PNAS Profile of NAS member Angelika Amon, winner of the 2019 Vilcek Prize in Biomedical Science
Image courtesy of Samara Vise (Koch Institute for Integrative Cancer Research, Cambridge, MA.)
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Psychology of late is witnessing a cultural revolution. Once a science that was criticized as largely culture blind (research being devoid of any focus on culture) and culture bound (testing the majority of theories on Western, educated, industrialized, rich, and democratic, or WEIRD, samples) (1), culture is now becoming central in diverse areas, including neuroscience, cognitive science, clinical and developmental psychology, social and organizational behavior, and related disciplines (2). Increasingly, research has also begun to move beyond merely accounting for variation across national cultures to understanding cultural variation within nations (3, 4). An exciting question is whether we can find any homology of cultural processes across these levels of analyses while also illuminating distinct patterns that arise in different cultural contexts (5). The study in PNAS by Chua et al. (6) represents a massive effort toward these important scientific goals in the unique context of China.
With its 1.4 billion people—one-fifth of the world’s population—spread across 9.6 million square kilometers, 56 groups, and 31 provinces (7), China is a fascinating context to examine culture theories that have been developed in the West. China is undergoing rapid cultural change and is already an economic superpower that will shape global trade and issues of war and peace for years to come. However, while there are many economic, political, and technological analyses of the country, with some exceptions (e.g., ref. 8), there has been little attention given to emerging cultural dynamics within China, an important void that Chua et al. (6) begin to fill.
The study by Chua et al. (6) is the first of its kind to investigate cultural variation in the strength of social norms, or tightness-looseness (TL), across the 31 Chinese provinces. Research has illuminated important differences in cultures that are tight (i.e., those that have strict rules and …
↵1Email: mjgelfand{at}gmail.com.
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Universal and culture-specific patterns of tightness-looseness across the 31 Chinese provinces
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