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Cultural Anthropology publishes ethnographic writing informed by a wide array of theoretical perspectives, innovative in form and content, and focused on both traditional and emerging topics. It also welcomes essays concerned with ethnographic methods and research design in historical perspective, and with ways cultural analysis can address broader public audiences and interests.

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Vol. 39 No. 1 (2024)

We present six original papers in this issue as well as the inaugural guest commentary.

When the Society for Cultural Anthropology selected our distributed, international editorial collective to lead Cultural Anthropology , they did so in part to support our commitment to opening channels of this crucial platform of our discipline beyond the scope of privileged, endowed higher educational institutions in the United States. As one step of this process, in this issue we provide space to the Choctaw Nation of Oklahoma to describe their work since the passage of the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act (NAGPRA) in 1990. As Deanna L. Byrd, the NAGPRA Liaison-Coordinator and Research and Outreach Program Manager of the Choctaw Nation of Oklahoma, and Ian Thompson, the Tribal Historic Preservation Officer of the Choctaw Nation of Oklahoma, writes, since that time, “Native American communities gained a measure of say in how ancestral burials are treated on federal lands. The law also established a mechanism to help Native American, Alaskan, and Native Hawaiian communities have open dialogue with institutions across the country about the return of their ancestors, funerary objects, sacred objects, and objects of cultural patrimony.” 

In dialogue with critical disability studies, Eliza Williamson zooms in the everyday practices of Bahian mothers with children diagnosed with Congenital Zika Syndrome. Mothers, she shows, assert their children’s personhood by refusing their medically diagnosed lack of futurity through what she defines as habilitative care: “a bodymind potentializing set of practices” involving a myriad of “substances, technologies and techniques understood to encourage maximum potential development of embodied abilities in young disabled children.”

Leniqueca Welcome delves into unaccounted forms of violence on and in those “who occupy the category of poor black woman in Trinidad” to develop a “capacious, relational and historically layered” approach to entangled forms of gender-based violence and life searching. In so doing, a sharp critique of the masculinist state and legacies of colonial extraction emerges.

By spending time with loggers, timber industrialists, and state technocrats across Peru’s Amazonian region of Loreto, Eduardo Romero Dianderas tracks technical maneuvers and political controversies around timber volumetric calculation. Far from a mathematical abstraction, his ethnography invites us to think that the practice of volume-making—scaling, standardizing, and accounting for timber—is a contact zone in which “power, history and bodily experience” saturate a crucial operation for global environmental governance.

Focusing on demonstrations held outside Yangon, Myanmar, in favor of a plan to build a New Yangon City, Courtney Wittekind’s article intervenes in the binaries of “truth” versus “falsity” and “genuine” versus “fake” to advance an anthropological theorization of demonstration, speculation, and spectacle.

For centuries, the Curse of Ham, the originary anti-Black myth of the Abrahamic faiths, functioned as the foundational and legitimating narrative of white supremacist ideology across the African continent. To Justin Haruyama’s disconcertment, this was also the narrative invoked by some of his Zambian informants to explain the predicament of Black people today. In his paper for this issue, Haruyama stages a conversation with Black liberation theology to suggest that these narratives articulated, however, a profound refutation of liberal egalitarianism and, from the situated premises of a transnational Zambian perspective, put forward an alternative vision for a decolonial abolitionist anthropology.

In his article, Ramy Aly interrogates the anthropology of ethics and revolution in dialogue with a phenomenological and situated account of the 2011 January Egyptian Revolution. He does it through the experiences and narratives of those that were too young to take part in street protests and political movements but for whom the revolution still takes precedent in everyday practices of self-making.

Cover and table-of-contents image by Eduardo Romero Dianderas.

Guest Commentary

No stone unturned.

Habilitating Bodyminds, Caring for Potential: Disability Therapeutics after Zika in Bahia, Brazil

On and in their bodies: masculinist violence, criminalization, and black womanhood in trinidad, volumes: the politics of calculation in contemporary peruvian amazonia, “take our land” : fronts, fraud, and fake farmers in a city-to-come, anti-blackness and moral repair: the curse of ham, biblical kinship, and the limits of liberalism, the ordinariness of ethics and the extraordinariness of revolution: ethical selves and the egyptian january revolution at home and school, curated collections.

War on Palestine

Sovereignty

Reclaiming Hope

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ORIGINAL RESEARCH article

Culture and attention: future directions to expand research beyond the geographical regions of weird cultures.

• 1 Department of Psychology, University of Alberta, Edmonton, AB, Canada
• 2 Shine Mongol Harumafuji School, Ulan Bator, Mongolia
• 3 Department of Psychology, University of Wisconsin – Green Bay, Green Bay, WI, United States

Henrich et al. (2010) highlighted the necessity of broadening the range of regions for cross-cultural investigation in their seminal paper “The weirdest people in the world.” They criticize the current psychological framework for relying dominantly on American undergraduate students for their participant database, and state that there is a risk associated with investigating human nature by focusing solely on a unique population. This line of research has, over the past 30 years, successfully demonstrated the diversity of human cognition. However, it is true that there are still only a limited number of studies that have extended their geographical regions of research outside of G7 (Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, United Kingdom, and United States) and G20 countries (Argentina, Australia, Brazil, China, India, Indonesia, Mexico, Russia, Saudi Arabia, South Africa, South Korea, Turkey, EU countries, and the above G7 countries). In order to fully examine the issue of culture and cognition, we maintain that the field of psychology must extend its research globally. In this paper, we will briefly discuss the history of cross-cultural research in the 1960s which can be seen as the beginning of addressing the above concerns, and review some contemporary empirical studies which took over their 1960s predecessors’ mission. Here we address three strengths of extending the geographical scope to advance cultural psychology. In the second half of the paper, we will introduce our preliminary study conducted in Mongolia as a sample case study to demonstrate a way of administering cultural psychological research outside of the existing research field. We will then discuss implications of this line of research, and provide tips on how to open a new research site.

Introduction

A group of researchers in the late 1980s and early 1990s began advocating for the development of a new research field in social sciences in order to understand the human mind in cultural contexts ( Bruner, 1990 ; Shweder, 1991 ; Miller, 1999 ). This interdisciplinary field of research, which includes linguistics, psychology, anthropology, and neuroscience, is now known as “cultural psychology.” Researchers in this field challenged the universality of human psychological processes and advocated the importance of understanding human psychology in cultural contexts. Recently, they have developed a variety of theoretical frameworks, devised research methodology and tasks for experimentation, and demonstrated substantial cultural variations in even basic psychological processes—notably human cognition (e.g., Masuda et al., 2019 , for review). However, research programs have not fully expanded to new geographical regions. In this paper, we address the need to conduct research outside of G7 (Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, United Kingdom, and United States) and G20 countries (Argentina, Australia, Brazil, China, India, Indonesia, Mexico, Russia, Saudi Arabia, South Africa, South Korea, Turkey, EU countries, and the above G7 countries), and discuss an important direction to further advance research on culture and human cognition. As one example that demonstrates this new way of conducting research, we will also share results from a case study held in Mongolia.

Patterns of Cognition and Social Orientation

One of the goals of cultural psychologists is to present empirical evidence that the majority of so-called “universal psychological phenomena” reported in North American professional journals are actually the products of mutual constitutions between culture and the mind. For over 30 years, cultural psychologists have examined cultural variations in basic psychological processes between people in East Asian and North American societies in order to address this goal.

A theoretical framework developed by Nisbett et al. (2001) , Nisbett (2003) , Nisbett and Masuda (2003) , Nisbett and Miyamoto (2005) , and Masuda et al. (2019) , for example, contrasted two patterns of cognition: analytic and holistic. Analytic cognition , dominant in Western cultures such as Western Europe and North America, is characterized by discourses that emphasize an object-oriented focus in visual attention (selectively focusing more on objects than on context). In contrast, holistic cognition , dominant in East Asian cultures such as China, Korea, and Japan, is characterized by discourses that emphasize a context-oriented focus of attention (attending to objects in relation to their context).

Based on this theoretical framework, a substantial number of empirical studies have demonstrated that East Asians are more likely than North Americans to be sensitive to contextual information in many aspects of social cognition (see Masuda, 2017 , for review). For example, Masuda and Nisbett (2001) demonstrated that, when asked to describe animated vignettes of underwater scenes, Japanese tended to holistically capture the entire scene, whereas Americans tended to analytically detach the main object in the scene, and selectively describe the features of that object. Implementing the theory of holistic vs. analytic cognition, researchers have documented cultural variations in causal attribution, inference, categorization, spatial and temporal perception, emotion perception, and even artistic expression and design of Internet web pages ( Masuda, 2017 , for review).

Varnum et al. (2010) further discussed that people’s social orientation— interdependence vs. independence —could play an important role for people to develop culturally specific cognitions— holistic vs. analytic , respectively. One explanation for the connection between independence and analytic cognition is that those who live in societies where independent social orientation is dominant find that the world consists of events, people, and objects which are, in general, independent from each other. Such a view facilitates people to selectively pay attention to what they think is the most important event, object, or person in the scene, while intentionally ignoring the context. In contrast, an explanation for the connection between interdependence and holistic cognition is that those who live in a society where interdependent social orientation is dominant need to become sensitive to other people’s feelings in order to maintain the society. This requires having communal and cooperative relationships. Such a sensitivity to relationships facilitates people to pay attention not only to the target issue but also to its surrounding context. When such social practices are generalized, people tend to use holistic attention, capturing all of the scenes and relationships in a single event.

The Criticism Against General Psychology: WEIRD People in the World

Recently, a problem was addressed by Henrich et al.’s (2010) seminal paper “The Weirdest People in the World,” in which the authors criticized psychological data reported in major North American journals for relying too much on North American undergraduate students to have their findings naively accepted as universal. Henrich et al. called this population “WEIRD,” which stands for “Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, and Democratic.” More specifically, WEIRD people in many cases represent American undergraduate students who have taken psychology courses, and whose contributions make up a major part of the psychological database. Although the database is valuable for advancing psychological science, Henrich et al., 2010 argue that it is not representative of the human population, and therefore cannot be generalized. In fact, the ratio of the WEIRD population to the entire human population is very small, suggesting that WEIRD people are rather unusual outliers.

Why are researchers reluctant to access people outside of the WEIRD category? Possible reasons attributing to the biased data collections include the following: (1) the North American student subject pools at universities allow researchers to easily conduct studies as they are familiar with participating in experiments as their human subjects and there is little cost to using them; (2) the majority of psychologists have trained in North American academic institutions; the Western tradition of scientific investigation is quite analytic (i.e., ignores contexts by assuming they play less important roles in shaping one’s mind); and (3) researchers are not fully aware of the fact that they are culturally biased, and assume that the North American mind is standard, universal, and invariant across all cultures.

History of Cross-Cultural Investigation in Human Cognition and Perception

Outside psychology, doubts of universality in the mind and the idea that there are substantial variations in psychological processes have been discussed in a broader context in the Humanities and Social Sciences. The history of cross-cultural studies regarding human nature is rather long. For example, the seeds of cultural psychology can be traced back to Wilhelm Wundt’s (1916) “völkerpsychologie” (folk psychology), where he addressed descriptive investigations of cultural phenomena. A variety of fields have also contributed to the study of cultural variations in human nature, including anthropology (e.g., Kluckhohn, 1949 ; Geertz, 1973 ) and linguistics (e.g., Whorf, 1956 ). Furthermore, other domains of psychology including developmental psychology (e.g., Vygotsky, 1978 ; Luria, 1979 ), and social psychology (e.g., Sherif, 1936 ) have also contributed to the study of cultural variations. In the field of cognitive sciences, “New Look Psychology,” advocated by Bruner and Goodman (1947) and Bruner (1957) , researchers maintained that even our perception—so called basic psychological processes—is highly influenced by cultural contexts.

While theoretical discussions have been addressed in a variety of fields, empirical studies on cross-cultural variations in basic psychological processes have focused on small-scale societies since the 1960s (for an extensive review see Cole and Scribner, 1974 ; McCauley and Henrich, 2006 ). One of the earliest empirical studies where researchers extended their data collection outside the geography of North American laboratories is a series of anthropological studies involving the Müller-Lyer illusion ( Rivers, 1901 , 1905 ; Segall et al., 1966 ). This optical illusion refers to people’s perception of the length of lines where same length lines with inward arrows are judged to be longer than the lines with outward arrows. Segall et al. (1966) demonstrated that the effect of the Müller-Lyer illusion, which had been reported in Western data, was observed in Melanesian and Indian tribal members, but not in a hunter-gatherer group in the Kalahari Desert.

These early studies have maintained that ecological factors—people’s actual life experiences in a particular geographical and ecological environment—are keys to understanding people’s perception and cognition. For example, the “carpenter hypothesis,” maintains that one’s experience of viewing things three dimensionally affects the magnitude of the illusion, especially if the environment contains rectangular architectures. In such an environment, lines with inward arrows often appear as front edges of rectangular shaped buildings, which are closer to the viewer, whereas lines with outward arrows often appear as rear edges, which are farther away from the viewer. Because of this experience, people tend to overestimate the length of inward arrows compared to outward arrows. In other words, the magnitude of the optical illusion is reduced for those who have not experienced such an environment, suggesting that the optical illusion is not innate but shaped by one’s environmental experience ( Hudson, 1960 , 1962a , b , 1967 ; Mundy-Castle, 1966 ; Deregowski, 1968a , b ).

In other early research on perception, researchers contrasted perceptual styles in field-dependent vs. field-independent perception (e.g., Witkin et al., 1954 ; Witkin, 1967 ; Witkin and Berry, 1975 ; Witkin and Goodenough, 1977 ). Using perceptual tasks (e.g., embedded figure task), these researchers investigated individual differences in context sensitivity. For example, field-independent individuals were better at detecting target shapes which were superimposed on multi-layered shapes than field-dependent individuals. These perceptual tasks were later used to identify cultural variations in attention, finding that people in cities, independent cultures, and hunting communities tended to show context independent patterns of perception ( Dowson, 1967 ; Berry, 1971 , 1976 ).

In sum, cross-cultural investigations into human cognition were conducted from the 1960s through to the 1970s, but fell out of favor partially because mainstream North American psychologists began searching for evidence of universality rather than specificity (e.g., Fodor and Pylyshyn, 1981 ; Fodor, 1983 ; Pylyshyn, 1999 ). The contemporary cultural psychology research began in the late 1990s by focusing on empirical investigations and applying some of the classic methods from earlier cross-cultural studies to different populations (e.g., Ji et al., 2000 ). There is an inherent affinity between contemporary cultural psychology and cross-cultural studies from the 1960s. In line with the WEIRD critics, we maintain that researchers should acknowledge the classic cross-cultural studies in small-scale societies and should reconsider the importance of conducting research outside of G7 and G20 countries.

Beyond the East vs. West Dichotomy

The idea of holistic cognition/interdependent social orientation vs. analytic cognition/independent social orientation has been applied to many cross-cultural studies of East Asians and North Americans. Why has the East vs. West dichotomy been so often utilized by contemporary cultural psychologists? After Markus and Kitayama’s seminal review paper (1991) was published, the issue of culture caught mainstream psychologists’ attention, which resulted in advancing contemporary cultural psychology for two main reasons: First, going beyond cross-cultural studies of the 1960’s, contemporary psychologists successfully demonstrated that cultural variations in cognition linger even when they target post-industrial societies in East Asia. For example, Japan is one of the G7 countries, of which demographic factors such as the level of education, level of modernization, GDP level, as well as methodological factors such as accessibility to undergraduate participants and school curriculums in colleges are quite comparable to that of North American and European counterparts, yet researchers persuasively demonstrated substantial diversity in cognition between these countries (e.g., Kitayama et al., 1997 ). Second, from a social sciences perspective, the rapid economic growth in the East Asian economy would also influence mainstream psychologists’ perception about culture. The East/West dichotomy dominated the business discourse of the 1980’s due to economic competition between America and Japan, and it still persists. Retrospectively, it has been one of the factors which indirectly increased the number of audiences who were interested in successful findings in cultural psychology.

However, like Henrich et al. (2010) ’s argument regarding the limits of relying on data from WEIRD societies, the East/West dichotomy also limits our scope and forces us to question our ability to claim universality in cognitive processes. There are at least three beneficial points for researchers to further broaden this field of research to go beyond the East/West dichotomy.

First, while a plethora of evidence has depicted differences between the cultures of the two continents of East Asia and North America, researchers need to be prudent not to overgeneralize this dichotomy onto cultures in other continents: there is not much known about Europe, South America, the Middle East, Africa, and Central Asia. It is only recently that researchers have acknowledged the gaps in the data of the global population. For example, Kitayama et al. (2009) demonstrated that British and German participant’s level of holistic attention fell between Americans and Japanese, showing a moderate level of context sensitivity. Meanwhile, all the Western groups showed stronger dispositional biases in person perception compared to Japanese, and in the implicit measurement of interdependence, Japanese scores were higher than the Western populations. Similarly, San Martin et al. (2018) studied Arab populations, and identified that Saudis and Lebanese were as interdependent in their self-perception, holistic in their attention, and context-oriented in their behavioral inference patterns as Japanese, yet they were more assertive in their emotional experiences than Japanese. Uskul et al. (2008) also tested three small communities in the Black Sea region of Turkey. Participants were ethnically similar and spoke the same language but differed in their primary economic activities and subsistence systems. They found that herders, who often work alone, tend to hold a more independent social orientation and analytic thinking style, whereas farmers and fishers, whose cooperative working styles are both valued and required, tend to hold a more interdependent social orientation and holistic thinking style. However, research has scarcely been conducted in other regions such as Central Asia, South America, and Africa, even though there are substantial amounts of ethnography and data provided by anthropologists, sociologists, and regional researchers.

Second, the East-West dichotomy often results in unclear explanations regarding the key variables that directly influence one’s pattern of cognition. For example, Southern Chinese tend to hold holistic patterns of attention, and it is often argued that their rice-farming tradition, which requires intensive collaboration such as creating irrigation systems, is the antecedent of their interdependent social orientation ( Talhelm et al., 2014 ). However, there is still a need for researchers to articulate the causality between culture and cognition, and much research is needed to test the replicability of the findings. Can interdependent social norms be independent from the culture’s dominant economic system? What if the dominant economic system of the target culture is nomadic pastoral (a potential ecological facilitator of analytic cognition), yet they are socially interdependent (a potential factor in making people holistic)? In order to answer these questions, researchers must investigate explanatory variables and scrutinize the magnitude of the effect of each variable.

Third, while cultural psychologists have advocated for many theoretical frameworks predicting cultural variations in human cognition, it is important to further search for variables and dimensions by which researchers can capture a variety of cultural phenomena all over the world. For example, San Martin et al. (2018) identified that interdependence and assertiveness are key variables in explaining Arabs’ mentalities. Where does the assertiveness come from? Are there other cultures which show similar mentalities? What are the effects of religious beliefs (e.g., shamanism, monotheism, polytheism, animism, etc.), political systems (e.g., communistic, socialistic, democratic, etc.), population density (e.g., dense, intermediate, scarce, etc.), or relational mobility—a socioecological variable ( Yuki and Schug, 2012 ) that represents how much freedom and opportunity a society affords individuals to choose and dispose of interpersonal relationships based on personal preference (e.g., high-voluntary vs. low-fixed)? Currently, cultural psychologists can provide few answers to these questions.

In summary, this section has discussed a brief history of the theoretical development of cultural research, classic empirical studies, and the recent advances of research on culture and cognition outside of the WEIRD population and the East-West dichotomy. We also discussed three major reasons for researchers to extend their region of research outside of G7 and G20 countries. In the next section, we will introduce a case study as an example of initiating a cross-cultural study in a new culture.

Mongolian School-Aged Children and Teenagers’ Landscape Drawing Styles: a Case Study

In this study, we selected Mongolia as our target culture and created networks with Shine Mongol Elementary and Secondary schools, part of the New Mongol Academy, Ulaanbaatar, Mongolia, where we implemented a study using a simple picture drawing task ( Masuda et al., 2008 ). The main objective of this study was to examine Mongolian children and teenager’s patterns of perception. In addition, we aimed to compare the data with an existing cross-cultural dataset ( Nand et al., 2014 ) to examine the similarities and differences in drawing styles across three countries: Mongolia, Canada, and Japan. By doing so, we attempted to demonstrate a way of extending research to a non-WEIRD culture (e.g., Henrich et al., 2010 ) and strove to go beyond the East-West dichotomy (e.g. Markus and Kitayama, 1991 ; Nisbett, 2003 ).

Mongolian Culture

Ancient historical documents reported that people of many ethnic backgrounds have lived in the geographical area of Mongolia 1 . The earliest report of Mongolians appeared in Chinese documents published in the 11th century, but their activities can be traced back to the 9th century. In the 13th century, Genghis Khan (Chinggis Khaan) founded the Mongol Empire, and his influence spread across Eurasia. From the 17th century, the area was ruled by the Qing dynasty in China, influencing the country until the end of the 19th century. In the early 20th century, the Mongolian People’s Republic was established under the authority of the Soviet Union. The Mongolian people further transformed in the late 1980s and early 1990s, and in 1992, the government issued a new constitution implementing a multi-party system and endorsing a market economy.

Because of their herding and nomadic traditions, family oriented lifestyle, religious beliefs (e.g., Buddhism, Shamanism, and Animism), and the ecology of the area, researchers can speculate a variety of socio-economic-geographical variables which may influence Mongolians’ minds. While acknowledging intra-cultural variations, we assumed there would be a dominant pattern of psychological processes in this culture. Although there are many anthropological and sociological studies (e.g., Fijn, 2011 ; Sakamoto et al., 2015 ), psychological studies with empirical methodology have rarely been conducted thus far.

Historically, Mongolian culture has developed independently from WEIRD populations and from East-West contrasts, while they have experienced political influences from Russia and China. Therefore, it is important for cultural psychologists to examine Mongolians and their civilization in order to discover potentially unique characteristics in their mindset. We present two competing hypotheses: (1) since Mongolians value family ties, they hold more interdependent and less independent social orientation ( Markus and Kitayama, 1991 ; Varnum et al., 2010 ), therefore their patterns of attention are more similar to East Asians than North Americans, or (2) because of their tradition of pastoral and nomadic lifestyle, one that has been said to be relatively independent from any other subsistence system, Mongolians are less holistic and more analytic ( Nisbett et al., 2001 ; Uskul et al., 2008 ; Masuda et al., 2019 ), suggesting that their patterns of attention are more similar to North Americans than East Asians. In addition to the need to test the above competing hypotheses, we sought to discover unique characteristics of the Mongolian mind.

