Culture encompasses all aspects of a group’s or society’s identity, including language, art, cuisine, social habits, religion, beliefs, values and traditions. Sociologists such as Georg Simmel use the term to refer to the ways that people think, act and live together. Psychologists have used the term to mean an individual’s beliefs, emotions, and ways of interacting with the world. This is different from the concept of cultural heritage, which refers to a building, artifact or location’s association with a particular culture, such as the home where a person was born or the city in which they lived.
Many researchers study how a person’s culture influences behavior and development. Some focus on specific culturally based beliefs and values, for example:
However, this approach to culture is limited in its ability to explain how cultural differences show up in behavior and development. This is because beliefs and values are abstract phenomena that cannot directly make behaviors or developmental processes happen.
A more useful way to understand how culture matters is to consider the ways that cultures influence the context of behavior and development. This is the approach taken in this spotlight series. The six papers in this series move our understanding and investigations of culture in new substantive directions. In addition, they help to illuminate some of the processes through which culture influences development.
The first paper in this series, by Jin Li and Heidi Fung, defines culture in terms of historically based values that differ across groups with which individuals identify. They then pose the general developmental question of how these culturally based values show up in and “work” to shape people’s behavior. They analyze European-American and Taiwanese mother-child conversations about learning and find that the culturally specific ways that these mothers structure intentionality and intersubjectivity in these conversations are important facets of culture that influence children’s behavior.
Another important paper in the series, by Richard Triandis, examines how culturally based beliefs and values are transmitted through everyday interactions. He finds that the culturally specific ways in which parents and their children talk about a task together, such as how to do math, are key factors in how children learn to do the task.
The last two papers in this series take an evolutionary perspective to the study of culture. They show how culture evolves through a process of innovation and adaptation, whereby new innovations and adaptations to existing cultural practices occur simultaneously. They also demonstrate how these evolutionary trends can be understood through the analysis of historical data on the evolution of human populations and environments. These papers suggest that a deeper understanding of how culture evolves may lead to more effective interventions for culturally sensitive education, counseling and treatment. Moreover, these evolutionary insights can be used to address a wide range of applied developmental issues around the globe.