People Are Culturally Shaped Shapers The Psychological Science Of Culture And Culture Change

The term "culture" is everywhere today as people strive to make sense of their increasingly diverse and divided worlds. To say "It's cultural," or "It's a culture clash," or "We need a culture change" is becoming idiomatic, and lay cultural theories and hypotheses abound. In this chapter, we review how the psychological science of culture has advanced in the past decade and how psychologists are providing insights to today's most pressing issues. In the first section, we explain some foundational ideas of the science of cultural psychology, introduce the culture cycle, and summarize how different culture cycles shape different ways of being a person. In the second section, we describe several crosscutting generalizations about people and about culture that have become more fully theorized and empirically grounded since the first edition of this volume was published. In the third section, we review some key empirical insights from the field that have emerged over the past decade. And finally, we consider how to apply some of the insights of cultural psychology to understand contemporary culture clashes and divides, as well as envision psychologically grounded approaches to culture change.