The current study chose to implement a landscape drawing task used in previous studies ( Masuda et al., 2008 ; Nand et al., 2014 ; Senzaki et al., 2014 ). Those results indicated that East Asians have developed an artistic tradition of expression which emphasizes context, whereas Westerners, especially North Americans, have developed another artistic tradition of expression which emphasizes main objects rather than context. Furthermore, contemporary members of each culture (as opposed to classic painters), such as school-aged children, teenagers, and young adults demonstrate culturally dominant patterns of artistic expressions when asked to draw a landscape image. Masuda et al. maintain that the observed patterns of drawing reflect the dominant pattern of attention: East Asians view things holistically and in a context-oriented manner associated with their sense of interdependent social orientation, whereas North Americans view things analytically and in an object-oriented manner associated with their sense of independent social orientation ( Nisbett et al., 2001 ; Nisbett, 2003 ; Nisbett and Masuda, 2003 ; Masuda, 2017 ; Masuda et al., 2019 ).

We focused selectively on school-aged children because we assumed that cultural variation in cognition is attributable to one’s internalization and socialization of a culturally shared meaning system ( Miller, 1999 ). By using a drawing task which assess school-aged children’s cognition (e.g., Nand et al., 2014 ), we examined whether Mongolian school-aged children and teenagers would show a pattern of drawing styles similar to, or different from analytic/object-oriented/independent North Americans (e.g., European Canadians and European Americans) or holistic/context-oriented/interdependent East Asians (e.g., Japanese). We also examined whether Mongolian children and teenagers would draw any particular objects (e.g., houses, clothing, animals, scenic images) which may represent unique characteristics of Mongolian culture.

Materials and Methods

Participants.

A total of 334 school-aged children and teenagers from Grade 1 through Grade 12 at Shine Mongol School in Ulaanbaatar, Mongolia, participated in the current study. The participants consisted of 23 first graders (13 females, eight males, two undeclared), 25 second graders (12 females, 13 males), 29 third graders (14 females, 14 males, one undeclared), 28 fourth graders (18 females, 12 males), 30 fifth graders (15 females, 15 males), 27 sixth graders (13 females, 14 males), 27 seventh graders (11 females, 16 males), 22 eighth graders (11 females, 11 males), 25 ninth graders (14 females, 11 males), 30 tenth graders (13 females, 17 males), 39 eleventh graders (22 females, 17 males), and 29 twelfth graders (21 females, 8 males). An additional 14 students were tested but were not included in our analyses due to the omission of necessary items. The majority of students were born in Mongolia, but 20 students were born abroad (eight in Japan, three in the United States, two in Australia, two in the United Kingdom, one in Korea, one in China, one in Singapore, one in Canada, and one in Germany). All students understood the instructions in Mongolian, and data from these students made up only 5.9% of the total data; therefore, we included their data into our final analyses.

Materials and Procedure

The materials and procedure were identical to those used in the previous studies ( Nand et al., 2014 ; Senzaki et al., 2014 ). Students who participated in the study were provided with a pencil and a 392 mm × 271 mm sheet of paper on which to draw a landscape picture. The study was conducted in a classroom setting, where a male teacher, who is the second author, accompanied by the first author, gave instructions in Mongolian. It was emphasized that there was no right or wrong way to draw the picture, and that the children were free to complete their own artwork as they wished. The classroom teachers were sometimes present to observe the session and help with collecting students’ artwork, but they did not administer the session. After instruction and their consent to participate, the students were asked to draw a landscape image including a human, house, tree, and a horizon. They were also told that they could incorporate any other additional objects into their pictures. To standardize students’ understanding of the concept of horizon, the teacher explained what a horizon is, using the following instruction: “When you go outside, you see that the sky comes down and meets the ground, and makes one line. That line is called a horizon.” The total time of the session including instruction and data collection was 30 min.

Types of Drawings with Horizon Lines

Based on Senzaki et al.’s (2014) coding scheme, we measured the top and bottom parts of the horizon drawn by each student. We then computed the average of the two values as the artwork’s location of horizon, and the ratio of the horizon height against the entire frame height. A research assistant and the third author independently measured the location of the horizon. Intercoder agreement in measuring these values were r = 0.995. For the random 30% of the data, the intraclass correlation coefficient (ICC) between the two coders was ICC = 0.976, [95% CI = 964; 984], indicating an excellent reliability. Disagreement was resolved through discussion.

While the majority of students drew a conventional landscape image, a small number of students produced other patterns of drawings (see Figure 1 ). For example, in some illustrations, a single horizon was drawn but objects were floating above the horizon (coded as “pictures with floating objects”). In these cases, the height of that single line was measured as the location of the horizon. If children drew an air-gap line (a second line in the sky in addition to the line representing the ground), only the ground line was measured (coded as “pictures with air-gap”). If children used the bottom edge of the paper as a horizon line and placed objects on it, a value of 0 (i.e., a height of 0 cm) was given for the location of the horizon (bottom edge line). Lastly, if children drew only floating objects, we categorized the image as having no horizon line (no horizon) and this data was excluded from the analysis. As seen in Table 1 , these patterns are consistent with Canadian and Japanese data ( Nand et al., 2014 ; Senzaki et al., 2014 ). The universality of this pattern has been addressed in previous papers ( Eisner, 1967 ; Lewis, 1990 ; Cox and Chapman, 1995 ; Toku, 2001 ).

Table 1. Grade distributions of understanding the concept of horizon.

Figure 1. A sample of a Mongolian participant’s landscape drawing.

Location of Horizon

First, we carried out the ANOVA’s below by including the gender of the participants as one of individual variables. However, there were no main effects or interaction of gender and other independent variables. Therefore, we collapsed this variable in the analyses reported below.

By taking the participants’ grade as an independent variable, a one-way ANOVA was applied to the ratio of the location of the horizon against the entire frame. As shown in Figure 2 , there was a significant main effect of grade, F (1, 327) = 11.97, p < 0.001, η p 2 = 0.290. The results of multiple t tests indicated that as children grow older, the location of the horizon in their drawings becomes higher. For example: Grade two’s location of horizon ( M = 0.40, SD = 0.22) was significantly higher than that of Grade one’s ( M = 0.27, SD = 0.22), t (322) = 2.82, p < 0.01; Grade three’s location of horizon ( M = 0.54, SD = 0.29) was significantly higher than that of Grade two’s, t (322) = 3.07, p < 0.01. However, Grade four’s location of horizon ( M = 0.61, SD = 0.14) did not significantly differ from that of Grade three’s, t (322) (1.54, ns; and the location of horizon of Grade five ( M = 0.610.61, SD = 0.150.15), Grade six ( M = 0.620.62, SD = 0.160.16), Grade seven ( M = 0.62, SD = 0.09), Grade eight ( M = 0.59, SD = 0.08), Grade nine ( M = 0.65, SD = 0.09), Grade ten ( M = 0.63, SD = 0.18), Grade eleven ( M = 0.64, SD = 0.15), and Grade twelve ( M = 0.63, SD = 0.16) did not significantly differ from each other, t (322) < 1, ns.

Figure 2. The ratio of horizon height to the entire frame height.

The general patterns of the location of the horizon from Grade one through twelve seem to be identical to that of Canadian and Japanese school-aged children and teenagers reported in Nand et al. (2014) and Senzaki et al. (2014) . However, it is important to scrutinize cultural variations in the artworks by comparing the patterns across cultures in detail. We merged the current data with those of previous studies ( Nand et al., 2014 ). A 3 (Culture: Mongolians, Canadians, and Japanese) × 12 (Grade: Grade one through Grade twelve) was applied to the ratio of the location of the horizon against the entire frame in order to examine cultural variations in the artworks. The results indicated that there was a main effect of culture, F (2, 1192) = 117.73, p < 0.001, η p 2 = 0.169. In general, the location of horizon in Mongolian data ( M = 0.58, SD = 0.19) is higher than that of Japanese ( M = 0.53, SD = 0.27), t (1192) = 2.84, p < 0.01, and Canadian’s data ( M = 0.35, SD = 0.21), t (1192) = 15.12, p < 0.001. There was also a main effect of grade, F (11, 1193) = 29.85, p < 0.001, η p 2 = 0.221. Overall, the location of the horizon in drawings became higher with the participant’s increased grade level: Grade two’s location of horizon ( M = 0.38, SD = 0.300.30) was significantly higher than that of Grade one ( M = 0.18, SD = 0.20), t (1192) = 5.89, p < 0.001; Grade three’s location of horizon ( M = 0.37, SD = 0.29) did not differ from that of Grade two, t < 1, ns; Grade four’s location of horizon ( M = 0.46, SD = 0.23) was significantly different from that of Grade three, t (327) = 3.15, p < 0.001; Grade five’s location of horizon ( M = 0.46, SD = 0.23) did not differ from that of Grade four, t < 1, ns; Grade six’s location of horizon ( M = 0.55, SD = 0.24) was higher than that of Grade five, t (1192) = 3.23, p < 0.001; and the location of horizon of Grade seven ( M = 0.58, SD = 0.17), Grade eight ( M = 0.53, SD = 0.16), Grade nine ( M = 0.55, SD = 0.19), Grade ten ( M = 0.55, SD = 0.20), Grade eleven ( M = 0.59, SD = 0.16), and Grade twelve ( M = 0.56, SD = 0.19) did not significantly differ from each other, t s(1192) < 1.50, ns.

More importantly, there were interactions between culture and grade levels, F (22, 1192) = 2.93, p < 0.001, η p 2 = 0.053 (see Figure 2 ). The location of horizons drawn by all grades of Mongolians was higher than that of Canadians: Grade one: t (1192) = 2.44, p < 0.01; Grade two: t (1192) = 4.00, p < 0.001; Grade three t (1192) = 2.44, p < 0.01; Grade four: t (1192) = 2.44, p < 0.01; Grade five: t (1192) = 2.44, p < 0.01; Grade six: t (1192) = 2.44, p < 0.01; Grade seven: t (1192) = 2.44, p < 0.01; Grade eight: t (1192) = 2.44, p < 0.01; Grade nine: t (1192) = 2.44, p < 0.01; Grade ten: t (1192) = 2.44, p < 0.01; Grade eleven: t (1192) = 2.44, p < 0.01; and Grade twelve: t (1192) = 2.44, p < 0.01. As for the comparison between Japanese and Mongolian data, there were a few significant differences in the location of the horizon. First, the location of horizons drawn by Mongolian children and teenagers was higher than that of their Japanese counterparts only in Grade one: t (1192) = 2.08, p < 0.05; Grade five: t (1192) = 2.54, p < 0.01; Grade six: t (1192) = 2.44, p < 0.01; Grade nine: t (1192) = 1.99, p < 0.05; and Grade ten: t (1192) = 2.44, p < 0.01. The location of horizons drawn by Japanese was higher than that of their Mongolian counterparts in Grade two, t (1192) = 2.33, p < 0.02, and there were no statistical significances in the location of horizons in Grades three, four, seven, eight, eleven, and twelve, t s(1192) < 1.60, ns. In sum, the cross-cultural comparisons among Canadians, Japanese, and Mongolians allowed us to conclude that the pattern of Mongolian data was quite similar to that of Japanese data, but substantially different from Canadian data.

Types of Houses

In addition to the cross-cultural comparisons regarding the locations of horizons, we observed several unique drawing styles in the Mongolian data. One aim of the current paper was to emphasize the importance of overcoming the WEIRD issue in psychological research (e.g., Henrich et al., 2010 ) and extend away from the East vs. West framework (e.g., Nisbett, 2003 Masuda, 2017 ). In order to do this, we first focused on the types of houses. Historically, Mongolian houses are a round shaped portable tent called a ger , made of wood and felt, a textile material that is produced by matting, condensing, and pressing fiber of sheep wool. We examined whether children and teenagers drew modern houses (e.g., Western style houses) or traditional ger houses (see Figure 3 ). Participants were asked to draw at least one house in their landscape as one of the required objects to complete their drawing. In the analysis phase, we assigned a value of one for each type of house depicted in the drawing. For example, if a participant drew two traditional houses and a modern house in his/her artwork, we assigned 1, 1, respectively. If they drew a traditional house but did not draw a modern house, we assigned 1, 0, respectively.

Figure 3. Samples of traditional vs. modern houses drawn by Mongolian participants.

Next, we contrasted whether there were any trends in the types of houses, by carrying out a 2 (Types of Houses: traditional vs. modern) × 12 (Grade: one through twelve) ANOVA, treating types of houses as a repeated measure. The results indicated that there was a main effect of types of houses, F (1, 322) = 74.21, p < 0.001, η p 2 = 0.187. Overall, Mongolian children and teenagers were more likely to draw traditional houses ( M = 0.73, SD = 0.44) than modern houses ( M = 0.33, SD = 0.47). There was an interaction between types of houses and grade as well, F (1, 322) = 1,89, p = 0.04, η p 2 = 0.061. The results of multiple t tests indicated that participants drew traditional houses more than modern houses in Grade two, t (322) = 5.87, p < 0.001; Grade three, t (322) = 4.59, p < 0.001; Grade four, t (322) = 3.57, p < 0.001; Grade five, t (322) = 3.34, p < 0.005; Grade six, t (322) = 2.73, p < 0.05; Grade seven, t (322) = 2.94, p < 0.01; Grade ten, t (322) = 2.25, p < 0.05; Grade eleven, t (322) = 3.65, p < 0.001; and Grade twelve, t (322) = 2.37, p < 0.05, but the pattern did not reach statistical significance in Grade eight, t (322) = 1.30, ns, and Grade nine, t < 1, ns. Finally, the pattern was reversed in Grade one but again did not reach statistical significance, t < 1, ns (see Figure 4 ).

Figure 4. The ratio of traditional vs. modern houses.

Types of Clothes

Second, we examined whether children and teenagers drew people with modern clothes (e.g., Western style clothes) or traditional clothes called deel (see Figure 5 ). Participants were asked to draw at least one person in the landscape image. Types of clothes were categorized into two types: modern vs. traditional. Similar to the analyses in the previous section, we assigned a value of one for each type of clothing observed. For example, if they drew a person who wore traditional clothes and two people who wore modern clothes, we assigned 1, 1, respectively. If they drew a person with traditional clothes but did not draw a person with modern clothes, we assigned 1, 0, respectively. Then we contrasted whether there were any trends in the types of clothes, by carrying out a 2 (Types of Clothes: traditional vs. modern) × 12 (Grade: one through twelve) ANOVA, treating types of houses as a repeated measure. The results indicated that there was a main effect of types of clothes, F (1, 322) = 110.29, p < 0.001, η p 2 = 0.255. Overall, Mongolian children and teenagers were more likely to draw people with modern clothes ( M = 0.73, SD = 0.44) than traditional clothes ( M = 0.30, SD = 0.46). There was an interaction between types of clothes and grade as well, F (1, 322) = 3,18, p < 0.001, η p 2 = 0.098. The results of multiple t tests indicated that participants drew modern clothes more than traditional clothes in Grade one, t (22) = 15.20, p < 0.001; Grade two, t (24) = 5.31, p < 0.001; Grade three, t (28) = 5.27, p < 0.001; Grade four, t (27) = 2.50, p < 0.02; Grade five, t (29) = 2.90, p < 0.01; Grade six, t (26) = 3.32, p < 0.005; Grade eight, t (21) = 2.93, p < 0.01; Grade nine, t (24) = 2.31, p < 0.05; and Grade ten, t (29) = 3.75, p < 0.001; however, this pattern did not reach statistical significance in Grade seven, t (26) = 1.77, 0.05 < p < 0.10; Grade eleven, t < 1, ns; or Grade twelve, t (29) = 1.68, p > 0.10 (See Figure 6 ).

Figure 5. Samples of traditional vs. modern clothes drawn by Mongolian participants.

Figure 6. The ratio of traditional vs. modern clothes.

Types of Animals

Although it was not required, many Mongolian children and teenagers drew animals including sheep, horses, goats, dogs, cows, camels, and reindeer as additional objects in their artwork (see Figure 7 ). We assume that the large number of animal images is due to the participants’ familiarity with herding lifestyles. Historically, Mongolians have lived with five animals including horses, sheep, goats, camels, and cows. Additionally, dogs are seen as useful domesticated animals which serve as shepherds, and reindeer have been domesticated in Western and Northern Mongolia, but are not as popular in Central, South, and East Mongolia. We targeted these seven animals since they were most commonly drawn. A 7 (Types of Animals: Sheep, Horse, Goat, Dog, Cow, Camel, and Reindeer) × 12 (Grade one through twelve) ANOVA was carried out, using the number of Types of Animals as a repeated measure (see Figure 8 ). The results indicated that there was a main effect of types of animals, F (1, 322) = 34.34, p < 0.001, η p 2 = 0.096. Overall, Mongolian children and teenagers draw more sheep ( M = 3.00, SD = 9.81) than horses ( M = 0.21, SD = 0.61), t (322) = 5.25, p < 0.001, camels ( M = 0.01, SD = 0.18), t (322) = 5.56, p < 0.001, goats ( M = 0.05, SD = 0.33), t (322) = 5.51, p < 0.001, cows ( M = 0.03, SD = 0.28), t (322) = 5.54, p < 0.001, dogs ( M = 0.05, SD = 0.22), t (322) = 5.49, p < 0.001, and reindeer ( M = 0.01, SD = 0.16), t (322) = 5.57. p < 0.001. The second most popular animal in their drawings were horses. They drew more horses than camels, t (322) = 5.58, p < 0.001, goats, t (322) = 4.63, p < 0.001, cows, t (322) = 4.98, p < 0.001, dogs, t (322) = 4.63, p < 0.001, and reindeer, t (322) = 5.79, p < 0.001. Goats and dogs were more popular than reindeer, t (322) = 2.07, p < 0.05 and t (322) = 2.77, p < 0.01, respectively. Other comparisons among animals did not reach statistical significance.

Figure 7. Samples of animals drawn by Mongolian participants.

Figure 8. The number of accounts of seven types of animals: Horses, camels, sheep, goats, cows, dogs, and reindeer.

There was an effect of grade, F (11, 322) = 2.16, p = 0.017, η p 2 = 0.069, but it should be qualified by the interaction between types of animals and grade as well, F (11, 322) = 1.99, p = 0.029, η p 2 = 0.064. The results of multiple t -tests indicated that as children and teenagers’ grades went up, they drew more sheep. Young school-aged children rarely drew sheep, and the values were significantly lower for Grade one ( M = 0.00, SD = 0.00) participant’s when compared to Grade seven ( M = 3.11, SD = 6.19), t (322) = 3.01, p < 0.001, Grade two ( M = 0.20, SD = 0.81), t (322) = 2.88, p < 0.001, Grade three ( M = 0.48, SD = 1.50), t (322) = 2.70, p < 0.001, and Grade four ( M = 0.46, SD = 2.26), t (322) = 2.70, p < 001, but there were no differences between Grade five ( M = 1.67, SD = 7.50) and seven ( M = 3.11, SD = 6.19), t (322) = 1.49, ns, and between Grade six ( M = 1.67, SD = 4.67) and seven, t (322) = 1.45, ns. However, there were significant gaps in values between Grade seven and nine ( M = 6.16, SD = 19.97), t (322) = 3.02, p < 0.001 as well as Grade eight ( M = 1.09, SD = 2.34) and nine, t (322) = 4.77, p < 0.001. Grade nine, ten ( M = 5.70, SD = 13.03), eleven ( M = 6.08, SD = 9.04), and twelve ( M = 7.07, SD = 17.57) showed the highest values regarding the number of sheep and the value of Grades, however, we did not observe any trends in other animals, t s(322) < 1, p < 0.001.

Correlational Analyses

We further analyzed associations between the location of the horizon and the number of modern/traditional houses, modern/traditional clothes, and animals drawn in the scene. The results ( N = 334) indicated that there were significant positive correlations between the location of the horizon and the number of traditional houses ( r = 0.13, p = 0.01), traditional clothes ( r = 0.21, p < 0.001) and sheep ( r = 12, p = 0.03), suggesting that traditional Mongolian cultural resources may sustain their holistic/context-oriented/interdependent cognition, rather than analytic/object-oriented/independent cognition.

The number of traditional houses positively correlated with the number of traditional clothes ( r = 0.21, p < 0.001), horses ( r = 0.27. p < 0.001), sheep ( r = 0.21, p < 0.001), and goats ( r = 0.15, p < 0.006). The number of traditional clothes also positively correlated with the number of horses ( r = 0.17, p = 0.002) and goats ( r = 0.12, p = 0.034). In contrast, the number of modern houses negatively correlated with the number of traditional houses ( r = −0.28, p < 0.001), and horses ( r = 11, p = 046), but positively correlated with the number of modern clothes ( r = 0.26, p < 0.001). The number of modern clothes negatively correlated with the number of traditional clothes ( r = −0.30, p < 0.001), but positively correlated with the number of modern houses ( r = 0.26, p < 0.001). These findings suggest that there was clear consistency among the objects drawn by Mongolian school-age children: the more they drew traditional objects, the less they drew modern objects, and vice-versa, suggesting that they still have rich and tangible sources for drawing traditional scenes in modern Mongolia, and that they conceptually distinguish traditional objects from modern objects.

For drawings of animals, the number of horses positively correlated with the number of sheep ( r = 0.20, p < 0.001) and goats ( r = 0.22, p < 0.001). The number of camels positively correlated with the number of goats ( r = 0.14, p < 0.011). Finally, the number of sheep positively correlated with the number of goats ( r = 0.11, p < 0.042). These findings suggest that Mongolian school-age children completed the assigned drawing with rich sources from herding culture, when they drew such countryside scenes.

Types of Mountains

Finally, there was one more unique characteristic in Mongolian children and teenagers’ drawings worth mentioning ( Table 2 ). A small number of participants across almost all grades drew a multi layered chain of mountains ( Figure 9 ). This style of drawing is observable in conventional artworks and images in the city. However, no Canadian or Japanese participants drew mountain chains in such a way. This implies that Mongolian children and teenagers were exposed to a specific visual representation accessible in their society and internalized the techniques of drawing images in accordance to the culturally shared tradition. Further investigation into the transmission of cultural representations of artwork is required.

Table 2. Grade distributions of culture-specific mountain drawings.

Figure 9. A sample image with a culturally specific mountain drawing.

