads to positive mental health outcomes for US European American children, but an authoritarian parenting style leads to positive outcomes for African American children ( 75 ).

The specificity and generality of parenting, and relations between parents and their children's mental health, are advantageously assessed through cultural research because neither parenting nor children's development occurs in a vacuum: both emerge and grow in a medium of culture. Variations in what is normative in different cultures challenge our assumptions about what is universal and inform our understanding of how parent-child relationships unfold in ways both culturally universal and specific.

CONCLUSIONS

Culture influences some parenting cognitions and practices and, in turn, child mental health from a very early age, through such pervasive factors as what parents expect of children, when and how parents care for children, and which behaviors parents appreciate, emphasize, and reward. Parents are influenced by conventionalized images of what is and what ought to be proper childrearing, and so they (even unconsciously) seek to implement an agendum derived from concepts that characterize their culture-specific milieu.

It is the continuing task of parents to caregive as well as to enculturate children by preparing them for the physical, psychosocial, and educational situations that are characteristic of their specific culture. For this reason, many social theorists have asserted that the family generally, and the parent-child relationship specifically, constitute the effective crucible for the early (and perhaps eventual) development of the individual and the continuity of culture. Every culture promotes unique ways of adapting to the stringencies of its requirements, ecology, and environment and has developed traditions to achieve the common goals of childrearing. As a consequence, even in the face of some shared goals, parenting children varies dramatically across cultures. The cultural contexts of parenthood and childhood are therefore of increasing interest to world psychiatry.

That said, after approximately a century of psychological study, with considerable attention paid to parenting and child mental health, still too little is known about the beliefs and behaviors, life circumstances and experiences, of children or their parents in non-Western cultures. In the past, scholars have tended to generalize from person- or situation-specific behaviors to species-general conclusions without paying adequate attention to circumstances and limitations imposed by culture. A pervading critique is that, traditionally, research in this field has tended to describe constructs, structures, functions, and processes in accordance with ideals appropriate to Western, educated, industrialized, rich, and democratic societies ( 76 - 78 ). For example, Patel and Sumathipala ( 79 ) surveyed leading psychiatry journals and found that only “6% of the literature [was] published from regions of the world that account for over 90% of global population”. A central limitation related to culture has impeded comprehensive understanding of parenting and child mental health. This limitation has led to many critiques of single-culture perspectives and motivated consistent calls for more cross-cultural study ( 77 , 79 , 80 ). Thus, researchers increasingly recognize the need to expand the scope of parenting inquiry to include more culturally diverse samples. Heeding these calls is important to avoid misperceptions of universality as well as biases of monocultural study.

There is, therefore, definite need and significance for cultural approaches to parenting and child mental health. Descriptively they are invaluable for revealing the full range of human parenting and child mental health. Study across cultures also furnishes a check against ethnocentrism. Acceptance of findings from any one culture as “normative” is too narrow in scope, and ready generalizations from them to parents and children at large are uncritical. Comparison across cultures is also valuable because it augments an understanding of the processes through which biological variables fuse with environmental variables and experiences in development. Awareness of alternative modes of development enhances understanding of the nature of human variation. From early roots in ethnographic work, studies of culture and parenting have grown to occupy an increasingly important position in developmental thinking. We need more detailed and systematic data on cultural beliefs, behaviors, and the settings of parent and child development.

The long-standing issues found at the intersection of parenting, child mental health, and culture are the following. What are the universals of child care and child development in our species? How do parents organize the effective environments of childhood? What are the contributions of culture to parenting, child mental health, and parent-child relationships? No study of a single society can answer these broad questions. It is possible, however, to learn lessons from the study of different societies that may offer partial answers.

Overall, perhaps the most important single thing that a parent does for a child is determine the culture into which that child is born ( 81 ). The cultural study of parenting and child mental health is beneficially understood in a framework of necessary versus desirable demands. A necessary demand is that parents and children communicate with one another. Normal interaction and children's wholesome mental health depend on it. Not unexpectedly, communication appears to be a universal aspect of parenting and child development. A desirable demand is that parents and children communicate in certain ways adapted and faithful to their culture.

The cultural perspective reveals the ideals and norms of the society and how they are instantiated; the parental perspective defines beliefs and behaviors that characterize childcare; and the child perspective assesses the impact of culture and caregiving on the development of mental health.

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Different Types of Love Activate the Brain Differently

by Denis Storey August 27, 2024 at 11:51 AM UTC

Clinical relevance: New research maps the neural mechanisms behind different forms of love, revealing that each type activates distinct areas of the brain.

• The study used fMRI to analyze brain responses to love for romantic partners, children, friends, pets, strangers, and nature.
• Interpersonal love primarily activates brain regions linked to social cognition and the brain’s reward system.
• Love for nature and pets involves unique neural patterns, influenced by both biological and cultural factors.

Love might be a “many-splendored thing,” but it also appears to take different forms. New research from Aalto University – and published in the Oxford journal Cerebral Cortex –   plots a roadmap of the neural mechanisms that make up the various forms of love. That map reveals that the different types of love engage disparate – and distinct – areas of the brain.

The study shows that it remains integral to forging and sustaining connections with other people, parents, and even things.

The Finnish researchers hoped to explain the neural basis of love beyond the well-documented romantic and maternal types. This also sought to bridge that gap by examining the brain’s response to six different objects of love.

“We now provide a more comprehensive picture of the brain activity associated with different types of love than previous research,” Pärttyli Rinne, the philosopher who organized the research project, explained in a press release . “The activation pattern of love is generated in social situations in the basal ganglia, the midline of the forehead, the precuneus, and the temporoparietal junction at the sides of the back of the head.”

Methodology of Love

Leveraging functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), the team investigated brain activity related to love for romantic partners, children, friends, strangers, pets, and nature.

To stir those feelings, the researchers asked the study participants to listen to short stories written to target specific love types. The researchers then used fMRI to track the resulting brain activity. The findings suggest that the brain’s responses relies heavily on the object of affection, with different forms triggering separate neural networks.

The researchers discovered that interpersonal love, such as that for romantic partners, children, and friends, primarily triggers brain regions related to social cognition. These areas include the temporoparietal junction and midline structures, which are more active during love for people.

Notably, pet owners showed more obvious activity in these regions when thinking about their pets compared to participants without pets, suggesting a deeper emotional connection between pet owners and their animals.

The researchers also found that love for romantic partners, children, and friends elicited stronger and more widespread activation in the brain’s reward system, which includes the striatum, ventral tegmental area, and orbitofrontal cortex.

On the other hand, love for strangers, pets, and nature triggered less of a response in these regions, reflecting the weaker affiliative bonds normally linked to these forms of love.

Incidentally, the study found that love for nature showed up in brain regions different from those affiliated with interpersonal love. Specifically, affection for nature engaged the fusiform gyrus, parahippocampal gyrus, and superior parietal lobes. This implies that it could be tied to aesthetic appreciation and a sense of connection to the environment.

Biology, Culture Each Play a Part

The researchers suggest that the diverse neural patterns involved stem from biological and cultural sources. The study supports the concept that love, while rooted in fundamental neurobiological mechanisms, can also be influenced by outside factors.

For example, the stronger brain activity the researchers witnessed in pet owners underscores the role of cultural factors in forming emotional bonds.

The study results open up potential new ways to think about how different types of love might change based on neurological conditions or mental health issues. And by charting the brain’s reactions to different forms of affection, the study sheds light on how it operates on both biological and cultural levels.

Further Reading

Study Refutes Concept of Love Languages

Barriers to Loving: A Clinician’s Perspective

Dogs Can Smell Our Stress And It Burns Them Out

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