The current case study examined Mongolian children and teenagers’ landscape artwork. The results of local comparisons of Mongolian data, and cross-cultural comparisons between Mongolians, Canadians, and Japanese provided us with a variety of new knowledge. First of all, similar to their Canadian and Japanese counterparts, young Mongolian children (e.g., Grade one) captured three-dimensional scenes by placing the horizon in a lower section of the frame. But the location of the horizon gradually moved up as their grade level increased. Finally, a culturally dominant way of landscape drawing styles stabilized around Grades four to five, and became constant in their teenage years. Overall, the results of the Mongolian data were more similar to that of Japanese than to Canadians, suggesting that, while being exposed to their pastoral social orientation (which has been discussed as the antecedent of analytic/object-oriented/independent cognition), Mongolian children and teenagers were more likely to be influenced by their holistic/context-oriented/interdependent cognition when they drew landscape images (e.g., Masuda, 2017 ; Masuda et al., 2019 ).

Beyond the discussions of universality and cultural specificity of landscape drawing, the current study also provided us with rich information on Mongolian children and teenagers’ life experiences. For example, while the school is situated in the center of Ulaanbaatar, the capital city of Mongolia, where Western style houses and buildings are dominant, many children in fact have had the opportunity to visit the countryside and view traditional ger houses. We assume that such experiences provided an image of what a unique Mongolian landscape looks like. Therefore, when they were asked to complete the landscape drawing, Mongolian children and teenagers seem to accurately represent traditional ger houses. In contrast, though traditional Mongolian clothes are popular for attending special events such as ritual ceremonies and festivals, modern clothes are dominant both in cities and the countryside. We assume that when Mongolian children and teenagers were asked to draw a landscape drawing, they reflected on images of familiar clothing for their drawings. However, it is interesting that such a tendency weakened as they became teenagers, potentially implying that adolescents think the traditional deel clothes play an important role in identifying themselves as mature Mongolians. Future studies should further investigate the relationship between cultural traditions and identity.

In terms of the types of animals, the data showed that sheep and horses were two popular animals in the landscape drawings. The number of sheep drawn increased gradually as children attended higher grades. These results may reflect the fact that older children and teenagers were more aware of the importance of the pastoral economy in Mongolia as well as the fact that horses are an important symbol that represent this society, or it may just reflect the fact that older children are generally more skilled at drawing. The fact that the number of sheep are larger than any of the other animals may reflect that sheep are dominantly popular around the village: compared to horses and cows which search for grass far from the village, goats and sheep roam the grassland closer to the village, which allow them to be viewed more frequently. Furthermore, the ratio of goats to sheep in this area is traditionally 1:10. As a result, herds of sheep are frequently viewed by Mongolians, which can explain their patterns of drawings. The current results may accurately represent reality for Mongolians.

The findings based on correlational analyses further give credence to the connection between their holistic/context-oriented/interdependent drawing style and their motivation to draw traditional resources such as traditional ger and deel . The number of sheep also supports this connection. One may question why the pattern of cognition shared by this traditionally herding-oriented culture appears to contradict with that of other herding societies (e.g., Uskul et al., 2008 ). Fijn’s (2011) observation in her book “Living with Herds: Human-Animal Co-existence in Mongolia” may provide some insights. In her book, she observed that Mongolians’ pictorial depiction of their homeland captures the whole range of valley and mountain in their drawing as if they perceive the connectedness of all elements (p. 58), suggesting that it is natural for them to sustain holistic/context-oriented/interdependent tendencies. Future research should investigate possibilities of more nuanced differences in cognition among these traditional herding cultures.

Limitations

While we maintain that the cultural variations in drawing styles could be explained by the framework of holistic vs. analytic cognition, there remain other possibilities which affect Mongolian school age children’s drawing patterns, such as their perceived social expectations regarding their performance, and their intentions on what they want to communicate to others. For instance, their sense of social desirability to express their cultural identity may direct them to draw more traditional objects rather than modern objects in the scenes. By adding other measures, future studies need to mitigate such possible biases.

It is also noteworthy that several years have passed between the collection of the current Mongolian data and previous studies targeting Canadians and Japanese. While we maintain that patterns of cognition do not change quickly, and the data would be replicable if we were able to collect Canadian and Japanese data again, it is prudent to address this limitation. Future research should elucidate this point.

Finally, the current study assumed that there is a sensitive period for school-age children to develop culturally specific patterns of responses, and the patterns we observed are similar to those of young adults in previous studies ( Nand et al., 2014 ; Senzaki et al., 2014 ). Therefore, it was crucial for the current study to select school-age children as subjects and match their age range with the previous studies. We examined whether there are any trends regarding how they draw images, and whether the patterns are similar to holistic Japanese school-age children’s data or analytic Canadian school-age children’s data. While we argue that this preliminary investigation successfully controlled for age factors, and replicated the effectiveness of the methodology, it is also prudent to further examine whether the patterns are actually sustained among young adults, middle-aged, and elder people in Mongolia. By using this useful drawing task, we also plan to examine potential within-culture variations between those who live in cities and those who live in the countryside, such as mountainous and desert areas.

General Discussion

The current paper addressed the importance for cultural psychologists to target research fields outside of G7 and G20 countries, while going beyond the constraints of the WEIRD cultures and the East/West dichotomy. While reviewing classic cross-cultural studies in the 1960s, we discussed the similarities between them and contemporary cultural psychology. At the same time, we addressed the field’s need to evolve by focusing more on the internalization and socialization processes of a given culture’s meaning system ( Bruner, 1990 ; Shweder, 1991 ; Miller, 1999 ) in order to elucidate the impact of culture on human cognition. The motivation to search for universal phenomena is inherent in scientific investigation, but we may too easily accept equivalency in cognition across cultures without a broad enough sample set outside of North America. Given recent discourse on the pros and cons of globalization, now is a good time to expand our research in order to scientifically define culture’s role on cognition—and the actions we take that have global scope. We hope that our paper will motivate scholars to break through existing constraints in our field.

Here, we include a case study from Mongolia, and compare the data with previous cross-cultural findings from Japan and Canada ( Nand et al., 2014 ; Senzaki et al., 2014 ). The case study had several implications. First, it demonstrated a possible way of extending established research to a new cultural site, Mongolia. Second, the addition of new cultural data suggested universal patterns of human development with regards to the concept of horizon. For example, there appears to be a general trend in which the pictorial representation of the location of the horizon gradually rises across 12 years of schooling. Third, by incorporating the current data into the existing dataset ( Nand et al., 2014 ), we identified cultural similarities and differences between Mongolians, Japanese, and Canadians. These findings allow us to speculate the causes of cultural variation in drawing styles such as the level of interdependence, holistic thinking style, and specific aspects of herding traditions shared in Mongolia. Future studies must investigate the causes of cultural variations in order to understand the mutual relationship between culture and the human mind.

How to Conduct Research in a New Culture

In addition to presenting our case study, we would like to share our experiences in conducting cultural research. Here, we will discuss some potential challenges along with possible solutions, in hopes that they will inform new cultural researchers. Some of these points have been already discussed in anthropology and cultural studies, yet we maintain it is worth sharing them with contemporary cultural psychologists who are interested in broadening their scope of research.

Respect the Target Culture’s Rules and Customs

Each culture has its own rules and customs for communicating and creating interpersonal relationships with people. Although researchers may be more comfortable following their own rules and customs, it is important for them to accommodate the guidelines of the target culture. This message is especially important for researchers studying basic psychological processes who have collected data from participants only in their cultural community, because, in most cases, they would be unaware of substantial cultural variations in human behaviors in general. We strongly urge these researchers to expose themselves to new cultural experiences and deeply learn about the target culture and its language. Such observational and anthropological knowledge will be the foundation of their research ideas.

Find a Way to Thank Local Collaborators

Finding collaborators in a new culture is indeed time-consuming and laborious. Once you create a relationship with them, it is necessary for researchers to find a way to thank them, both in the short-term and the long-term. Benefits for the collaborators could include direct monetary support or official recruitment of paid assistants. However, there are also many indirect benefits. For example, if you collect data at a high school, the local collaborators may request you to give a series of lectures, to establish exchange programs, or even collect data from your own culture. Unidirectional relationships can be destructive, so it is important to search for long-term mutual benefits after the data collection is complete, so that a positive relationship can be formed between cultures.

Spend Enough Time Discussing Research Ethics

While collecting data under the institution to which you belong, the ethics board requires you to follow the board’s cultural ethics and rules. In some cultures, however, there might not be such a human ethics board, or if there is, the structure and procedure of conducting research might be quite different from yours. In this case, you are required to discuss with both human ethics boards and representatives of the target culture to find a comparable and optimal set of rules to follow. This may include how to get consent and agreement, maintaining participants’ voluntary participation rules and their right to select alternative tasks, withdrawal from the session, confidentiality of participants’ identities, a data withdrawal policy, and permission for researchers to publicly report their findings. The meticulous solution and optimization will be the foundation of your publication in international journals which meet the standard of international academia.

Using Easy-to-Administer Research Materials

Beginning with an easy task is a suitable way to collect data from a new target culture for many reasons. First, procedural ease helps the collaborators administer the session, and reduces potential mistakes. Second, the first experience is key for the collaborators to estimate the cost of the research and future collaborations. Third, carrying specific experimental devices and materials are costly for both researchers and collaborators, and may require filling out documents and paying extra fees when going through customs. In general, paper-and-pencil materials are tangible and make it easy for participants to follow the instructions. A successful and positive first experience is essential for developing a long-term relationship between researchers and local collaborators.

Sharing the Findings With Local Collaborators

It is the researchers’ responsibility to discuss and get approval from the local collaborators when their paper is accepted by a professional journal. Once the paper is published, it can impact the collaborators’ personal lives, their institution, and even their culture—especially when the paper addresses a core component of their cultural values to which they are strongly associated. Providing collaborators with enough time to consider the costs and benefits of publishing the paper allows both researchers and collaborators to develop confidence and responsibility regarding their research program. If the population size of a given society is small, the impact of a single publication may strongly influence the target society. Continuous observation of researchers’ output may be required, and researchers need to answer the local people’s queries and concerns responsibly.

This paper was intended to provide readers with advice to help further advance the field of cultural psychology. We believe that acknowledging the long history of research on cultural variations in basic perceptual processes since the 1960s and reviving these lines of research will enrich the discourse of cultural psychology. Through the current study, we shared our experience of starting novel research with collaborators from a school in Ulaanbaatar, Mongolia, and reported the findings. Our future research plans include examining potential variabilities between people living in the countryside and the city, as well as the effect of geographical and vocational variation on Mongolian mentalities. We hope this paper will motivate cultural researchers to go abroad and establish new research sites for advancing cultural psychology.

Data Availability Statement

The original contributions presented in the study are included in the article/supplementary files, further inquiries can be directed to the corresponding author.

Ethics Statement

The studies involving human participants were reviewed and approved by Research Ethics Board, University of Alberta; Shine Mongol School. Written informed consent from the participants’ legal guardian/next of kin was not required to participate in this study in accordance with the national legislation and the institutional requirements.

Author Contributions

TM analyzed the data and wrote a main part of the manuscript. BB administered whole sessions and wrote a part of the manuscript. SS analyzed the data and wrote a part of the manuscript. All authors contributed to the article and approved the submitted version.

This study is supported by Social Sciences and Humanities Council of Canada, RES0033263.

Conflict of Interest

The authors declare that the research was conducted in the absence of any commercial or financial relationships that could be construed as a potential conflict of interest.

Acknowledgments

We are thankful to Dr. Ganzorig Chimed, Professor of Nano Science and Nanoengineering, New Mongol Institute of Technology, Dr. Naranbayar Purevsuren, the former Principal of Shine Mongol School, and all of the assistants at Shine Mongol Academy, including Munkhbayasgalan Narantsatsralt, Solongo Baatarkhuu, Tsolmon Otgonjargal, Nyamjargal Ochirkhuyag, Dulamsuren Dashzeveg, Lkhamsuren Myagmarsuren, and Bayart-Od Tsolmon for allowing us to carry out the study. We also thank Dr. Ryo Takiguchi at Mongol Japanese Center and Dr. Susumu Ohnuma at Hokkaido University who have created a network between our research team and Shine Mongol School, which allowed us to conduct this study. We also thank Aki Awatsu and Kristina Nand for sharing their data, and Dr. Natasha Fijn and Dr. Robert J. Losey for their advice for the early part of our project. Finally, we thank Khulan Enkhtaivan for her assistance with data entry and material translations between Mongolian and English, Rintaro Alexander Masuda for his assistance with data analyses, and Jamie Nisbet and Neill Walker for their proofreading and editing of the manuscript.

• ^ The studies involving human participants were reviewed and approved by the Research Ethics Office, University of Alberta. Written informed consent from the participants’ legal guardian/next of kin was not required to participate in this study in accordance with national legislation and institutional requirements.

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Keywords : culture, Mongolia, drawing, holistic vs. analytic attention, WEIRD

Citation: Masuda T, Batdorj B and Senzaki S (2020) Culture and Attention: Future Directions to Expand Research Beyond the Geographical Regions of WEIRD Cultures. Front. Psychol. 11:1394. doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2020.01394

Received: 04 October 2019; Accepted: 25 May 2020; Published: 24 July 2020.

Reviewed by:

Copyright © 2020 Masuda, Batdorj and Senzaki. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY) . The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) and the copyright owner(s) are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.

*Correspondence: Takahiko Masuda; [email protected]

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Human Relations Area Files

Cultural information for education and research, basic guide to cross-cultural research.

Carol R. Ember and Melvin Ember

This brief guide takes you through the basic steps of a cross-cultural study using the HRAF Collection of Ethnography– on paper, fiche, or online ( eHRAF World Cultures ).

After reviewing the history of the HRAF Collection of Ethnography, we start with a discussion of the kinds of questions cross-cultural researchers investigate, and why they want to investigate them. Then we discuss how to choose a sample, how to develop measures, and how to analyze results.

Introduction

The growing concern of students, scholars, and the general public to understand ethnic conflict, cultural diversity, and global problems has generated a demand for educational and research programs emphasizing the worldwide, comparative study of human behavior and society. The development of cross-cultural and area studies requires a large mass of readily available, organized cultural information; conventional sources of such information are widely scattered and often inaccessible, and often too expensive to assemble and utilize effectively. The HRAF Collections are designed to overcome this traditional barrier to research.

The HRAF Collection of Ethnography is a unique source of information on the cultures of the world, and as of April 2008 the complete collection contained over a million pages of indexed information on about 400 different cultural, ethnic, religious, and national groups around the world. The collection was developed by the Human Relations Area Files, Inc. (HRAF), a non-profit research organization based at Yale University. For almost fifty years, HRAF has served the educational community and contributed to an understanding of world cultures by assembling, indexing, and providing access to primary research materials relevant to the social sciences, and by stimulating and facilitating training and research in these fields.

Development of the HRAF Collections began with the belief that enduring generalizations about human behavior and culture will emerge from a wealth of knowledge about the ways in which the different peoples of the world live. In 1937 at the Institute of Human Relations, Yale University, under the direction of the Institute’s Director, Mark A. May, and Professor George Peter Murdock, a small group of researchers attempted to design a system by means of which the cultural, behavioral, and background information on a society might be organized. A fundamental part of that system was a universal topical classification scheme, the Outline of Cultural Materials–OCM (Murdock et al. 2008), which is still integral to the work HRAF does today.

In 1949, the Human Relations Area Files was incorporated in the State of Connecticut, with Harvard University, the University of Oklahoma, the University of Pennsylvania, the University of Washington, and Yale University as its founding member institutions. These five were joined within the year by the University of Chicago, the University of North Carolina, and the University of Southern California. Today, hundreds of colleges, universities, libraries, museums, and research institutions in the United States and other countries have full or partial access to the HRAF Collection of Ethnography. (See the member list for institutions that are active members of the online version, eHRAF World Cultures.)

The HRAF Collection of Ethnography contains mostly primary source materials – mainly published books and articles, but including some unpublished manuscripts and dissertations – on selected cultures or societies representing all major regions of the world. The materials are organized and indexed by a unique method designed for rapid and accurate retrieval of specific data on given cultures and topics. HRAF’s system of organization and classification of source material presents information in a manner that significantly increases the usefulness of original source materials. Researchers can use the Collection of Ethnography in four different media: the original paper files, fiche, and on the World Wide Web. Until 1958, the HRAF Collection was produced and distributed as paper files: source materials were manually reproduced on 5″ x 8″ paper slips called File pages, and then filed by subject (OCM) category and by culture. Wider distribution of the collection was facilitated in 1958 with the development of the HRAF Microfiles Program. Materials from the paper files were processed into microfiche and issued in annual installments to participating institutions; Installment 42 was the last microfiche series issued to members.

In the 1980’s, HRAF began developing an electronic publishing program with the intention of distributing the HRAF Collection of Ethnography exclusively through electronic means. The Cross-Cultural CDs were the first result of this effort, providing researchers with ten collections on such topics as old age, marriage, religion, and human sexuality, excerpted from HRAF’s 60-Culture Probability Sample Files (PSF). In 1993, the first installment of the full-text HRAF Collection of Ethnography on CD-ROM (eHRAF) was issued to members with the plan of converting the entire 60-Culture PSF, plus new files covering North American immigrant groups, by the year 1999. Additional installments are added annually. As of April 2008, there were 165 cultures online .

Using eHRAF is a relatively straightforward process. Mechanics of use and research techniques are similar in many respects to standard library practices; searching follows the same principles and techniques, such as Boolean logic, that are used for other electronic educational collections.

Organization and Classification

In the paper and fiche versions of the HRAF Collection of Ethnography all documents that contain information about a particular culture are grouped together in a collection for that culture. Each culture collection is identified by a unique alphanumeric code according to the Outline of World Cultures–OWC (Murdock 1983) . In the OWC all the cultures are classified according to geographical regions:

A – Asia E – Europe F – Africa M – Middle East N – North America O – Oceania R – Eurasia (cultures located in the former Soviet Union and Russia) S – South America

There is one exception to this system: Muslim societies in Africa are classified as being in the Middle East. In its recent literature, HRAF has begun to organize those Muslim cultures under Africa, although they retain the same OWC code.

All the cultures in the paper and microfiche version of the HRAF Collection of Ethnography are grouped into these eight regions. Thus, all the documents pertaining to African cultures are grouped together and their OWC begins with “F.” Each of the major regions is then subdivided, usually on a political basis, into sub-regions designated by the addition of a second letter: “FF” designates the country of Nigeria and its component cultural units, while “SC” indicates that the culture described is in the South American country of Colombia. Finally, within each sub-region, more specific units are defined and assigned a number; these may be country entities, such as “RD01” for Ukraine, or “cultural” units such as “FL12” for the Maasai. Each culture is therefore listed in its regional, political, and cultural context within the Collection.

In eHRAF World Cultures, the OWC number is de-emphasized and cultures are ordered by major geographical regions arranged in alphabetical order: Africa, Asia, Europe, Middle America and the Caribbean, Middle East, North America, Oceania, and South America. The OWC number is listed in the Culture Profile (Browse/Cultures).

Selection of Cultures

Several thousand cultures are listed in the OWC, but not all the cultures on the list are included in the HRAF Collection of Ethnography. The cultures in the Collection are selected mainly on the basis of the following criteria:

(a) Maximum cultural diversity : the cultures should represent, as far as possible, the known range and variety of cultural types in terms of language, history, economy, and social organization.

(b) Maximum geographical dispersal : the cultures should be geographically representative of all major world areas and all major ecological settings.

(c) Adequacy of literature : within the scope of the two preceding criteria, the cultures should have a quantitatively and qualitatively adequate literature coverage.

(d) Special initiatives:  from time to time HRAF undertook to build special kinds of collections such as: immigrant and other subcultures within North America; cities; and country files.

Source Materials

Once the decision has been reached to build a collection on a particular culture, extensive bibliographic research is undertaken to identify as thoroughly as possible all of the significant literature on that culture. HRAF also solicits the advice and expertise of specialists. As always, researchers are encouraged to inform HRAF of any salient material which might have escaped notice.

The materials processed for the Collection of Ethnography are largely descriptive rather than theoretical, with the great majority being primary documents resulting from field observation. The ideal document is one which consists of a detailed description of a culture, or of a particular community or region within that culture, written on the basis of prolonged residence among the people documented by a professional social scientist. Many documents which do not meet all the criteria are included in the Collection of Ethnography because they are still important pieces of information; in fact, it is likely that they may be the only sources available for particular time periods, regions, or subjects. Thus the collection for each culture may contain documents written by travelers, missionaries, colonial officials, traders, etc. The Collection of Ethnography provides researchers with a comprehensive picture of life in one or more communities and in one or more time periods.

Classification

Every page in each document is indexed and assigned any number of appropriate subject category codes according to the classification scheme in the Outline of Cultural Materials (OCM) (Murdock et al. 2008; online versions); the subject codes are sometimes referred to as OCMs. The OCM consists of 710 subject categories plus a category numbered “000” for unclassified materials. The 710 categories are grouped into seventy-nine major subject divisions, each assigned a three-digit code ranging from 100 (Orientation) to 880 (Adolescence, Adulthood, and Old Age). Within each major subject division, up to nine more specific categories are defined. For example, the (Family (590) division is subdivided into seven more specific subject categories as follows: Residence (591), Household (592), Family Relationships (593), Nuclear Family (594), Polygamy (595), Extended Families (596), and Adoption (597).

Each category in the OCM includes a brief descriptive statement, indicating the range of information which may be classified under that category. Beneath this statement is usually a list of cross-references to other categories under which related information may be classified.

The OCM contains a detailed index which directs the researcher to OCM numbers relevant for their search. The OCM subjects are clearly defined in the OCM, but a few are essential to effective use of the HRAF Collection of Ethnography and bear mentioning here.

Every document page has at least one OCM assigned to it. If there are no pertinent subject categories, “000” indicating non-classified data is applied. In the paper and microfiche, the OCMs are written in roughly where the subject starts. Sometimes an OCM will apply to a particular sentence, although most OCMs apply to at least a section of a paragraph. For eHRAF all OCMs are located at the paragraph level. If five consecutive paragraphs discuss categories 585, 578, and 602, all three OCMs will appear at the beginning of each of the five paragraphs until the subject changes.

What’s the Question?

Cross-cultural (worldwide comparative) researchers ask four kinds of questions. The first is descriptive and deals with the prevalence or frequency of a trait: What percentage of the world’s societies practice polygyny? Which is the most important subsistence activity among food collectors – gathering, hunting, or fishing? How common is female infanticide? A second kind of question considers the causes of a trait or custom. Questions: Why is polygyny permitted in most societies known to anthropology? Why do women (as opposed to men) do most of the agricultural work in some societies? Why is the extended family the customary form of household in many societies? The third kind of question explores the consequences or effects of a particular trait or custom. What are the effects on infant care of high involvement of women in subsistence activities? Does punitive childtraining affect the frequency of warfare? The fourth question, which is not significantly different from the second and third, is a relational question. Rather than postulating causes or consequences, a researcher may simply ask how a particular aspect of culture may be associated with some other aspect(s). For example: Is there an association between most important subsistence activity and level of political complexity?

Of these four questions, the causal question is the most challenging because it does not completely specify what the researcher needs to do. The descriptive question tells the researcher what to count. The “consequence” and “relational” questions both specify two sets of phenomena that may be related. But the causal question does not tell the researcher where to look for causes. It only specifies what scientists call the dependent variable (the thing to be explained).

Think of the causal question as analogous to the format of a detective story. After a murder is committed the detective may know a lot about the crime, but not “whodunit” or why. Finding the solution usually entails hypothesizing about suspects and their possible motives and opportunities, eliminating the implausible possibilities, and concluding who is probably the culprit.

Similarly, in science, the pursuit of causes involves the testing of alternative explanations or theories which purport to say why something is the way it is. The researcher who chooses a causal question needs to identify plausible explanations or theories to test and to decide on a strategy (for collecting and analyzing data) that could falsify or disconfirm explanations. If all theories fail, researchers must come up with new theories. Although these requirements may suggest that the researcher who searches for causes may need to act differently from other researchers, this is really not the case, as we shall see.

The basic strategy for examining relationships in cross-cultural research is the same, whether the relationship involves presumed causes, consequences, or just hypothesized association. To illustrate that strategy, let us turn to an example of a test of a causal explanation.

In the first study we did together (M. Ember and C.R. Ember 1971), our question was: Why do some societies practice matrilocal residence and others patrilocal residence? We started where most people start – with explanations found in the literature. One of the most common was the idea that the division of labor based on gender in primary subsistence activities would largely determine residence after marriage (Lippert 1931: 237; Linton 1936: 168-69; Murdock 1949: 203ff.) In other words, female dominance in subsistence should produce matrilocality; male dominance should produce patrilocality. What makes this a causal explanation are the words “determine” and “should produce,” which are equivalent to using the word “cause.” But, as philosophers of science tell us, causes cannot be directly verified. Even if we can be sure that presumed causes preceded the presumed effects, we cannot rule out the possibility that something else is the real cause.

So how do we test such a causal explanation? The simplest way is to examine a relationship that should be true if the theory is correct, and then make a statistical test to see if the predicted relationship actually occurs significantly more often than would be expected by chance. In our own study of matrilocal versus patrilocal residence, we derived the following prediction from the “division of labor” theory: if females did relatively more work than males, residence would tend to be matrilocal; if males did relatively more subsistence work, residence would tend to be patrilocal. Notice that although the prediction (or more formally the hypothesis) has almost the same form as the theory we stated above, it differs in a fundamental way: the hypothesis simply predicts an association between two variables and says nothing about causality. Still, if two things are causally related, they should be statistically associated.

In our case, when we examined the association between division of labor and residence in a worldwide sample of societies, the predicted association was not found . This led us (and later Divale [1974]) to reject the theory that division of labor largely determines residence. After rejecting the “division of labor” explanation (at least as a major cause) we went on to test other explanations. Eventually we ended up developing a new theory that internal warfare (warfare within the society) would produce partilocal residence, and purely external warfare (particularly if women do a great deal of subsistence work) would produce matrilocal residence. Note that division of labor remains a partial cause in our explanations. Note too that even if a predicted relationship is supported, it may still be open to different interpretations. Indeed, Divale (1974) offers a vary different explanation for the obtained relationship between type of warfare and residence.

The study we just discussed illustrates the fundamental assumption of worldwide cross-cultural (or holocultural) research; if a theory has merit, the presumed causes and effect should generally be associated synchronically (see J. W. M. Whiting 1954; K. F. Otterbein 1969; R. Naroll, Michik, and F. Naroll 1976). A synchronic association is one that involves data (for each sample case) from more or less the same point in time, as if we were examining a large number of “ethnographic snapshots,” each one capturing a society at a single point in time. The cross-cultural method therefore provides a way of eliminating theories that have no predictive value. Theories that postulate causes, consequences, or relationships are tested in the same way; that is, by looking to see if predicted associations obtain.

Cross-cultural researchers must decide what societies to examine. No one can examine all cultures; even if one could, the labor and time costs involved would not justify doing so. The most important operating principles in a scientific test of a hypothesis are: 1) to choose a sample that is representative of some universe of societies the researcher wants to generalize the results to; and 2) to use a large enough sample such that the results are likely to be true for the larger universe of cases. As yet, there is no complete list of the world’s cultures to sample from, so researchers cannot do what is ideal, which is to sample randomly from a complete list. Instead, cross-cultural researchers usually sample from one of a number of published cross-cultural samples. (These lists can be thought of as “sampling frames.”) The most commonly used are (from larger to smaller): the Ethnographic Atlas (Murdock 1962 ff.); the “summary” Ethnographic Atlas (Murdock 1967); the Atlas of World Cultures (Murdock 1981); the Human Relations Area Files (HRAF) Collection of Ethnography (annually distributed by the Human Relations Area Files); the Standard Cross-Cultural Sample (Murdock and White 1969); and the HRAF Probability Sample Files (Naroll 1967; Lagace 1979), which is a subset of the entire HRAF Collection of Ethnography. While none of these samples is perfect, the important point about all of these lists is that they were not designed to support any researcher’s pet idea or theory. In contrast, a set of cases chosen from a researcher’s own personal library would be scientifically suspect.

Why use the HRAF Collection of Ethnography?

Most of the samples mentioned above contain bibliography (or pointers to bibliography) and at least some coded information on traits of interest to a variety of researchers. The HRAF Collection of Ethnography is different in that it contains no precoded data, but full texts indexed by subject matter and grouped by culture for the rapid retrieval of particular kinds of information. If you want to read about a particular aspect of culture and make your own coding decisions on a sample of societies, the HRAF collection is ideal because you do not have to collect all the books and articles on each of the cultures and then search for a particular subject through all the texts. HRAF’s subject index, the Outline of Cultural Materials (Murdock et al., 2008; online version ), can be used to identify particular subject categories to look at to find the information of interest to you.

If you are working from the print version of the Outline of Cultural Materials (OCM for short), the easiest way to find a subject category is by using the extensive index in the back of the OCM. This index will point you toward a number of possible numbered subject categories. When you read about these subjects in more detail, you will find out if the subject categories are appropriate. The OCM system is mostly hierarchical in that the first two digits usually reflect the major subject category. So, for example, all the “59s” (591-597) refer to the major subject labelled “Family.” The last digit is a subcategory (e.g., 596 is “extended families”).

If you are working on eHRAF, the A-Z Index can be found under either under Browse/Subjects or in Advanced Search when you press “Add Subjects.” There is also a list of OCMs organized by Major Subject and a list in OCM or numerical order. The A-Z list has a filter so that if you start typing a word it will try to find it. If you are in Advanced Search you can execute your search once you have chosen a subject category. Often researchers will need to search for more than one subject category to ensure that they will find what they are looking for. Keep in mind that not all ethnographers discuss all topics, so some categories will be empty for some cultures. It takes trial-and-error to find what you need and tailor a search to your needs.

Sampling within the HRAF Collection

It is rarely necessary to use the entire HRAF collection for comparative studies. The only reason it might be necessary to examine all the cases is if some trait or custom occurs rarely or is only rarely described. In that case, researchers might have to scan all the societies to find enough cases of a particular type. Examples of relatively rare traits are age-set systems, cannibalism, and woman-woman marriages.

Researchers use a variety of strategies to sample the collection. If researchers want to use some already coded data (coded previously by themselves or other researchers) for their study, they usually choose to limit themselves to those sample cases for which the desired precoded data are available. Some researchers find that the HRAF Collection of Ethnography speeds up their data retrieval so much that they use it for as many cultures as they can and then look up books and articles for the remaining cultures. Others choose the overlap between the HRAF sample and another sample. The important thing to keep in mind in using information from two different samples is that the information in the different samples may pertain to different time periods and different communities. Since cultures change over time and vary from community to community, it is extremely important to make sure that the same-named cases in the overlapping samples actually are the same in time and place. Otherwise, the researcher is introducing error.

For example, suppose one is examining the possible relationship between male mortality rates in warfare and frequency of polygyny (see M. Ember 1974 for a test of the hypothesis that high male mortality in warfare should be associated with appreciable polygyny). For information on a given society with regard to male mortality in warfare, one would look in categories Mortality (165), Instigation of War (721), and Aftermath of Combat (727) and might find ethnographic material from 1890 indicating that many men died in warfare. For information on extent of polygyny (category 595) the researcher may find the best information to be from 1950. If you used these two pieces of information (one from 1890 and the other from 1950) you might very well have a case that looks like it does not support your hypothesis. This would be an error if the society had appreciable polygyny in 1890 but did not have much in 1950. Pacification by external authorities might have eliminated war, thus evening out the sex-ratio, and thereby lessening polygyny. In this instance, the data from either 1890 or 1950 might support the hypothesis (high male mortality/high polygyny or low male mortality/low polygyny), but mixing data from different time periods would have created an “error.”

The online HRAF Cross-Cultural Concordance (first published as the Computerized Cross-Cultural Concordance –see C. R. Ember 1992) was developed to help researchers see if times and places match across different samples. One of the most useful aspects of this concordance is that it gives the researcher the appropriate sources to look at in the HRAF Collection of Ethnography (in paper, microfiche or now online as eHRAF World Cultures ) to see if she or he wants to match cases in another sample. HRAF processes an extensive set of sources for each society included in the archive. Usually there are multiple time and place foci, so it is important that a researcher attend to the need to choose exactly the right focus. Researchers who want to use data already available from other samples commonly use the Ethnographic Atlas (EA–in its full form or the summary form (Murdock 1962-1971; Murdock 1967) or the Standard Cross-Cultural Sample (SCCS–Murdock and White 1969) The codes for the Standard Cross-Cultural Sample (published by many different authors) have appeared in two journals ( Ethnology and Cross-Cultural Research [formerly Behavior Science Research ] ). Many have been reprinted in Barry and Schegel’s (1980) Cross-Cultural Codes and Samples , and have been put into computer format for the World Cultures electronic journal. The codes for the Ethnographic Atlas can now be found online in D-PLACE (https://d-place.org/). A discussion of the matches between HRAF or eHRAF and the Standard Cross-Cultural Sample and the Ethnographic Atlas can be found in C. R. Ember (2007). In eHRAF you can now find the matches to the SCCS sample  and the matches to the EA sample ; we also display the lists of cases for the SCCS and the EA on our home page. However, if you want to match two or more samples and find the appropriate sources you can also use the filter function in the HRAF Cross-Cultural Concordance .  For example, if you want the documents that are in eHRAF World Cultures that are also in the SCCS and the full EA, you can click all three. A file can also be exported of the entire set of matches.

If the researcher does not need information from outside HRAF, sampling from the HRAF Collection of Ethnography can proceed differently. The HRAF Collection itself can be used as a sampling frame (a list to sample from) and researchers can randomly choose cases from that list by using a table of random numbers. (Your library might not have the complete collection. Check with your librarian for the cultures found in your library.)

We would however urge caution in using the HRAF collection as a whole because it has a mixture of unit types. As explained earlier, due to some special programs, not all collections would be considered “anthropological societies.” For example, the collection on Cuban Americans should best be compared with other North American subgroups rather than as a society. A better choice would be to use one of the subsets of eHRAF designed to be representative.

There are three samples within HRAF that can be considered representative. They are: The Probability Sample Files, the Standard Cross-Cultural Sample,  and a Simple Random Sample.

Probability Sample Files

The subset of HRAF known as the Probability Sample Files (PSF) is a special kind of random sample called a stratified random sample. The world was divided into 60 culture areas (strata) and one case from each area was randomly chosen from a list of societies that met certain criteria (such as whether one of the ethnographers stayed for more than a year; having more than 1,000 pages of ethnography). It is important to note that modern, industrialized societies were excluded, as were political empires, societies that were only described in prehistory or history, and societies that did not include specific information about the people and their culture. See Naroll (1967) for the rules used in selecting the sample cases. When you are using eHRAF World Cultures you can, after executing a search, narrow your search to the PSF.

Standard Cross-Cultural Sample

The SCCS sample, developed by Murdock and White (1969) is also a stratified sample, but it was based on dividing the world into 200 culture areas (strata). The authors tried to find one well-described society in each of 200 areas, but ended up with 186 societies. For those culture areas with multiple cases within a culture area, the authors used their judgment about what case to include. Unlike the PSF, which has multiple time periods and multilple subcultues represented, the creators chose a specific time and place focus for each society. They usually opted for the earliest time frame that had comprehensive coverage.

Simple Random Sample

The Simple Random Sample (SRS) is in the process of being built. It was drawn by choosing from C. Ember’s (1992) concordance of cross-cultural samples. The only criteria was that there had to be at least the equivalent of one ethnography. Because cultures are added randomly, the cultures in that sample can be considered  representative sample of a fairly large list of cultures around the world (from about 8 different cross-cultural samples. Since as of the present there are less than 30 cultures, most researchers would not consider this a large enough sample. However, these cultures could be added to the PSF sample.

Size of Sample

What is a large enough sample? Statisticians have worked out formulas for calculating the size of the representative (random) sample that is needed to obtain a significant result (one likely to be true). The samples needed are usually much smaller than you might imagine. If a relationship is strong, a random sample of 20-30 is sufficient. (Weak associations can be significant only in large samples.) By using the random sampling strategy, researchers can always add cases randomly to increase sample size. Random sampling also enables researchers to estimate whether a phenomenon of interest occurs frequently enough to be studied and whether the measures adopted are usable on the available data.

While most people assume that “bigger is better,” bigger samples require much more time and effort and expense. And they may not yield much more information or accuracy than a smaller random sample. Political opinion polls are a case in point. Samples of a few hundred to a few thousand people in the entire United States can often yield quite accurate predictions of elections.

The concepts in a predicted association (hypothesis) can be fairly specific, such as whether or not a culture has a ceremony for naming a newborn child, or they may be quite abstract, such as whether the community is harmonious. But whether the concept is fairly specific or not, no concept is ever measured directly. This is true in physical as well as in the social sciences. We are so used to a thermometer measuring heat that we may forget that heat is an abstract concept that refers to the energy generated when molecules are moving. A thermometer reflects the principle that as molecules move more, a substance in a confined space (alcohol, mercury) will expand. We do not see heat; we see the movement of the substance in the confined space.

The three most important principles in designing a measure are:

•  try to be as specific as possible in deciding how to measure the concept;
•  try to measure the concept as directly as possible;
•  if possible, try to measure the concept in a number of different ways.

The first principle recognizes that science depends upon replication; it is essential for other researchers to try to duplicate the findings of previous researchers, so researchers have to be quite explicit about what they mean and exactly how they measure the concept. The second recognizes that although all measurement is indirect, some measures are more direct than others. If you want to know how “rainy” an area is, you could count the number of days that it rains during December, but a better measure would be the number of rainy days on average over a number of years. The third principle is that since no measure exactly measures what it is supposed to measure, it is better, if possible, to have more than one way to tap the concept of interest.

Measures have to be specified for each variable in the hypothesis. Devising a measure involves at least four steps; 1) theoretically defining the variable of interest (in words or mathematically); 2) operationally defining the variable, which means spelling out the “scale” that the researcher has devised for measuring it; 3) telling the coder where to find the required information (in the case of research using the HRAF Collection of Ethnography, this means specifying which subject categories (OCMs) the coder should look at; in the electronic version one can also specify what words or combinations of words to look for and 4) pre-testing the measure to see if it can be applied generally to most cases. Designing a measure requires some trial-and-error. If the scale is too confusing or too hard to apply (because the required information is lacking), the measure needs to be rethought.

To illustrate the procedure, let us consider a variable that seems rather straightforward: the degree to which a society has extended family households. Although this concept may appear straightforward, it still needs to be defined. The researcher needs to state what an extended family means, what a household means, and how she or he will decide the “degree” to which a sample society has extended family households. The first thing would be to decide on what is meant by an “extended family.” The researcher may choose to define a family as a social and economic unit consisting minimally of at least one or more parents and their children; an extended family as consisting of two or more constituent families united by a blood tie; and an extended family household as an extended family living co-residentially; in one house, neighboring apartments, or in a separate compound. Having defined the concepts, the researcher must now specify how to measure the degree to which a society has extended family households.

Definitions are not so hard to arrive at. What requires work is evaluating whether an operational definition is useful or easily applied. For example, suppose by “degree” (of extended familyness) we operationally mean the percentage of households in a focal community that contain extended families. The range of possible scale scores is from 0 to 100 percent. Suppose further that we instruct our coders to rate a case only if the ethnographer specifies a percentage or we can calculate a percentage from a household census. If we are also using information from another study, we tell our coders to look at the Household (592) and Extended Family (596) for the same community specified in the other study and at the time specified in the other study (same time). (If we are not taking data from another study, we can ask our coders to pick a community and a time which is most thoroughly described with regard to household form.) If we did a pretest, we would find out that very few ethnographers tell us the percentage of extended family households. Rather they usually say things like, “Extended family households are the norm.” Or, “Extended families are typical, but younger people are beginning to live in independent households.” So our operational definition of percentage of extended family households, although perfectly worthy, may not be that useful if we cannot find enough societies with household censuses.

What can we do? There are three choices. We can stick to our insistence on the best measure and study only those societies for which a percentage is given. We may have to expand our search (enlarge our sample) to find enough cases that have such precise information. Or, we can redesign our measure to incorporate descriptions merely in words (no census material is available). Or, we can choose not to do the study because we can’t measure the concept exactly how we want to. Faced with these three choices, most cross-cultural researchers opt to redesign the measure so as to incorporate word descriptions. Word descriptions do convey information about degree, but not as precisely. If an ethnographer says “extended family households are typical,” we do not know if that means 50% or 100%, but we are very confident it does not mean 0-40%. And we can be fairly sure it does not mean 40-49%. If the relative frequency of extended families is related to something else, we should be able to see the relationship whether we measure in percentages or words.

A newly designed measure might read something like this : Code extended family households as

4) Very high in frequency if the ethnographer describes this type of household as the norm or typical in the absence of any indication of another common type of household. Phrases like “almost all households are extended” are clear indicators. Do not use discussions of the “ideal” household to measure relative frequency, unless there are indications that the ideal is also practiced. If there is a developmental cycle, such as the household splitting up when the third generation reaches a certain age, do not use this category. Use category #3 if the extended family household remains together for a substantial portion of the life-cycle and #2 if the household remains together briefly.

3) Moderately high in frequency if the ethnographer describes another fairly frequent household pattern but indicates that extended family households are still the most common.

2) Moderately low in frequency if the ethnographer describes extended family households as alternative or a second choice (another form of household is said to be typical).

1) Infrequent or Rare if another form of household is the only form of household mentioned and if the extended family form is mentioned as absent or an unusual choice. Do not infer absence of extended families from the absence of any discussion of family and household type.

don’t know if there is no information in the appropriate subject categories, or there is contradictory information for the same time and place from different sources.

The next step is to pre-test this measure. It may turn out that four distinctions are too difficult to apply, so a researcher might want to collapse the scale a little. If we decide to use the scale described above, what do we do when we do get numbers or percentages from the ethnographers for some cases? Most of the time, we can fit those numbers into the word scale. So, for instance, if 70% of the households have extended families, and 30% are independent, we would choose scale position 3. But we might decide to use two scales: a precise one based on numerical measurement (percentages), the second a vaguer one based on words (C. Ember et al. 1991 recommend that we use both types of scale when we can). The advantage of using two scales is that the more precise (quantitative scale) should be more strongly related to other variables than the less precise scale, which result would increase confidence in the relationships found.

Measuring a concept like the degree to which a society has extended families may not be easy. But it is not that difficult either, because ethnographers usually attend to basic economic, social, and political features of a society. We can think of these things as “standard cultural observables.” Of course, there are concepts which are much more difficult to operationalize using ethnographic data, because ethnographers do not conventionally attend to these subjects. For instance, few ethnographies contain information that would allow construction of an indicator of rainfall variability, pH of the soil, or number of minutes per day adults spend in housework. For these types of information, researchers may decide to alter their operational definitions to make use of the data that are available. A better research strategy may be to use other kinds of data outside of the HRAF Collection of Ethnography. Some libraries have worldwide climate records. This information can often be linked to ethnography by looking up the nearest weather station (in subject category Research and Development, 654) or longitude and latitude in subject category Location (131) of the society.

Concepts may be difficult to operationalize for other reasons. They may be quite abstract, like the concepts of community solidarity or the relative status of women. These two are not only abstract, but they deal with information which is not usually discussed in conventional ethnographic topics. Information relevant to status might be found under discussions of kin group decisions, political decision-making, relationships of people within the household, sexual rights and obligations, how marriages are arranged, etc.

Research by Martin Whyte (1978b) suggests that it is preferable to avoid rating very abstract variables such as “the status of women.” Rather researchers should probably confine ratings to more specific variables, as Whyte himself did. Whyte chose 52 very specific variables to assess the status of women. These variables included the degree to which women had political roles, the importance of female gods, how easily women could get divorced, etc. Whyte found that the various aspects of status did not relate to each other. He concluded that if a researcher wants to discuss status it would be preferable to discuss at least 10 different (and independent) dimensions of status. Furthermore, when he tested for the possible bias in reporting by male versus female ethnographers (Whyte 1978a), he found that whatever bias may exist is more likely to be found in the reporting of more abstract (versus more specific) matters. This suggests that codes should be designed to tap very specific aspects of a phenomenon.

Researchers can always use a variety of scaling procedures to make specific measures into combined or more general measures, as many have done to measure degree of cultural complexity (combining ratings of specific features such as type of subsistence, average size of communities, level of political integration, etc.)

Analysis of Results

When the researcher has measured the variables of interest for all sample cases, he or she is ready to see if the predicted relationship actually exists in the data. After all, there are likely to be exceptions to the predicted relationship. Do the exceptions invalidate the prediction? How many exceptions would compel a rejection of the hypothesis? It is precisely here that cross-cultural researchers usually resort to statistical tests of significance.

Statisticians have devised various tests that tell us how “perfect” a result has to be for us to believe that there is probably an association between the variables of interest, that one variable generally predicts the other. Essentially, every statistical result is evaluated in the same objective way. The question is asked: What is the chance that this result is purely accidental, that there is really no association at all between the two variables? Although some of the mathematical ways of answering this question are rather complicated, the answer always involves a probability value (or p-value), the likelihood that the observed result or a stronger one could have occurred by chance. So, if a result has a p-value of less than .01, this indicates that there is less than one chance in one hundred that the relationship observed is purely accidental. A p-value of less than .01 is a fairly low probability; most social scientists conventionally agree to call any result with a p-value of .05 or less (five or fewer chances in one hundred) a statistically significant or probably true result.

In a study we did with Burton Pasternak on extended family households (Pasternak, C.R. Ember and M. Ember 1976), we tested the hypothesis that incompatibility of activity requirements would generally explain why people may choose to live in extended family households. By incompatability of activity requirements we meant that an adult in the household was required to perform two activities in different places at the same time. A common example for women is childtending and agricultural work in the fields. An example for men is working away from home for wages and having to plow the fields. If the household includes two or more families, i.e., if there is an extended family household, there will likely be two adults of each gender to perform the required tasks. We decided to read and code ethnography to measure incompatibility requirements first, before we knew what the household form was, and then we subsequently looked up previously published coded data on the presence or absence of extended family households. We decided not to code both variables (incompatibility of activity requirements and extended family households) ourselves because we did not want our hypothesis to influence our judgments. The sample investigated was chosen by randomly sampling 60 cultures from the overlap between the HRAF Collection of Ethnography and the Ethnographic Atlas (Murdock 1967). Even though we were only able to code 23 of the sample societies, the statistical test of the relationship between incompatibility of activity requirements and extended family households was statistically significant. The p value was .003, which meant that the result was likely to occur by chance just 3 out of 1000 times. We were able to predict 11 out of 13 of the societies with extended family households and 8 of the 10 of the societies with independent family households.

Why should a probably true relationship have any exceptions? If a theory or hypothesis is really correct, one would presume that all the cases fit. There are many reasons that one cannot ever expect a perfect result. First, even if a theory is correct about a major cause of what one is attempting to explain, there may still be other causes that have not been investigated. Exceptions to the predicted relationship might also occur because of what has been called “cultural lag.” Cultural lag occurs when change in one aspect of culture takes time to produce change in another aspect. A sample society might be an exception to the predicted relationship, but it might fit the theory if the variables could be measured for a later time period. Measurement inaccuracy is another source of exceptions, because measurement error is usually random error and random error usually weakens statistical relationships. For example, if some cases in a straight-line relationship are inaccurately measured (either too high or too low) on even just one variable, those cases will not be located on the line of the relationship.

In addition to its statistical significance, a cross-cultural relationship should also be evaluated with regard to its strength, or the degree to which the dependent variable is predicted statistically. After all, the goal in research is to find strong predictors, not just statistically significant ones.

If confidence in an explanation is required, a single cross-cultural test is not enough. Replications by other researchers using other samples, tests against alternative explanations, and tests using other research strategies are also needed. This may seem tiresome, but good research always gives a cherished theory many chances to fail.

More Advanced Reading

For more advanced treatments of these topics, the reader is urged to peruse the articles in “Cross-Cultural and Comparative Research: Theory and Method. Special issue,” 1991. Behavior Science Research 25:1-270; and Carol R. Ember and Melvin Ember, Cross-Cultural Research Methods , 2nd eidtion.  AltaMira Press, 2009.

Barry, Herbert III, and Alice Schlegel. 1980. Cross-Cultural Samples and Codes. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press.

Divale, William T. 1974. “Migration, External Warfare, and Matrilocal Residence.” Behavior Science Research 9:75-133.

Ember, Carol R. 2007.  Using the HRAF Collection of Ethnography in Conjunction With the Standard Cross-Cultural Sample and the Ethnographic Atlas .  Cross-Cultural Research 41:  396-427.

Ember, Carol R. with the assistance of Hugh Page, Jr., Timothy O’Leary, and M. Marlene Martin. 1992. Computerized Concordance of Cross-cultural Samples. New Haven: Human Relations Area Files.

Ember, Carol R. and Melvin Ember. 2009. Cross-Cultural Research Methods, 2nd edition. AltaMira Press.

Ember, Carol R., Marc Howard Ross, Michael Burton, and Candice Bradley. 1991. “Problems of Measurement in Cross-Cultural Research Using Secondary Data.” Behavior Science Research 25:187-216.

Ember, Melvin. 1974. “Warfare, Sex Ratio, and Polygyny.” Ethnology 13:197-206. Reprinted with afterthoughts in Marriage, Family, and Kinship: Comparative Studies of Social Organization. Melvin Ember and Carol R. Ember. 1983. New Haven: HRAF Press, pp. 109-124.

Ember, Melvin, and Carol R. Ember. 1971. “The Conditions Favoring Matrilocal Versus Patrilocal Residence.” American Anthropologist 73:571-94. Reprinted with afterthoughts in Marriage, Family, and Kinship: Comparative Studies of Social Organization. Melvin Ember and Carol R. Ember. 1983. New Haven: HRAF Press, pp. 151-198.

Lagace, Robert O. 1979. The HRAF Probability Sample: Retrospect and Prospect. Behavior Science Research, 14:211-229.

Linton, Ralph. 1936. The Study of Man. New York: Appleton-Century.

Lippert, Julius. 1931. The Evolution of Culture. George P. Murdock, trans. and ed. New York: Macmillan.

Murdock, George P. 1949. Social Structure. New York: Macmillan.

Murdock, George P. 1962-1971. Ethnographic Atlas, Installments I-XXVII, Ethnology 1-10.

Murdock, George P. 1967. Ethnographic Atlas: A Summary. University of Pittsburgh Press. Also Ethnology 6:109-236.

Murdock, George P. 1981. Atlas of World Cultures. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press.

Murdock, George P. 1983. Outline of World Cultures, 6th ed. New Haven: Human Relations Area Files.

Murdock, George P., Clellan S. Ford, Alfred E. Hudson, Raymond Kennedy, Leo W. Simmons, John W. M. Whiting. 6th revised edition with modifications 2008. Outline of Cultural Materials. New Haven: Human Relations Area Files.

Murdock, George P., and Douglas R. White. 1969. “Standard Cross-Cultural Sample.” Ethnology 8:329-369.

Naroll, Raoul. 1967. “The Proposed HRAF Probability Sample.” Behavior Science Notes 2:70-80.

Naroll, Raoul, Gary Michik, and Frada Naroll. 1976. Worldwide Theory Testing. New Haven: Human Relations Area Files.

Otterbein, Keith F. 1969. “Basic Steps in Conducting a Cross-Cultural Study.” Behavior Science Notes 4:221-236.

Pasternak, Burton, Carol R. Ember, and Melvin Ember. 1976. On the Conditions Favoring Extended Family Households. Journal of Anthropological Research 32: 109-23. Reprinted with afterthoughts in Marriage, Family, and Kinship: Comparative Studies of Social Organization. Melvin Ember and Carol R. Ember, 1983. New Haven: HRAF Press, pp. 109-124.

Whiting, John W. M. (1954) “The Cross-Cultural Method.” In Handbook of Social Psychology, Vol. 1. Gardner Lindzey, ed. Cambridge, Mass.: Addison-Wesley, pp. 523-31. Reprinted in Readings in Cross-Cultural Methodology. Frank W. Moore, ed. New Haven: HRAF Press, pp. 287-300.

Whyte, Martin K. 1978a. “Cross-Cultural Studies of Women and the Male Bias Problem.” Behavior Science Research 13:65-80.

Whyte, Martin K. 1978b. The Status of Women in Pre-industrial Societies. Princeton: Princeton University Press.

Printable Version

A printable PDF version of A Basic Guide to Cross-Cultural Research can be found here .

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• A Research Guide
• Research Paper Topics
• 30 Culture Research Paper Topics & Ideas

30 Culture Research Paper Topics & Ideas

• What is culture? The definition and development
• Is culture a defining trait of humans only? Can animals have a culture?
• Cultural similarities. What is common for us all over the globe?
• Local cultures and globalization: will they extinct?
• Culture as political instrument.
• Nationalism and culture.
• How much does religion influence culture?
• Culture and age: who are kids and elders in different cultures?
• Culture, gender and gender roles.
• Attitude to sex in different cultures.
• Culture and law: how much the legislative system is influenced by culture?
• Global culture: what can it be?
• Languages and cultures
• How does the native culture influence human psychology?
• African-American culture as a part of American culture in general
• Multicultural communities: how do they live?
• The phenomenon of female culture in closed communities: why does it emerge?
• Pop Culture and mass media
• The culture as business and political tool
• Advertisement and culture
• Conservation of culture in isolated communities
• People of mixed origins: shall they be considered a separate culture?
• Death in different cultures.
• Rigid class segregation in culture.Caste systems
• The culture clash between colonizers and natives.
• The alien cultures in literature and films. What defines them as alien?
• Is it important to preserve a cultural diversity?
• Assimilation of people in the foreign culture.
• The culture of my community.
• Culture, morals and ethics.

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Culture Research Paper

This sample culture research paper features: 6400 words (approx. 22 pages), an outline, and a bibliography with 31 sources. Browse other research paper examples for more inspiration. If you need a thorough research paper written according to all the academic standards, you can always turn to our experienced writers for help. This is how your paper can get an A! Feel free to contact our writing service for professional assistance. We offer high-quality assignments for reasonable rates.

While disputes surrounding the concept of culture reflect valid ideological disagreements, they are sometimes obscured by misunderstanding; not only is the term commonly used to signify vastly different concepts, but it is also frequently defined in vague and unclear terms (if explicitly defined at all). This research paper tries to clarify the notion by tracking its usage from its earliest applications to its place in contemporary anthropological discourse. First, the concept’s origins and evolution are examined, with a special focus on its development in American anthropology. The modern notion of culture as meanings and symbols is then investigated in depth. Finally, significant criticisms of the concept and responses to those criticisms are provided.

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Get 10% off with 24start discount code, introduction, cultural relativism, culture and the individual, culture as meaning, culture as symbolic systems, the nature of symbols, the pervasiveness of symbols, methodological implications, social anthropology, postmodern anthropology.

• Bibliography

Culture is one of the most complicated academic concepts now in use. It is defined and implemented in numerous and frequently contradictory ways, and there are considerable disagreements within academic disciplines regarding the fundamental nature of human social life and the appropriate method for studying it. For anthropologists, culture typically refers to symbolic systems of ideas, values, and shared understandings that give meaning and comprehension to the world for a certain group of people. While these systems, which provide the foundation for such fundamental concepts as food and kinship and even influence how individuals experience time, space, and other aspects of reality, may appear to their adherents to be natural and objective, they are, in fact, variable, socially accepted models. In order to find order and significance in a world devoid of both, humans must create their own models.

Ironically, just as the anthropological idea of culture has achieved enormous traction in popular culture and fields such as law and politics, it has come under fire from within the study of anthropology. Some anthropologists assert that the concept of culture oversimplifies and stereotypically treats entire societies as isolated and homogeneous, while downplaying individuality and diversity of thought. Others argue, however, that the notion has never involved such assumptions, and that culture is merely a useful method to consider the ideas and shared understandings that enable humans to comprehend their reality.

The Evolution of the Concept of Culture

Both the literal sense of cultivation (as in “of a crop”) and the metaphorical sense of self-improvement (the “cultivation of the mind”) are derived from the Latin term cultura , from which the English word culture derives. This phrase was frequently used in 18th-century England to describe to the improvement of one’s character through the refinement of judgment, taste, and intelligence; and, by extension, to those activities believed to express and maintain this sophistication (Williams, 1983). This basic connotation underlies the most prevalent popular use of the term today, which designates a specific segment of society (such as theater and art) as cultural to the exclusion of others.

The anthropological idea of culture entered the English language via a less direct route, first going through German as the philosophical concept kultur . Kultur was also derived from the concept of cultivation, but shortly thereafter began to evolve in opposition to the French term civilisation as the philosophical traditions of the two countries came into conflict. Civilization was associated with the French Enlightenment and the notion that civilization evolved from a primitive state characterized by ignorance and barbarism toward universal ideals in science, secularism, and rational thought. The “national character” of a people has come to be symbolized by the term Kultur , which has come to represent local and personal notions such as religion and tradition. In 1871, British anthropologist Edward Tylor blended parts of both notions to define culture as “that complex whole that includes knowledge, belief, art, law, morals, custom, and any other skills and practices acquired by man as a member of society” (as cited in Kroeber & Kluckhohn, 1952, p. 81). This is largely regarded as the first formal anthropological definition of the term, as it introduced the concept of culture as a taught, shared, and inclusive framework that encompasses practically every aspect of human social life.

Although Edward Tylor’s definition was innovative, it missed a crucial part of the original German notion that would later become a central aspect of the anthropological concept of culture. Tylor was a cultural evolutionist; he believed that, given sufficient time and favorable conditions, societies evolved toward increasingly superior forms. Consequently, he viewed 19th-century England to be the apex of human civilisation and all other societies (particularly those outside of Western Europe and North America) to be less evolved and fundamentally inferior. Franz Boas, a German-American scientist often considered as the creator of cultural anthropology, was one of the first to challenge the evolutionist perspective. Boas considered the concepts of cultural evolutionism to be unscientific, and he contested the fundamental premise that the prevalence of identical activities across nations inevitably indicates their shared evolutionary origin. He presented counterexamples in which substantially identical cultural institutions arose in various contexts for notably distinct reasons. Boas (1940/1995), using a historical and comparative methodology, contended that society did not follow a linear progression toward a single ideal form, but rather moved in many ways in response to fluid historical conditions.

Importantly, Boas maintained that individuals experience reality differently depending on the cultural context in which they are nurtured; he stated that “the seeing eye is the organ of tradition” (1940/1995). This resulted in the conclusion that a community’s ideals and practices could only be comprehended in relation to how its members experienced and envisioned their reality (1889). Boas reasoned that if cultural patterns of perception and evaluation were the result of socialization, then their adherence must be based on emotions and unconscious attachment rather than rational or practical evaluations of their value or efficacy. Therefore, he decided that any attempt to rank or compare the customs of other communities would be absurd.

Cultural evolutionists erred by considering their own culturally developed concepts and perceptions to be universally applicable and uniquely valid. Boas used the analysis of voice sounds as an example of why this is a dangerous activity. A person inexperienced with the sounds employed in a specific language will frequently perceive those sounds differently than a native speaker, for example, by failing to distinguish between two sounds that are functionally equivalent in his or her own language. The Japanese language, for instance, does not differentiate between the English /r/ and /1/ sounds, and unless exposed to English at a young age, native Japanese speakers tend to wrongly regard those sounds as identical. This tendency led to an unpleasant (though hilarious) incident in which early cultural evolutionists misunderstood the speech sounds of an indigenous American language and deemed it inferior due to what they erroneously perceived to be the absence of a stable phonemic system.

According to Edward Sapir and Benjamin Lee Whorf’s “linguistic relativity hypothesis,” the principle of relativism extends to linguistic meaning systems. Sapir and Whorf believed that the language a person speaks affects not only their ability to communicate, but also how they perceive what would otherwise appear to be fundamental components of reality. Thus, Sapir concluded that learning a language is equivalent to learning the “world.” Whorf drew on his expertise as a fire teacher to demonstrate how the connotation of a word like empty could cause individuals to behave irresponsibly around spent gasoline drums containing hazardous fumes. Subsequent research in this subject has revealed language implications on aspects such as color vision and spatial orientation, as well as on moral reasoning and other types of decision making. Whorf observed that the majority of linguistic categories are “covert,” or existing below conscious awareness; anthropologists Alfred Kroeber and Clyde Kluckhohn (1952) concluded that all cultural knowledge consists of both conscious and unconscious categories that “screen and distort” one’s conception of reality.

Although language analysis may provide the clearest example of relativism in action, the idea appears to apply to a wide variety of cultural phenomena. Not only do views, attitudes, and values vary significantly from one society to the next, but comparative study has demonstrated that people of different cultural groups can also have diverse emotional and physiological responses to stimuli. Many Americans, for instance, would feel disgust and possibly even nausea at the mere prospect of consuming live grubs. However, in many other communities, insects are regarded tasty, whilst the intake of onions and mushrooms is deemed repulsive.

As a result of this relativistic aspect, the concept of culture has been challenged for what is viewed as its role in undermining efforts to construct objective and universally binding principles for moral human action. Moreover, if it is illegitimate to compare distinct beliefs and behaviors, and if everything from nausea to the essence of existence is experienced via the lens of culture, then it becomes extremely challenging to argue in favor of objective, universal moral truth. However, as other theorists have argued, this does not necessarily imply that moral ideas are impossible. It simply means that in order for normative assertions to make meaning, they must be based on commonly held beliefs about the world. As with differing conceptions of the nature and significance of reality, the fact that conceptions of moral truth are unavoidably local and specific does not imply that they are irrational, invalid, or untenable.

An important question in anthropology is whether culture reflects its own level of analysis or whether it can be explained in terms of the thoughts and behaviors of individuals. Alfred Kroeber (1917), an eminent anthropologist and the first of Franz Boas’s several PhD students, believed that it was only a matter of time before culture established a “second level” once it was identified as a “distinctive product of men living in societies.” Kroeber referred to this tier as the superorganic . According to this perspective, the conduct of individuals combines to form a system governed by its own set of rules. In light of the fact that cultural phenomena are emergent aspects of this system, they demand their own degree of explanation. Thus, Kroeber claimed, anthropologists need not be concerned with individuals when dealing with culture; in fact, disregarding individuals could result in more comprehensive analysis.

Edward Sapir (1917), a student of Boas and one of the founders of linguistic anthropology, criticized the superorganic as reflecting “a social determinism amounting to religion.” Sapir argued that the idea regarded culture too much like a thing or a concrete entity, as opposed to an abstract concept, and allowed little room for individuals to behave according to their own free will. Sapir was also critical of the influential theories of Ruth Benedict (1934), an additional student of Boas who pushed the concept of civilizations as highly interwoven, “personality-laden” wholes. Benedict famously stated in a survey of three indigenous people from Melanesia and North America that each might be characterized by a certain personality type (the Dobu of Papua New Guinea, for example, were defined as “paranoid schizophrenic”). Famously, Sapir told his pupils that a culture cannot be “paranoid” in response to this attempt to apply psychological words to characterize entire cultures.

Sapir’s own thesis, outlined in a 1924 essay titled “Culture, Genuine and False,” viewed culture as the peculiar attitudes and methods of living that gave a people their unique position in the world. According to Sapir, a “genuine” culture is a harmonic, balanced, and healthy “spiritual organism.” Nonetheless, while this did necessitate a substantial degree of integration, a genuine culture was not merely “efficient”; that is, humans could not exist as simple gears in a machine. According to Sapir, culture and the individual are inseparable, as culture cannot sustain itself without individuals as “nuclei” and individuals cannot generate culture from nothing. Sapir’s solution and attempt to reconcile the contradictions he perceived in Benedict and others were fundamentally humanistic: The individual discovers a “mastery”—a profession that expresses his or her distinct particular skill while also being congruent with the will and desires of the other community members. Sapir was cautious to note, however, that the terms “culture” and “individual” could only be identified from an anthropologist’s perspective, as the individual himself could not cognitively detect such a distinction. The more humanistic aspects of Sapir’s theory were never widely accepted, but his thoughts on the relationship between culture and the individual foreshadowed numerous critiques present in “postmodern” anthropological theory (see “Criticisms of the Culture Concept”)

The Contemporary Concept: Culture as Meanings and Symbols

Later, some referred to Edward Tylor’s 1871 definition of culture as the “everything-is-culture” definition, as it encompassed not just knowledge, belief, and values, but also customs and conduct, as well as the miscellaneous category “other capabilities.” In the early 20th century, Franz Boas and his pupils gave the notion a more scientific appearance and included the key element of cultural relativism. The belief in the power of sorcery, for example, was culture, as was the ritual dance performed by the sorcerer and possibly even the artifacts made for the rite. Margaret Mead, a student of Boas and one of the most renowned cultural anthropologists in history, utilized a concept of culture that relied on the notion of a “complex of behavior.”

As part of a landmark work on the notion of culture, Kroeber and Kluckhohn (1952) were among the first to advocate excluding conduct from the concept of culture. Their conclusion was founded on the realization that human cognition and behavior is also influenced by causes other than culture. The issue with treating a specific conduct as part of culture was that it implied that the behavior belonged to or was a unique product of culture, while neglecting the important psychological, social, biological, and material components that also influence action. As with the other components, culture could not incorporate behavior because, as Kroeber and Kluckhohn pointed out, culture itself was a “pattern or design” abstracted from observable behavior — something that gave behavior meaning.

However, this concept does not imply that culture is identical to politics, economics, or any other aspect of human social life. Due to the fact that culture is not conduct but rather the beliefs and ideas that give behavior meaning, culture is a vital component of practically every area of social-scientific investigation. Even behaviors that look on the surface to be solely economic or political in nature, for example, are incomprehensible without a grasp of the specific cultural forms that make the contexts in which they occur reasonable and meaningful (see Sewell, 2005).

The contemporary concept of culture, then, focuses not only on behavior and artifacts as such, but also on what that behavior means and what those artifacts symbolize. For David Schneider (1868), an American anthropologist who helped found the approach known as “symbolic anthropology,” this meant that even behavioral norms should be excluded from cultural analysis. Schneider defined culture as a set of “definitions, premises, postulates, presumptions, propositions, and perceptions about the nature of the universe and man’s place in it” (p. 202), explaining that while “norms tell the actor how to play the scene, culture tells the actor how the scene is set and what it all means” (p. 203).

The importance placed on meaning in the modern concept of culture—not only for the anthropologist attempting to understand social life, but for the individual who lives it—is perhaps best accounted for in the writings of Clifford Geertz, whose influential ideas helped to redefine the discipline of anthropology in the late 20th century. Geertz (1973a) observed that humans are “unfinished animals,” set apart not just by our ability to learn, but by the astounding amount that we must learn in order to be able to function at the most basic level. Geertz attributed this to the fact that cultural evolution and biological evolution overlapped by millions of years in the phylogenetic development of the species, such that the human brain became utterly dependent on inherited systems of meaning. While our biological “hardware” might furnish us with basic capabilities, we must be socialized into specific social systems in order to use them. We cannot, for instance, simply speak; we must learn to speak English or Japanese or some other highly particular linguistic form. This accounts for the high degree of variability seen across human societies. As Geertz put it, “We all begin with the natural equipment to live a thousand kinds of life but end having lived only one” (p. 45), since the gap between what biology dictates and what we need to know in order to survive can only be filled with highly particular cultural forms. Without culture, then, humans would not revert to some basic and primary hunter-gatherer form, but would instead be “monstrosities” unable to accomplish even the simplest tasks (1973a, p. 49).

A central feature of the contemporary concept of culture is the emphasis placed on symbols. More than just providing the means to express and transmit cultural knowledge from person to person and generation to generation, symbols are seen as essential to the building of that knowledge in the first place. Anthropologists now tend to regard culture itself as a collection of symbolic systems, where the construction of cultural models and concepts relies on the unique properties of symbolic representation.

According to David Schneider (1968), a symbol is “anything that stands for something else.” The idea is that this “something else,” called the symbol’s referent, is not logically deducible from any characteristic of the symbol itself, but is associated with it purely on the basis of an agreement made by a social group. The word dog, for instance, really has nothing to do with the actual thing that speakers of English call a dog, but the connection is made because a group (the speakers of English) has agreed that a particular symbol (the word dog ) will stand for a particular referent (the domesticated descendants of the Asian red wolf). At first glance, this might seem unremarkable. But as Clifford Geertz (1973a) pointed out, while there are many instances in nature of “patterns for processes”—such as when a duckling learns a set of behaviors by imprinting on his mother, or when DNA issues “instructions” on how to build certain tissues—the capacity to represent objects and occurrences as they are is exceedingly rare, and probably unique to humans. Symbolic representation allows the users of symbolic systems to make reference to and reflect on things that are not actually present at the time, converting them into ideas that can be analyzed, manipulated, and combined with other such concepts in the medium of abstract thought.

Furthermore, symbolic reference involves much more than merely matching a word or other symbol to its counterpart in the “real world” of objects. In a famous example, Edward Sapir illustrated that when someone uses the word house in the general sense, they do not think of any one house, but of any and all houses that have ever existed or could possibly exist, as well as the set of collective beliefs, attitudes, and judgments associated with that class of objects. This is what is called a concept. Conceptual thought opens the door to the imaginative and productive capacities of the mind, allowing humans to do such extraordinary things as wonder about our place in the world, reflect on things that could have happened, but didn’t, and then lie about all of it. Closely related to the ability to lie is the ability to form conceptions of things pregnant with collective attitudes and value judgments that far exceed the natural or objective characteristics of the referents themselves. As French sociologist Émile Durkheim (1912/1995) emphasized in his landmark treatise on religion, symbols allow groups to focus their collective mental energy on concretized representations of social phenomena and give tangible expression to bundles of emotions and attitudes that might otherwise remain ineffable. As anthropologist Marshall Sahlins (1976) phrased it: “Men begin as men . . . precisely when they experience the world as a concept (symbolically)” (p. 142). It is for this reason that symbols are seen as the building blocks of culture.

Language is the most highly developed symbolic system, and the most common form in which cultural meanings are expressed. As the foremost means of “cutting up” the world into sensible and meaningful categories, language is virtually impossible to distinguish from culture, and it’s not surprising that the idiosyncrasies of its particular forms can have a powerful impact on how its speakers perceive reality (see earlier section, “Cultural Relativism”). But words are far from the only type of symbols used by humans. Clifford Geertz (1973b) regarded any “object, act, event, quality, or relation” as a potential symbol, and as it turns out, human social life is replete with organized systems of them. Geertz held up religion as a prototypical example, where acts, artifacts, relationships, and even people serve to symbolize the abstract concept of the supernatural and the beliefs and values associated with it (1973b). Religion also offers examples of what Roy D’Andrade (1984) would later call the directive and evocative functions of symbolic systems, as it serves to guide and motivate action by, as Geertz (1973b) put it, forming an idea of what the world is like and “clothing” that idea in such an “aura of factuality” as to make it seem self-evident.

Symbolic systems can become so engrained in a community’s understanding of the world that they become difficult to spot. Kinship systems, for instance, appeared for a very long time (even to anthropologists) to be deeply rooted in biology. But David Schneider (1968) argued that there is nothing about shared ancestry or genetic relatedness that necessarily leads to a recognition of the rights, duties, and responsibilities associated with cultural systems of kinship. Numerous kin classifications, in fact, ignore that criterion completely. Schneider concluded that biological relatedness is a symbol just like any other, arbitrarily designated to denote shared identity and mutual responsibility among social groups.

The Constitutive Power of Culture

The very act of perceiving an object or event in the world as being a type of something (e.g., perceiving a certain creature as a dog, the clasping of hands as a prayer, or the meeting of lips as a kiss ) entails the symbolic interpretation and generalization of a specific, concrete event. Because symbols represent concepts rather than just things as they exist in the world, almost everything humans perceive is at least partially constituted by collective representations and interpretation. But the power of culture is such that, in many cases, symbols do not attach to any referent at all, and instead actually create the objects or events to which they refer. Philosopher John Searle (1969) referred to this as the capacity to enact constitutive rules. In statements like “when a player crosses the goal line, he scores a touchdown” or “the candidate who receives the plurality of votes in the general election becomes president,” constitutive rules actually create the categories of touchdown and president. Societies are built upon intricate systems of these constitutive rules, which generally take the form “ x counts as y in context c. ” While usually thought of by the members of the community as natural or even commonsensical, these rules are entirely a matter of social agreement. The idea that one owns a house or car or any other piece of property, for instance, is based on the collective belief that transferring something called “money” to an institution called a “bank” entitles one to special rights over some material thing. Most often, others will not even question those rights. But when someone does seek to violate the agreement through force, such as by stealing a car or invading a home, it is understood that people in uniforms with guns will (hopefully) show up to stop them. Those uniformed enforcers of social consensus will only do so, however, insofar as they agree to obey the orders of an imaginary chain of authority that runs all the way to the president of the United States, whose power comes not from any physical or mental capacity of his, but from the collective agreement that he is to have such authority. Thus, personal property—like civil government or American football—relies on a complex, ordered hierarchy of constitutive rules and social facts that have no basis in material reality.

These institutions reflect a more basic property of symbolic representation: The meaning of cultural units tends to be layered upon many other orders of meaning. Something as simple as reading this sentence, for instance, plays upon such varied levels of conventional meaning as the denotation of speech sounds by individual letters, the definitions of words and groups of words, the grammatical rules that operate at the sentence level, and matters of tone and style conveyed by the structure of the paper as a whole.

The centrality of meanings and symbols in contemporary concepts of culture poses challenges for the study of social life. To begin with, there really is no such thing as a symbol per se, although almost anything can function as one. Symbolism is not an inherent quality of any word or sign, but rather a product of interpretation and consensus. Nor is the meaning of a symbol rigidly determined even by the force of collective agreement. As a number of theorists have argued, the interpretation of symbols relies on complex and often emotionally charged processes in the mind of the interpreter, which it must call upon a broad range of preexisting schemas, scripts, and tacit understandings in order to make any sense at all. Consider the following short description of a sequence of events: “Roger went to the restaurant/The waiter was unfriendly/Roger left a small tip.” In their work on artificial intelligence, Schank and Abelson (1977) showed how little sense such a sequence makes without detailed prior knowledge of what normally happens at a restaurant, what is expected of a waiter, and what is communicated in the complex practice of tipping.

For Clifford Geertz (1973c), the ambiguity and polysemy of the subject matter of anthropology meant that cultures could not be explained, but instead could only be interpreted through a process he called “thick description.” To truly grasp the meaning and significance of a belief or action, Geertz argued, one must first acquire a comprehensive understanding of the social and cultural context in which it occurs. Drawing on literary theory, Geertz suggested that culture must be “read” like a text—a text that, from the anthropologist’s point of view, is “foreign and faded,” full of abbreviations, omissions, and contradictions, and written not by anyone’s pen but by sporadic instances of socially meaningful behavior.

Critiques of the Culture Concept

While culture has long been the central object of inquiry in American anthropology (hence the term cultural anthropology ), scholars in the British social-anthropological tradition have historically been skeptical of culture, and have instead framed their investigations around the concept of society . In social anthropology, society refers to a complex web of social relationships and systematized patterns of behaviors and ideologies known as institutions (e.g., the military, primitive magic, the nuclear family, or the National Football League). Social anthropologists compare institutions across different societies in order to ascertain their “function.” They are particularly interested in “latent” functions: those consequences of institutionalized behavior of which the actors are unaware, but which nevertheless work to motivate the very existence of the institution. The functionalist approach rests on the assumption that particular types of institutions, such as kinship or government, are motivated by the same basic factors and oriented toward the same basic ends in all human societies in which they are present. Underneath their superficial differences, the various cultural manifestations of these institutions are seen as essentially similar, like species belonging to the same genus.

As concepts, culture and society are not necessarily incompatible, and have been viewed by some as closely related and even complementary. But for several generations of social anthropologists, culture was something of a taboo term. A. R. Radcliffe-Browne, one of the discipline’s founders, insisted that the concept of culture erroneously treated abstract ideas as real and concrete, and was too broad a concept to be useful in the study of social life. He claimed that society, on the other hand, was the proper object of anthropology, since societies were bounded and concrete, and social structure was embodied in directly observable social behavior. Eventually, however, social anthropologists recognized that no attempt to study social relationships could be successful without consideration of the cultural beliefs and values associated with them. Oxford anthropologist John Beattie (1964) identified this as the primary reason that Radcliffe-Browne’s limited conception of social anthropology as “comparative sociology” never fully caught on: The behavior of people in society cannot be understood without reference to what social relationships mean to those who participate in them.

Still, a number of social anthropologists remain reluctant to refer to the semiotic dimension of social life as culture. Adam Kuper (1999) argued that it is more legitimate to analyze religious beliefs, arts, and other institutions as separate domains than as “bound together in a single bundle labeled culture” (p. 245). But as William Sewell (2005) observed, and as Ruth Benedict (1934) noted before him, basic beliefs and symbolic representations of the world tend to cut across the lines that sociologists would use to carve up the social sphere, reaching across institutions, linguistic communities, age-groups, and even religions to span entire societies. This suggests that any attempt to approach such beliefs as though they were miscellaneous qualities of separate institutions risks completely missing the presence of a single, pervasive cultural theme. The more or less unquestioned belief in the sanctity of human life in modern society, for instance, affects almost every conceivable institution, from industrial development and urban planning to the cultivation of food and medicinal testing. To effectively treat such an idea as a product of any one institution would thus be a significant analytical mistake.

In recent years, some of the strongest criticisms of the culture concept have come from within the discipline of cultural anthropology itself. Adherents of a loosely defined movement known as “postmodern anthropology” (also variably referred to as postcultural, poststructural, and reflexive anthropology) have questioned the very usefulness and validity of culture as an abstract concept. Often associated with a 1986 collection of essays edited by James Clifford and George Marcus called Writing Culture, the movement can be viewed an extension of the theories of Clifford Geertz—particularly his use of literary theory and his emphasis on the importance of context. Michael Silverstein (2005) identified the “symbols and meaning-ism” that Geertz helped usher in as the point at which anthropology became a hermeneutic and interpretive project rather than an observational science. But for those affiliated with the Writing Culture movement, Geertz stopped short of the inevitable conclusion of his argument—that the description or “interpretation” of a culture is as much a reflection of the point of view of the anthropologist as it is of the culture itself. From this perspective, the anthropologist does not simply record facts about others’ ways of life; instead, she actually creates (or at least coconstructs) the culture as she describes it. This is obviously very troubling for the credibility of anthropological knowledge, and it becomes especially problematic when, as was traditionally the case, the anthropologist is a member of a dominant society granted unilateral authority to depict the beliefs and practices of a subjugated population. Critics point to this unequal power dynamic as at least partially to blame for misguided attempts to capture complex realities using false dichotomies like “savage vs. civilized,” “rational vs. irrational,” or “individualist vs. collectivist.”

This “reflexive” critique is linked to an older, more basic criticism in anthropology, suggesting that culture is a tool for the preservation of existing systems of power and oppression. Proponents of this view argue that by ascribing too much importance to tradition, the concept of culture legitimates the domination and mistreatment of traditionally powerless segments of societies. A frequently cited example is the disadvantaged place that women are perceived as occupying in traditionally patriarchal societies. Others have argued, however, that the perception of inequality and discrimination in other cultures is prone to error, since it often fails to take into account the subtle cultural mechanisms that redistribute power and shape social relationships. And while there certainly are cases where the idea of culture is misused to justify atrocities, this does not explain why the concept should be rejected as an analytical tool.

Another dimension of the postmodern critique takes specific aim at the practice of referring to a culture or to cultures in the plural. Some feel that this use—which is often traced, somewhat controversially, to the theories of Ruth Benedict and Margaret Mead—oversimplifies and stereotypes other societies, erroneously treating entire communities as uniform, isolated, and unchanging while downplaying diversity and internal disagreement. This implication is ever more frequently seen in popular usage, where terms like Japanese culture imply a universally shared, unquestioned, and totaling “way of life.” And while integration is not necessarily synonymous with cultural determinism, Benedict (1934), for her part, did little to dispel that interpretation in asserting that the individual “is the little creature of his culture. . . . Its habits are his habits, its beliefs his beliefs” (pp. 2–3). In response, critics like Clifford and Marcus (1986) stressed the importance of individual agency and “resistance” to cultural norms, pointing out that cultures are not bounded, homogeneous, or “pure.” Instead, culture is contested, contradictory, and only loosely integrated, constantly subject to change both from within and without. Postmodernists note that cultures have always been hybridized and permeable, but that this has become increasingly so in recent decades in the face of globalization and capitalist expansion. As Clifford and Marcus (1986) observed, difference is now routinely found next door and familiarity at the end of the earth, suggesting that received notions of culture are not only mistaken, but also irrelevant.

Others maintain, however, that the concept of culture has never implied uniformity, and that no serious anthropologist ever viewed individuals as mindless automatons totally controlled by a self-contained and unchanging cultural system. They argue that culture has always been an abstraction; that is, culture does not represent a “thing” that exists in the world as such, but is instead separated by way of observation and logical inference from the context of real-world actions and utterances in which it is embedded. Alfred Kroeber (1952) defended the practice of speaking of cultures in the plural on this basis, anticipating contemporary critiques in pointing out that one could speak at the same time of a Tokyo or a Japanese or an East Asian culture without implying that any of them represented a homogeneous or totalizing way of life. More recently, Marshall Sahlins (1999) has asserted that the concept of culture critiqued by postmodern anthropologists is a myth. Sahlins does argue that cultural communities can have boundaries, but that these boundaries, rather than being barriers to the flow of people, goods, or ideas, represent conscious designations of identity and inclusion made by the members of the community themselves.

Regarding the uniformity and homogeneity of cultural knowledge, anthropologist Richard Shweder (2003) has argued that culture never implied the passive acceptance of received beliefs and practices or the absence of dispute or debate. Shweder points out that every culture has experts and novices, but that such unequal distribution of knowledge does not mean that anyone is more or less a member of that culture. As one of the chief proponents of the resurgent interdisciplinary field of “cultural psychology,” Shweder has helped demonstrate that basic psychological processes such as selfhood and emotion, rather than being products of deep structural similarity, are rooted in culturally specific modes of understanding (Shweder & Bourne, 1984). Such findings have provided some of the driving force behind the growing influence of the concept of culture in the field of social psychology (e.g., Markus & Kitayama, 1991; et al).

Whether prior theories or particular uses of the term carried misguided implications or not, anthropologists continue to recognize culture as an indispensible consideration in the analysis of human social life. As theorists from nearly every area of study surveyed in this research paper have agreed, shared cultural knowledge is absolutely essential for individuals to function in a way that is recognizably human (see Geertz, 1973a, 1973b, 1973c; Whorf, 1956; Beattie, 1964; Clifford & Marcus, 1986; Sewell, 2005; Sahlins, 1976). Clifford Geertz referred to a gap that exists between our species’ innate biological predispositions and what humans must know in order to survive and function— a gap that could only be filled with highly particular systems of beliefs, values, and representations expressed and transmitted through symbols.

Even those most critical of the concept tend to recognize the centrality and pervasiveness of culture. Culture represents the shared ideas that define and give meaning to objects, events, and relationships in our world and the collective representations that create and maintain social institutions. This is true even of those domains of human activity appearing to follow their own logic and obeying their set of rules and principles. Renato Rosaldo (1989), whose work was also included among the 1986 collection of essays that kindled the postmodern anthropological movement, wrote as follows:

Culture … refers broadly to the forms through which people make sense of their lives … It does not inhabit a set-aside domain as does politics or economics. From the pirouettes of classical ballet to the most brute of brute facts, all human conduct is culturally mediated. Culture encompasses the everyday and the esoteric, the mundane and the elevated, the ridiculous and the sublime. Neither high nor low, culture is all-pervasive. (p. 26)

Thus, the concept of culture, in one way or another, is likely to remain of central concern to the discipline of anthropology for the foreseeable future.

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• Sapir, E. (1917). Do we need a superorganic? American Anthropologist, 19, 441–447.
• Sapir, E. (1924). Culture, genuine and spurious. American Journal of Sociology, 29, 401–429.
• Schank, R., & Abelson, R. (1977). Scripts, plans, goals, and understandings. Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum.
• Schneider, D. (1968). American kinship. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
• Searle, J. (1969). Speech acts: An essay in the philosophy of language. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.
• Sewell, W. (2005).The concept(s) of culture. In W. Sewell, Logics of history (pp. 152–174). Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
• Shweder, R. (2003). Anti-postculturalism (or, the view from manywheres). In R. Shweder, Why do men barbecue? Recipes for cultural psychology (pp. 1–45). Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
• Shweder, R., & Bourne, E. (1984). Does the concept of the person vary cross-culturally? In R. Shweder & R. Levine (Eds.), Culture theory (pp. 158–199). Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.
• Silverstein, M. (2005). Languages/cultures are dead: Long live the linguistic-cultural. In D. Segal & S. Yanagisako (Eds.), Unwrapping the sacred bundle: Reflections on the discipline of anthropology (pp. 99–125). Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
• Tylor, E. B. (1958). Religion in primitive culture. New York: Harper & Row. (Originally published as Chapters 11–19 of Primitive culture, 1871)
• Whorf, B. L. (1956). Language, thought, and reality. Cambridge: MIT Press.
• Williams, R. (1983). NewYork: Oxford University Press.

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Cultural Research Paper Topics

• Investigating the benefits of cultural studies in promoting brands in international markets.
• Perception differences among youth and the old population of disabled people.
• Examination of different coping mechanisms of being culturally different in society.
• Impact of films, songs, and feminism on promoting women equality.
• Conservation of culture in isolated communities.
• Influence of religion on culture: A case study of the Muslim community
• Cultural commonalities for all human beings on earth.
• Correlation between attitude and sex as tools of culture.
• Exhibition of cultural traits in indigenous and exotic animals.
• How association to particular languages influences culture.

Cultural Anthropology Research Paper Topics

• An evaluation of the cultural anthropology of our time

The effects of cultural anthropology to the missionary.

• The role of women in modern society as opposed to the traditional roles.
• What are the peculiarities of the Zulu community culture in Southern Africa?
• Examination of various religious practices in the United States of America.

The influence of English as a common language on American culture.

• Exploration of the long-term impacts of physical labour on the physical appearance of humans.
• How stigma affects efforts on stopping the spread of sexually transmitted diseases.
• How is the concept of death viewed in Africa?
• What is the anthropological perspective on the development of the modern United States of America?

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• Evaluate the significance of preserving cultural diversity in the 21st century.
• What is the role of cultural diversity in modern society?
• How pluralism and multiculturalism have impacted the lives of American citizens.
• Associations of psychological counselling to cultural diversity.
• Demonstrate critical thinking about psychology with a special mention on multicultural issues and diversity.
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• Evaluate the role of cultural diversity in schools
• Impacts of migration on the cultural diversity of Asian land, especially on mental health.
• Cultural diversity’s impact on the interaction process and performance.

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• Personality and filial piety among British citizens.
• What are the cross-cultural perspectives on human developments in Central America?
• The self and social behaviour among Red Indians in the United States of America.
• Factors that influence cross-cultural psychology.
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• Life experiences of unemployed graduates in the United Kingdom.
• The relationship between parenting stress and stigma with parent-child interactions in mothers with autistic children.
• Comparative analysis of gender stereotypes of superior thinking in men and emotions in women among students
• How has Covid-19 affected the political atmosphere in the United States of America?
• Analyze the impact that famous artists have on world culture.
• Discuss the evolution of cultural psychology as a topic since the 17th century.

Cross-Cultural Research Paper Topics

• How does culture affect social and emotional development?
• Compare and contrast the features of language and culture.
• Impacts of social organization and history in modern society.
• Members of any culture perceive their behaviour as logical. Validate this statement.
• Determinants of cross-cultural business communication.
• The roles of attitudes toward accents and dialects in creating barriers in international business communication.
• Description of socio-linguistic as a tool of differentiating economic classes.
• Influence of environmental factors on the development and character of cultures.
• Climate and topography affect the transport and logistics, settlement, and territorial organization. Elucidate.
• Describe how Africa’s population size and its density and the availability of natural resources influence the continent toward export and domestic markets.
• Discuss ways in which conceptions of authority affects cross-cultural psychology, more so in India.
• The role of non-verbal communication in promoting culture.

Best Cultural Research Paper Topics

• The evolution of the amount and type of sexism over the years.
• Analysis of the impact of Michael Jackson on popular culture in the world.
• How has the Black Lives Matter movement affected discussions and view about racism in the US?
• Reasons for the emergence of female culture in closed communities.
• Influence of native culture on human psychology.
• Causes of assimilation of people in the foreign culture.
• How cultural studies in colleges and universities have helped demystify cultural myths and misconceptions.
• Why children need to stay with their grandparents at least once in a while

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What It Means To Be Asian in America

The lived experiences and perspectives of asian americans in their own words.

Asians are the fastest growing racial and ethnic group in the United States. More than 24 million Americans in the U.S. trace their roots to more than 20 countries in East and Southeast Asia and the Indian subcontinent.

The majority of Asian Americans are immigrants, coming to understand what they left behind and building their lives in the United States. At the same time, there is a fast growing, U.S.-born generation of Asian Americans who are navigating their own connections to familial heritage and their own experiences growing up in the U.S.

In a new Pew Research Center analysis based on dozens of focus groups, Asian American participants described the challenges of navigating their own identity in a nation where the label “Asian” brings expectations about their origins, behavior and physical self. Read on to see, in their own words, what it means to be Asian in America.

• Introduction

Table of Contents

This is how i view my identity, this is how others see and treat me, this is what it means to be home in america, about this project, methodological note, acknowledgments.

No single experience defines what it means to be Asian in the United States today. Instead, Asian Americans’ lived experiences are in part shaped by where they were born, how connected they are to their family’s ethnic origins, and how others – both Asians and non-Asians – see and engage with them in their daily lives. Yet despite diverse experiences, backgrounds and origins, shared experiences and common themes emerged when we asked: “What does it mean to be Asian in America?”

In the fall of 2021, Pew Research Center undertook the largest focus group study it had ever conducted – 66 focus groups with 264 total participants – to hear Asian Americans talk about their lived experiences in America. The focus groups were organized into 18 distinct Asian ethnic origin groups, fielded in 18 languages and moderated by members of their own ethnic groups. Because of the pandemic, the focus groups were conducted virtually, allowing us to recruit participants from all parts of the United States. This approach allowed us to hear a diverse set of voices – especially from less populous Asian ethnic groups whose views, attitudes and opinions are seldom presented in traditional polling. The approach also allowed us to explore the reasons behind people’s opinions and choices about what it means to belong in America, beyond the preset response options of a traditional survey.

The terms “Asian,” “Asians living in the United States” and “Asian American” are used interchangeably throughout this essay to refer to U.S. adults who self-identify as Asian, either alone or in combination with other races or Hispanic identity.

“The United States” and “the U.S.” are used interchangeably with “America” for variations in the writing.

Multiracial participants are those who indicate they are of two or more racial backgrounds (one of which is Asian). Multiethnic participants are those who indicate they are of two or more ethnicities, including those identified as Asian with Hispanic background.

U.S. born refers to people born in the 50 U.S. states or the District of Columbia, Puerto Rico, or other U.S. territories.

Immigrant refers to people who were not U.S. citizens at birth – in other words, those born outside the U.S., Puerto Rico or other U.S. territories to parents who were not U.S. citizens. The terms “immigrant,” “first generation” and “foreign born” are used interchangeably in this report.  

Second generation refers to people born in the 50 states or the District of Columbia with at least one first-generation, or immigrant, parent.

The pan-ethnic term “Asian American” describes the population of about 22 million people living in the United States who trace their roots to more than 20 countries in East and Southeast Asia and the Indian subcontinent. The term was popularized by U.S. student activists in the 1960s and was eventually adopted by the U.S. Census Bureau. However, the “Asian” label masks the diverse demographics and wide economic disparities across the largest national origin groups (such as Chinese, Indian, Filipino) and the less populous ones (such as Bhutanese, Hmong and Nepalese) living in America. It also hides the varied circumstances of groups immigrated to the U.S. and how they started their lives there. The population’s diversity often presents challenges . Conventional survey methods typically reflect the voices of larger groups without fully capturing the broad range of views, attitudes, life starting points and perspectives experienced by Asian Americans. They can also limit understanding of the shared experiences across this diverse population.

Across all focus groups, some common findings emerged. Participants highlighted how the pan-ethnic “Asian” label used in the U.S. represented only one part of how they think of themselves. For example, recently arrived Asian immigrant participants told us they are drawn more to their ethnic identity than to the more general, U.S.-created pan-ethnic Asian American identity. Meanwhile, U.S.-born Asian participants shared how they identified, at times, as Asian but also, at other times, by their ethnic origin and as Americans.

Another common finding among focus group participants is the disconnect they noted between how they see themselves and how others view them. Sometimes this led to maltreatment of them or their families, especially at heightened moments in American history such as during Japanese incarceration during World War II, the aftermath of 9/11 and, more recently, the COVID-19 pandemic. Beyond these specific moments, many in the focus groups offered their own experiences that had revealed other people’s assumptions or misconceptions about their identity.

Another shared finding is the multiple ways in which participants take and express pride in their cultural and ethnic backgrounds while also feeling at home in America, celebrating and blending their unique cultural traditions and practices with those of other Americans.

This focus group project is part of a broader research agenda about Asians living in the United States. The findings presented here offer a small glimpse of what participants told us, in their own words, about how they identify themselves, how others see and treat them, and more generally, what it means to be Asian in America.

Illustrations by Jing Li

Publications from the Being Asian in America project

• Read the data essay: What It Means to Be Asian in America
• Watch the documentary: Being Asian in America
• Explore the interactive: In Their Own Words: The Diverse Perspectives of Being Asian in America
• View expanded interviews: Extended Interviews: Being Asian in America
• About this research project: More on the Being Asian in America project
• Q&A: Why and how Pew Research Center conducted 66 focus groups with Asian Americans

One of the topics covered in each focus group was how participants viewed their own racial or ethnic identity. Moderators asked them how they viewed themselves, and what experiences informed their views about their identity. These discussions not only highlighted differences in how participants thought about their own racial or ethnic background, but they also revealed how different settings can influence how they would choose to identify themselves. Across all focus groups, the general theme emerged that being Asian was only one part of how participants viewed themselves.

The pan-ethnic label ‘Asian’ is often used more in formal settings

“I think when I think of the Asian Americans, I think that we’re all unique and different. We come from different cultures and backgrounds. We come from unique stories, not just as a group, but just as individual humans.” Mali , documentary participant

Many participants described a complicated relationship with the pan-ethnic labels “Asian” or “Asian American.” For some, using the term was less of an active choice and more of an imposed one, with participants discussing the disconnect between how they would like to identify themselves and the available choices often found in formal settings. For example, an immigrant Pakistani woman remarked how she typically sees “Asian American” on forms, but not more specific options. Similarly, an immigrant Burmese woman described her experience of applying for jobs and having to identify as “Asian,” as opposed to identifying by her ethnic background, because no other options were available. These experiences highlight the challenges organizations like government agencies and employers have in developing surveys or forms that ask respondents about their identity. A common sentiment is one like this:

“I guess … I feel like I just kind of check off ‘Asian’ [for] an application or the test forms. That’s the only time I would identify as Asian. But Asian is too broad. Asia is a big continent. Yeah, I feel like it’s just too broad. To specify things, you’re Taiwanese American, that’s exactly where you came from.”

–U.S.-born woman of Taiwanese origin in early 20s

Smaller ethnic groups default to ‘Asian’ since their groups are less recognizable

Other participants shared how their experiences in explaining the geographic location and culture of their origin country led them to prefer “Asian” when talking about themselves with others. This theme was especially prominent among those belonging to smaller origin groups such as Bangladeshis and Bhutanese. A Lao participant remarked she would initially say “Asian American” because people might not be familiar with “Lao.”

“​​[When I fill out] forms, I select ‘Asian American,’ and that’s why I consider myself as an Asian American. [It is difficult to identify as] Nepali American [since] there are no such options in forms. That’s why, Asian American is fine to me.”

–Immigrant woman of Nepalese origin in late 20s

“Coming to a big country like [the United States], when people ask where we are from … there are some people who have no idea about Bhutan, so we end up introducing ourselves as being Asian.”

–Immigrant woman of Bhutanese origin in late 40s

But for many, ‘Asian’ as a label or identity just doesn’t fit

Many participants felt that neither “Asian” nor “Asian American” truly captures how they view themselves and their identity. They argue that these labels are too broad or too ambiguous, as there are so many different groups included within these labels. For example, a U.S.-born Pakistani man remarked on how “Asian” lumps many groups together – that the term is not limited to South Asian groups such as Indian and Pakistani, but also includes East Asian groups. Similarly, an immigrant Nepalese man described how “Asian” often means Chinese for many Americans. A Filipino woman summed it up this way:

“Now I consider myself to be both Filipino and Asian American, but growing up in [Southern California] … I didn’t start to identify as Asian American until college because in [the Los Angeles suburb where I lived], it’s a big mix of everything – Black, Latino, Pacific Islander and Asian … when I would go into spaces where there were a lot of other Asians, especially East Asians, I didn’t feel like I belonged. … In media, right, like people still associate Asian with being East Asian.”

–U.S.-born woman of Filipino origin in mid-20s

Participants also noted they have encountered confusion or the tendency for others to view Asian Americans as people from mostly East Asian countries, such as China, Japan and Korea. For some, this confusion even extends to interactions with other Asian American groups. A Pakistani man remarked on how he rarely finds Pakistani or Indian brands when he visits Asian stores. Instead, he recalled mostly finding Vietnamese, Korean and Chinese items.

Among participants of South Asian descent, some identified with the label “South Asian” more than just “Asian.” There were other nuances, too, when it comes to the labels people choose. Some Indian participants, for example, said people sometimes group them with Native Americans who are also referred to as Indians in the United States. This Indian woman shared her experience at school:

“I love South Asian or ‘Desi’ only because up until recently … it’s fairly new to say South Asian. I’ve always said ‘Desi’ because growing up … I’ve had to say I’m the red dot Indian, not the feather Indian. So annoying, you know? … Always a distinction that I’ve had to make.”

–U.S.-born woman of Indian origin in late 20s

Participants with multiethnic or multiracial backgrounds described their own unique experiences with their identity. Rather than choosing one racial or ethnic group over the other, some participants described identifying with both groups, since this more accurately describes how they see themselves. In some cases, this choice reflected the history of the Asian diaspora. For example, an immigrant Cambodian man described being both Khmer/Cambodian and Chinese, since his grandparents came from China. Some other participants recalled going through an “identity crisis” as they navigated between multiple identities. As one woman explained:

“I would say I went through an identity crisis. … It’s because of being multicultural. … There’s also French in the mix within my family, too. Because I don’t identify, speak or understand the language, I really can’t connect to the French roots … I’m in between like Cambodian and Thai, and then Chinese and then French … I finally lumped it up. I’m just an Asian American and proud of all my roots.”

–U.S.-born woman of Cambodian origin in mid-30s

In other cases, the choice reflected U.S. patterns of intermarriage. Asian newlyweds have the highest intermarriage rate of any racial or ethnic group in the country. One Japanese-origin man with Hispanic roots noted:

“So I would like to see myself as a Hispanic Asian American. I want to say Hispanic first because I have more of my mom’s culture in me than my dad’s culture. In fact, I actually have more American culture than my dad’s culture for what I do normally. So I guess, Hispanic American Asian.”

–U.S.-born man of Hispanic and Japanese origin in early 40s

Other identities beyond race or ethnicity are also important

Focus group participants also talked about their identity beyond the racial or ethnic dimension. For example, one Chinese woman noted that the best term to describe her would be “immigrant.” Faith and religious ties were also important to some. One immigrant participant talked about his love of Pakistani values and how religion is intermingled into Pakistani culture. Another woman explained:

“[Japanese language and culture] are very important to me and ingrained in me because they were always part of my life, and I felt them when I was growing up. Even the word itadakimasu reflects Japanese culture or the tradition. Shinto religion is a part of the culture. They are part of my identity, and they are very important to me.”

–Immigrant woman of Japanese origin in mid-30s

For some, gender is another important aspect of identity. One Korean participant emphasized that being a woman is an important part of her identity. For others, sexual orientation is an essential part of their overall identity. One U.S.-born Filipino participant described herself as “queer Asian American.” Another participant put it this way:

“I belong to the [LGBTQ] community … before, what we only know is gay and lesbian. We don’t know about being queer, nonbinary. [Here], my horizon of knowing what genders and gender roles is also expanded … in the Philippines, if you’ll be with same sex, you’re considered gay or lesbian. But here … what’s happening is so broad, on how you identify yourself.”

–Immigrant woman of Filipino origin in early 20s

Immigrant identity is tied to their ethnic heritage

Participants born outside the United States tended to link their identity with their ethnic heritage. Some felt strongly connected with their ethnic ties due to their citizenship status. For others, the lack of permanent residency or citizenship meant they have stronger ties to their ethnicity and birthplace. And in some cases, participants said they held on to their ethnic identity even after they became U.S. citizens. One woman emphasized that she will always be Taiwanese because she was born there, despite now living in the U.S.

For other participants, family origin played a central role in their identity, regardless of their status in the U.S. According to some of them, this attitude was heavily influenced by their memories and experiences in early childhood when they were still living in their countries of origin. These influences are so profound that even after decades of living in the U.S., some still feel the strong connection to their ethnic roots. And those with U.S.-born children talked about sending their kids to special educational programs in the U.S. to learn about their ethnic heritage.

“Yes, as for me, I hold that I am Khmer because our nationality cannot be deleted, our identity is Khmer as I hold that I am Khmer … so I try, even [with] my children today, I try to learn Khmer through Zoom through the so-called Khmer Parent Association.”

–Immigrant man of Cambodian origin in late 50s

Navigating life in America is an adjustment

Many participants pointed to cultural differences they have noticed between their ethnic culture and U.S. culture. One of the most distinct differences is in food. For some participants, their strong attachment to the unique dishes of their families and their countries of origin helps them maintain strong ties to their ethnic identity. One Sri Lankan participant shared that her roots are still in Sri Lanka, since she still follows Sri Lankan traditions in the U.S. such as preparing kiribath (rice with coconut milk) and celebrating Ramadan.

For other participants, interactions in social settings with those outside their own ethnic group circles highlighted cultural differences. One Bangladeshi woman talked about how Bengalis share personal stories and challenges with each other, while others in the U.S. like to have “small talk” about TV series or clothes.

Many immigrants in the focus groups have found it is easier to socialize when they are around others belonging to their ethnicity. When interacting with others who don’t share the same ethnicity, participants noted they must be more self-aware about cultural differences to avoid making mistakes in social interactions. Here, participants described the importance of learning to “fit in,” to avoid feeling left out or excluded. One Korean woman said:

“Every time I go to a party, I feel unwelcome. … In Korea, when I invite guests to my house and one person sits without talking, I come over and talk and treat them as a host. But in the United States, I have to go and mingle. I hate mingling so much. I have to talk and keep going through unimportant stories. In Korea, I am assigned to a dinner or gathering. I have a party with a sense of security. In America, I have nowhere to sit, and I don’t know where to go and who to talk to.”

–Immigrant woman of Korean origin in mid-40s

And a Bhutanese immigrant explained:

“In my case, I am not an American. I consider myself a Bhutanese. … I am a Bhutanese because I do not know American culture to consider myself as an American. It is very difficult to understand the sense of humor in America. So, we are pure Bhutanese in America.”

–Immigrant man of Bhutanese origin in early 40s

Language was also a key aspect of identity for the participants. Many immigrants in the focus groups said they speak a language other than English at home and in their daily lives. One Vietnamese man considered himself Vietnamese since his Vietnamese is better than his English. Others emphasized their English skills. A Bangladeshi participant felt that she was more accepted in the workplace when she does more “American” things and speaks fluent English, rather than sharing things from Bangladeshi culture. She felt that others in her workplace correlate her English fluency with her ability to do her job. For others born in the U.S., the language they speak at home influences their connection to their ethnic roots.

“Now if I go to my work and do show my Bengali culture and Asian culture, they are not going to take anything out of it. So, basically, I have to show something that they are interested in. I have to show that I am American, [that] I can speak English fluently. I can do whatever you give me as a responsibility. So, in those cases I can’t show anything about my culture.”

–Immigrant woman of Bangladeshi origin in late 20s

“Being bi-ethnic and tri-cultural creates so many unique dynamics, and … one of the dynamics has to do with … what it is to be Americanized. … One of the things that played a role into how I associate the identity is language. Now, my father never spoke Spanish to me … because he wanted me to develop a fluency in English, because for him, he struggled with English. What happened was three out of the four people that raised me were Khmer … they spoke to me in Khmer. We’d eat breakfast, lunch and dinner speaking Khmer. We’d go to the temple in Khmer with the language and we’d also watch videos and movies in Khmer. … Looking into why I strongly identify with the heritage, one of the reasons is [that] speaking that language connects to the home I used to have [as my families have passed away].”

–U.S.-born man of Cambodian origin in early 30s

Balancing between individualistic and collective thinking

For some immigrant participants, the main differences between themselves and others who are seen as “truly American” were less about cultural differences, or how people behave, and more about differences in “mindset,” or how people think . Those who identified strongly with their ethnicity discussed how their way of thinking is different from a “typical American.” To some, the “American mentality” is more individualistic, with less judgment on what one should do or how they should act . One immigrant Japanese man, for example, talked about how other Japanese-origin co-workers in the U.S. would work without taking breaks because it’s culturally inconsiderate to take a break while others continued working. However, he would speak up for himself and other workers when they are not taking any work breaks. He attributed this to his “American” way of thinking, which encourages people to stand up for themselves.

Some U.S.-born participants who grew up in an immigrant family described the cultural clashes that happened between themselves and their immigrant parents. Participants talked about how the second generation (children of immigrant parents) struggles to pursue their own dreams while still living up to the traditional expectations of their immigrant parents.

“I feel like one of the biggest things I’ve seen, just like [my] Asian American friends overall, is the kind of family-individualistic clash … like wanting to do your own thing is like, is kind of instilled in you as an American, like go and … follow your dream. But then you just grow up with such a sense of like also wanting to be there for your family and to live up to those expectations, and I feel like that’s something that’s very pronounced in Asian cultures.”

–U.S.-born man of Indian origin in mid-20s

Discussions also highlighted differences about gender roles between growing up in America compared with elsewhere.

“As a woman or being a girl, because of your gender, you have to keep your mouth shut [and] wait so that they call on you for you to speak up. … I do respect our elders and I do respect hearing their guidance but I also want them to learn to hear from the younger person … because we have things to share that they might not know and that [are] important … so I like to challenge gender roles or traditional roles because it is something that [because] I was born and raised here [in America], I learn that we all have the equal rights to be able to speak and share our thoughts and ideas.”

U.S. born have mixed ties to their family’s heritage

“I think being Hmong is somewhat of being free, but being free of others’ perceptions of you or of others’ attempts to assimilate you or attempts to put pressure on you. I feel like being Hmong is to resist, really.” Pa Houa , documentary participant

How U.S.-born participants identify themselves depends on their familiarity with their own heritage, whom they are talking with, where they are when asked about their identity and what the answer is used for. Some mentioned that they have stronger ethnic ties because they are very familiar with their family’s ethnic heritage. Others talked about how their eating habits and preferred dishes made them feel closer to their ethnic identity. For example, one Korean participant shared his journey of getting closer to his Korean heritage because of Korean food and customs. When some participants shared their reasons for feeling closer to their ethnic identity, they also expressed a strong sense of pride with their unique cultural and ethnic heritage.

“I definitely consider myself Japanese American. I mean I’m Japanese and American. Really, ever since I’ve grown up, I’ve really admired Japanese culture. I grew up watching a lot of anime and Japanese black and white films. Just learning about [it], I would hear about Japanese stuff from my grandparents … myself, and my family having blended Japanese culture and American culture together.”

–U.S.-born man of Japanese origin in late 20s

Meanwhile, participants who were not familiar with their family’s heritage showed less connection with their ethnic ties. One U.S.-born woman said she has a hard time calling herself Cambodian, as she is “not close to the Cambodian community.” Participants with stronger ethnic ties talked about relating to their specific ethnic group more than the broader Asian group. Another woman noted that being Vietnamese is “more specific and unique than just being Asian” and said that she didn’t feel she belonged with other Asians. Some participants also disliked being seen as or called “Asian,” in part because they want to distinguish themselves from other Asian groups. For example, one Taiwanese woman introduces herself as Taiwanese when she can, because she had frequently been seen as Chinese.

Some in the focus groups described how their views of their own identities shifted as they grew older. For example, some U.S.-born and immigrant participants who came to the U.S. at younger ages described how their experiences in high school and the need to “fit in” were important in shaping their own identities. A Chinese woman put it this way:

“So basically, all I know is that I was born in the United States. Again, when I came back, I didn’t feel any barrier with my other friends who are White or Black. … Then I got a little confused in high school when I had trouble self-identifying if I am Asian, Chinese American, like who am I. … Should I completely immerse myself in the American culture? Should I also keep my Chinese identity and stuff like that? So yeah, that was like the middle of that mist. Now, I’m pretty clear about myself. I think I am Chinese American, Asian American, whatever people want.”

–U.S.-born woman of Chinese origin in early 20s

Identity is influenced by birthplace

“I identified myself first and foremost as American. Even on the forms that you fill out that says, you know, ‘Asian’ or ‘Chinese’ or ‘other,’ I would check the ‘other’ box, and I would put ‘American Chinese’ instead of ‘Chinese American.’” Brent , documentary participant

When talking about what it means to be “American,” participants offered their own definitions. For some, “American” is associated with acquiring a distinct identity alongside their ethnic or racial backgrounds, rather than replacing them. One Indian participant put it this way:

“I would also say [that I am] Indian American just because I find myself always bouncing between the two … it’s not even like dual identity, it just is one whole identity for me, like there’s not this separation. … I’m doing [both] Indian things [and] American things. … They use that term like ABCD … ‘American Born Confused Desi’ … I don’t feel that way anymore, although there are those moments … but I would say [that I am] Indian American for sure.”

–U.S.-born woman of Indian origin in early 30s

Meanwhile, some U.S.-born participants view being American as central to their identity while also valuing the culture of their family’s heritage.

Many immigrant participants associated the term “American” with immigration status or citizenship. One Taiwanese woman said she can’t call herself American since she doesn’t have a U.S. passport. Notably, U.S. citizenship is an important milestone for many immigrant participants, giving them a stronger sense of belonging and ultimately calling themselves American. A Bangladeshi participant shared that she hasn’t received U.S. citizenship yet, and she would call herself American after she receives her U.S. passport.

Other participants gave an even narrower definition, saying only those born and raised in the United States are truly American. One Taiwanese woman mentioned that her son would be American since he was born, raised and educated in the U.S. She added that while she has U.S. citizenship, she didn’t consider herself American since she didn’t grow up in the U.S. This narrower definition has implications for belonging. Some immigrants in the groups said they could never become truly American since the way they express themselves is so different from those who were born and raised in the U.S. A Japanese woman pointed out that Japanese people “are still very intimidated by authorities,” while those born and raised in America give their opinions without hesitation.

“As soon as I arrived, I called myself a Burmese immigrant. I had a green card, but I still wasn’t an American citizen. … Now I have become a U.S. citizen, so now I am a Burmese American.”

–Immigrant man of Burmese origin in mid-30s

“Since I was born … and raised here, I kind of always view myself as American first who just happened to be Asian or Chinese. So I actually don’t like the term Chinese American or Asian American. I’m American Asian or American Chinese. I view myself as American first.”

–U.S.-born man of Chinese origin in early 60s

“[I used to think of myself as] Filipino, but recently I started saying ‘Filipino American’ because I got [U.S.] citizenship. And it just sounds weird to say Filipino American, but I’m trying to … I want to accept it. I feel like it’s now marry-able to my identity.”

–Immigrant woman of Filipino origin in early 30s

For others, American identity is about the process of ‘becoming’ culturally American

Immigrant participants also emphasized how their experiences and time living in America inform their views of being an “American.” As a result, some started to see themselves as Americans after spending more than a decade in the U.S. One Taiwanese man considered himself an American since he knows more about the U.S. than Taiwan after living in the U.S. for over 52 years.

But for other immigrant participants, the process of “becoming” American is not about how long they have lived in the U.S., but rather how familiar they are with American culture and their ability to speak English with little to no accent. This is especially true for those whose first language is not English, as learning and speaking it without an accent can be a big challenge for some. One Bangladeshi participant shared that his pronunciation of “hot water” was very different from American English, resulting in confusions in communication. By contrast, those who were more confident in their English skills felt they can better understand American culture and values as a result, leading them to a stronger connection with an American identity.

“[My friends and family tease me for being Americanized when I go back to Japan.] I think I seem a little different to people who live in Japan. I don’t think they mean anything bad, and they [were] just joking, because I already know that I seem a little different to people who live in Japan.”

–Immigrant man of Japanese origin in mid-40s

“I value my Hmong culture, and language, and ethnicity, but I also do acknowledge, again, that I was born here in America and I’m grateful that I was born here, and I was given opportunities that my parents weren’t given opportunities for.”

–U.S.-born woman of Hmong origin in early 30s

During the focus group discussions about identity, a recurring theme emerged about the difference between how participants saw themselves and how others see them. When asked to elaborate on their experiences and their points of view, some participants shared experiences they had with people misidentifying their race or ethnicity. Others talked about their frustration with being labeled the “model minority.” In all these discussions, participants shed light on the negative impacts that mistaken assumptions and labels had on their lives.

All people see is ‘Asian’

For many, interactions with others (non-Asians and Asians alike) often required explaining their backgrounds, reacting to stereotypes, and for those from smaller origin groups in particular, correcting the misconception that being “Asian” means you come from one of the larger Asian ethnic groups. Several participants remarked that in their own experiences, when others think about Asians, they tend to think of someone who is Chinese. As one immigrant Filipino woman put it, “Interacting with [non-Asians in the U.S.], it’s hard. … Well, first, I look Spanish. I mean, I don’t look Asian, so would you guess – it’s like they have a vision of what an Asian [should] look like.” Similarly, an immigrant Indonesian man remarked how Americans tended to see Asians primarily through their physical features, which not all Asian groups share.

Several participants also described how the tendency to view Asians as a monolithic group can be even more common in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic.

“The first [thing people think of me as] is just Chinese. ‘You guys are just Chinese.’ I’m not the only one who felt [this] after the COVID-19 outbreak. ‘Whether you’re Japanese, Korean, or Southeast Asian, you’re just Chinese [to Americans]. I should avoid you.’ I’ve felt this way before, but I think I’ve felt it a bit more after the COVID-19 outbreak.”

–Immigrant woman of Korean origin in early 30s

At the same time, other participants described their own experiences trying to convince others that they are Asian or Asian American. This was a common experience among Southeast Asian participants.

“I have to convince people I’m Asian, not Middle Eastern. … If you type in Asian or you say Asian, most people associate it with Chinese food, Japanese food, karate, and like all these things but then they don’t associate it with you.”

–U.S.-born man of Pakistani origin in early 30s

The model minority myth and its impact

“I’ve never really done the best academically, compared to all my other Asian peers too. I never really excelled. I wasn’t in honors. … Those stereotypes, I think really [have] taken a toll on my self-esteem.” Diane , documentary participant

Across focus groups, immigrant and U.S.-born participants described the challenges of the seemingly positive stereotypes of Asians as intelligent, gifted in technical roles and hardworking. Participants often referred to this as the “model minority myth.”

The label “model minority” was coined in the 1960s and has been used to characterize Asian Americans as financially and educationally successful and hardworking when compared with other groups. However, for many Asians living in the United States, these characterizations do not align with their lived experiences or reflect their socioeconomic backgrounds. Indeed, among Asian origin groups in the U.S., there are wide differences in economic and social experiences. 

Academic research on the model minority myth has pointed to its impact beyond Asian Americans and towards other racial and ethnic groups, especially Black Americans, in the U.S. Some argue that the model minority myth has been used to justify policies that overlook the historical circumstances and impacts of colonialism, slavery, discrimination and segregation on other non-White racial and ethnic groups.

Many participants noted ways in which the model minority myth has been harmful. For some, expectations based on the myth didn’t match their own experiences of coming from impoverished communities. Some also recalled experiences at school when they struggled to meet their teachers’ expectations in math and science.

“As an Asian person, I feel like there’s that stereotype that Asian students are high achievers academically. They’re good at math and science. … I was a pretty mediocre student, and math and science were actually my weakest subjects, so I feel like it’s either way you lose. Teachers expect you to fit a certain stereotype and if you’re not, then you’re a disappointment, but at the same time, even if you are good at math and science, that just means that you’re fitting a stereotype. It’s [actually] your own achievement, but your teachers might think, ‘Oh, it’s because they’re Asian,’ and that diminishes your achievement.”

–U.S.-born woman of Korean origin in late 20s

Some participants felt that even when being Asian worked in their favor in the job market, they encountered stereotypes that “Asians can do quality work with less compensation” or that “Asians would not complain about anything at work.”

“There is a joke from foreigners and even Asian Americans that says, ‘No matter what you do, Asians always do the best.’ You need to get A, not just B-plus. Otherwise, you’ll be a disgrace to the family. … Even Silicon Valley hires Asian because [an] Asian’s wage is cheaper but [they] can work better. When [work] visa overflow happens, they hire Asians like Chinese and Indian to work in IT fields because we are good at this and do not complain about anything.”

–Immigrant man of Thai origin in early 40s

Others expressed frustration that people were placing them in the model minority box. One Indian woman put it this way:

“Indian people and Asian people, like … our parents or grandparents are the ones who immigrated here … against all odds. … A lot of Indian and Asian people have succeeded and have done really well for themselves because they’ve worked themselves to the bone. So now the expectations [of] the newer generations who were born here are incredibly unrealistic and high. And you get that not only from your family and the Indian community, but you’re also getting it from all of the American people around you, expecting you to be … insanely good at math, play an instrument, you know how to do this, you know how to do that, but it’s not true. And it’s just living with those expectations, it’s difficult.”

–U.S.-born woman of Indian origin in early 20s

Whether U.S. born or immigrants, Asians are often seen by others as foreigners

“Being only not quite 10 years old, it was kind of exciting to ride on a bus to go someplace. But when we went to Pomona, the assembly center, we were stuck in one of the stalls they used for the animals.” Tokiko , documentary participant

Across all focus groups, participants highlighted a common question they are asked in America when meeting people for the first time: “Where are you really from?” For participants, this question implied that people think they are “foreigners,” even though they may be longtime residents or citizens of the United States or were born in the country. One man of Vietnamese origin shared his experience with strangers who assumed that he and his friends are North Korean. Perhaps even more hurtful, participants mentioned that this meant people had a preconceived notion of what an “American” is supposed to look like, sound like or act like. One Chinese woman said that White Americans treated people like herself as outsiders based on her skin color and appearance, even though she was raised in the U.S.

Many focus group participants also acknowledged the common stereotype of treating Asians as “forever foreigners.” Some immigrant participants said they felt exhausted from constantly being asked this question by people even when they speak perfect English with no accent. During the discussion, a Korean immigrant man recalled that someone had said to him, “You speak English well, but where are you from?” One Filipino participant shared her experience during the first six months in the U.S.:

“You know, I spoke English fine. But there were certain things that, you know, people constantly questioning you like, oh, where are you from? When did you come here? You know, just asking about your experience to the point where … you become fed up with it after a while.”

–Immigrant woman of Filipino origin in mid-30s

U.S.-born participants also talked about experiences when others asked where they are from. Many shared that they would not talk about their ethnic origin right away when answering such a question because it often led to misunderstandings and assumptions that they are immigrants.

“I always get that question of, you know, ‘Where are you from?’ and I’m like, ‘I’m from America.’ And then they’re like, ‘No. Where are you from-from ?’ and I’m like, ‘Yeah, my family is from Pakistan,’ so it’s like I always had like that dual identity even though it’s never attached to me because I am like, of Pakistani descent.”

–U.S.-born man of Pakistani origin in early 20s

One Korean woman born in the U.S. said that once people know she is Korean, they ask even more offensive questions such as “Are you from North or South Korea?” or “Do you still eat dogs?”

In a similar situation, this U.S.-born Indian woman shared her responses:

“I find that there’s a, ‘So but where are you from?’ Like even in professional settings when they feel comfortable enough to ask you. ‘So – so where are you from?’ ‘Oh, I was born in [names city], Colorado. Like at [the hospital], down the street.’ ‘No, but like where are you from?’ ‘My mother’s womb?’”

–U.S.-born woman of Indian origin in early 40s

Ignorance and misinformation about Asian identity can lead to contentious encounters

“I have dealt with kids who just gave up on their Sikh identity, cut their hair and groomed their beard and everything. They just wanted to fit in and not have to deal with it, especially [those] who are victim or bullied in any incident.” Surinder , documentary participant

In some cases, ignorance and misinformation about Asians in the U.S. lead to inappropriate comments or questions and uncomfortable or dangerous situations. Participants shared their frustration when others asked about their country of origin, and they then had to explain their identity or correct misunderstandings or stereotypes about their background. At other times, some participants faced ignorant comments about their ethnicity, which sometimes led to more contentious encounters. For example, some Indian or Pakistani participants talked about the attacks or verbal abuse they experienced from others blaming them for the 9/11 terrorist attacks. Others discussed the racial slurs directed toward them since the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020. Some Japanese participants recalled their families losing everything and being incarcerated during World War II and the long-term effect it had on their lives.

“I think like right now with the coronavirus, I think we’re just Chinese, Chinese American, well, just Asian American or Asians in general, you’re just going through the same struggles right now. Like everyone is just blaming whoever looks Asian about the virus. You don’t feel safe.”

–U.S.-born man of Chinese origin in early 30s

“At the beginning of the pandemic, a friend and I went to celebrate her birthday at a club and like these guys just kept calling us COVID.”

–U.S.-born woman of Korean origin in early 20s

“There [were] a lot of instances after 9/11. One day, somebody put a poster about 9/11 [in front of] my business. He was wearing a gun. … On the poster, it was written ‘you Arabs, go back to your country.’ And then someone came inside. He pointed his gun at me and said ‘Go back to your country.’”

–Immigrant man of Pakistani origin in mid-60s

“[My parents went through the] internment camps during World War II. And my dad, he was in high school, so he was – they were building the camps and then he was put into the Santa Anita horse track place, the stables there. And then they were sent – all the Japanese Americans were sent to different camps, right, during World War II and – in California. Yeah, and they lost everything, yeah.”

–U.S.-born woman of Japanese origin in mid-60s

As focus group participants contemplated their identity during the discussions, many talked about their sense of belonging in America. Although some felt frustrated with people misunderstanding their ethnic heritage, they didn’t take a negative view of life in America. Instead, many participants – both immigrant and U.S. born – took pride in their unique cultural and ethnic backgrounds. In these discussions, people gave their own definitions of America as a place with a diverse set of cultures, with their ethnic heritage being a part of it.

Taking pride in their unique cultures

“Being a Pakistani American, I’m proud. … Because I work hard, and I make true my dreams from here.” Shahid , documentary participant

Despite the challenges of adapting to life in America for immigrant participants or of navigating their dual cultural identity for U.S.-born ones, focus group participants called America their home. And while participants talked about their identities in different ways – ethnic identity, racial (Asian) identity, and being American – they take pride in their unique cultures. Many also expressed a strong sense of responsibility to give back or support their community, sharing their cultural heritage with others on their own terms.

“Right now it has been a little difficult. I think it has been for all Asians because of the COVID issue … but I’m glad that we’re all here [in America]. I think we should be proud to be here. I’m glad that our families have traveled here, and we can help make life better for communities, our families and ourselves. I think that’s really a wonderful thing. We can be those role models for a lot of the future, the younger folks. I hope that something I did in the last years will have impacted either my family, friends or students that I taught in other community things that I’ve done. So you hope that it helps someplace along the line.”

“I am very proud of my culture. … There is not a single Bengali at my workplace, but people know the name of my country. Maybe many years [later] – educated people know all about the country. So, I don’t have to explain that there is a small country next to India and Nepal. It’s beyond saying. People after all know Bangladesh. And there are so many Bengali present here as well. So, I am very proud to be a Bangladeshi.”

Where home is

When asked about the definition of home, some immigrant participants said home is where their families are located. Immigrants in the focus groups came to the United States by various paths, whether through work opportunities, reuniting with family or seeking a safe haven as refugees. Along their journey, some received support from family members, their local community or other individuals, while others overcame challenges by themselves. Either way, they take pride in establishing their home in America and can feel hurt when someone tells them to “go back to your country.” In response, one Laotian woman in her mid-40s said, “This is my home. My country. Go away.”

“If you ask me personally, I view my home as my house … then I would say my house is with my family because wherever I go, I cannot marry if I do not have my family so that is how I would answer.”

–Immigrant man of Hmong origin in late 30s

“[If somebody yelled at me ‘go back to your country’] I’d feel angry because this is my country! I live here. America is my country. I grew up here and worked here … I’d say, ‘This is my country! You go back to your country! … I will not go anywhere. This is my home. I will live here.’ That’s what I’d say.”

–Immigrant woman of Laotian origin in early 50s

‘American’ means to blend their unique cultural and ethnic heritage with that in the U.S.

“I want to teach my children two traditions – one American and one Vietnamese – so they can compare and choose for themselves the best route in life.” Helen , documentary participant (translated from Vietnamese)

Both U.S.-born and immigrant participants in the focus groups shared their experiences of navigating a dual cultural environment between their ethnic heritage and American culture. A common thread that emerged was that being Asian in America is a process of blending two or more identities as one.

“Yeah, I want to say that’s how I feel – because like thinking about it, I would call my dad Lao but I would call myself Laotian American because I think I’m a little more integrated in the American society and I’ve also been a little more Americanized, compared to my dad. So that’s how I would see it.”

–U.S.-born man of Laotian origin in late 20s

“I mean, Bangladeshi Americans who are here, we are carrying Bangladeshi culture, religion, food. I am also trying to be Americanized like the Americans. Regarding language, eating habits.”

–Immigrant man of Bangladeshi origin in mid-50s

“Just like there is Chinese American, Mexican American, Japanese American, Italian American, so there is Indian American. I don’t want to give up Indianness. I am American by nationality, but I am Indian by birth. So whenever I talk, I try to show both the flags as well, both Indian and American flags. Just because you make new relatives but don’t forget the old relatives.”

–Immigrant man of Indian origin in late 40s

Pew Research Center designed these focus groups to better understand how members of an ethnically diverse Asian population think about their place in America and life here. By including participants of different languages, immigration or refugee experiences, educational backgrounds, and income levels, this focus group study aimed to capture in people’s own words what it means to be Asian in America. The discussions in these groups may or may not resonate with all Asians living in the United States. Browse excerpts from our focus groups with the interactive quote sorter below, view a video documentary focused on the topics discussed in the focus groups, or tell us your story of belonging in America via social media. The focus group project is part of a broader research project studying the diverse experiences of Asians living in the U.S.

Read sortable quotes from our focus groups

Browse excerpts in the interactive quote sorter from focus group participants in response to the question “What does it mean to be [Vietnamese, Thai, Sri Lankan, Hmong, etc.] like yourself in America?” This interactive allows you to sort quotes from focus group participants by ethnic origin, nativity (U.S. born or born in another country), gender and age.

Video documentary

Videos throughout the data essay illustrate what focus group participants discussed. Those recorded in these videos did not participate in the focus groups but were sampled to have similar demographic characteristics and thematically relevant stories.

Watch the full video documentary and watch additional shorter video clips related to the themes of this data essay.

Share the story of your family and your identity

Did the voices in this data essay resonate? Share your story of what it means to be Asian in America with @pewresearch. Tell us your story by using the hashtag #BeingAsianInAmerica and @pewidentity on Twitter, as well as #BeingAsianInAmerica and @pewresearch on Instagram.

This cross-ethnic, comparative qualitative research project explores the identity, economic mobility, representation, and experiences of immigration and discrimination among the Asian population in the United States. The analysis is based on 66 focus groups we conducted virtually in the fall of 2021 and included 264 participants from across the U.S. More information about the groups and analysis can be found in this appendix .

Pew Research Center is a subsidiary of The Pew Charitable Trusts, its primary funder. This data essay was funded by The Pew Charitable Trusts, with generous support from the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative DAF, an advised fund of the Silicon Valley Community Foundation; the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation; the Henry Luce Foundation; The Wallace H. Coulter Foundation; The Dirk and Charlene Kabcenell Foundation; The Long Family Foundation; Lu-Hebert Fund; Gee Family Foundation; Joseph Cotchett; the Julian Abdey and Sabrina Moyle Charitable Fund; and Nanci Nishimura.

The accompanying video clips and video documentary were made possible by The Pew Charitable Trusts, with generous support from The Sobrato Family Foundation and The Long Family Foundation.

We would also like to thank the Leaders Forum for its thought leadership and valuable assistance in helping make this study possible. This is a collaborative effort based on the input and analysis of a number of individuals and experts at Pew Research Center and outside experts.

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Title: culturebank: an online community-driven knowledge base towards culturally aware language technologies.

Abstract: To enhance language models' cultural awareness, we design a generalizable pipeline to construct cultural knowledge bases from different online communities on a massive scale. With the pipeline, we construct CultureBank, a knowledge base built upon users' self-narratives with 12K cultural descriptors sourced from TikTok and 11K from Reddit. Unlike previous cultural knowledge resources, CultureBank contains diverse views on cultural descriptors to allow flexible interpretation of cultural knowledge, and contextualized cultural scenarios to help grounded evaluation. With CultureBank, we evaluate different LLMs' cultural awareness, and identify areas for improvement. We also fine-tune a language model on CultureBank: experiments show that it achieves better performances on two downstream cultural tasks in a zero-shot setting. Finally, we offer recommendations based on our findings for future culturally aware language technologies. The project page is this https URL . The code and model is at this https URL . The released CultureBank dataset is at this https URL .

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Research on Digital Transformation Driving the High-Quality Development of Cultural and Tourism Enterprises—Evidence Based on Listed Cultural and Tourism Companies

• Published: 29 April 2024

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• Rui Tang 1 ,
• Pishi Xiu   ORCID: orcid.org/0000-0002-7238-4272 2 &
• Haoxiang Dong 1  

Digital transformation has become an important means for cultural and tourism enterprises to achieve high-quality development. The role of digital transformation in driving the development of cultural and tourism enterprises deserves to be fully explored. Based on the data of 98 listed cultural and tourism companies in China, this paper uses Python text mining, a two-way fixed effects model, and other methods to find that digital transformation could promote high-quality development of cultural and tourism enterprises. The positive effects of digital transformation are not limited by the nature of enterprise ownership, enterprise growth, or the competitive environment. The positive influence of digital transformation is significant when facing a high degree of marketization. Mechanism tests show that improvement in management efficiency, operational efficiency, quality of workforce, and industry spillovers are effective ways for digital transformation to promote high-quality development of cultural and tourism enterprises. The findings provide a decision-making basis for cultural and tourism enterprises to explore the potential of digital technology and cultivate digital transformation as an important driving force for high-quality development of enterprises.

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Marketability index data is from China Provincial Marketization Index Database , the website is https://cmi.ssap.com.cn/ .

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Tang, R., Xiu, P. & Dong, H. Research on Digital Transformation Driving the High-Quality Development of Cultural and Tourism Enterprises—Evidence Based on Listed Cultural and Tourism Companies. J Knowl Econ (2024). https://doi.org/10.1007/s13132-024-01972-3

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Lessons from Amazon’s Early Growth Strategy

If you’re interested in strategies for scaling start-ups, this episode is for you.

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So much has been written about Amazon’s outsized growth. But Harvard Business School professor Sunil Gupta says it’s the company’s unusual approach to strategy that has captured his scholarly attention. Gupta has spent years studying Amazon’s strategy and its founder and former CEO Jeff Bezos.

In this episode, Gupta shares how Amazon upended traditional corporate strategy by diversifying into multiple products serving many end users, instead of having a narrow focus.

He argues that some of Amazon’s simplest business strategies — like their obsession with customers and insistence on long-term thinking — are approaches that companies, big and small, can emulate.

Key episode topics include: strategy, innovation, leadership, scaling, Jeff Bezos, long-term thinking, customer focus.

HBR On Strategy curates the best case studies and conversations with the world’s top business and management experts, to help you unlock new ways of doing business. New episodes every week.

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HANNAH BATES: Welcome to HBR On Strategy , case studies and conversations with the world’s top business and management experts, hand-selected to help you unlock new ways of doing business.

So much has been written about Amazon’s outsized growth. But Harvard Business School professor Sunil Gupta says it’s the company’s unusual approach to strategy that has captured his scholarly attention.

Gupta has spent years studying Amazon’s strategy and its founder and former CEO, Jeff Bezos.

In this episode, Gupta shares how Amazon upended traditional corporate strategy by diversifying into multiple products serving many end users instead of focusing more narrowly.

And he argues that some of their simplest business strategies – like their obsession with the customer and insistence on long-term thinking – are approaches that companies, big and small, should emulate.

If you’re interested in innovation strategy, this episode is for you. It originally aired on HBR IdeaCast in November 2020. Here it is.

ALISON BEARD:  Welcome to the HBR IdeaCast from Harvard Business Review.  I’m Alison Beard.

If you had to name the most successful business leader alive today, who would you say?  I can’t hear you from my basement podcasting room, but I would bet that for many of you, the answer is Jeff Bezos, CEO of Amazon.  This is a man who over the past 25 years turned his online bookstore startup into a diversified company currently valued at $1.6 trillion.

Amazon is a digital retailing juggernaut, it’s also a web services provider, media producer, and manufacturer of personal technology devices like Kindle and Echo.  Oh, and Bezos also owns the Washington Post and Blue Origin, a space exploration company.  Forbes tells us he is the richest person in the world.

How did he accomplish so much?  How did he change the business landscape?  What mistakes has he made along the way?  A new collection of Bezos’s own writing, which full disclosure, my colleagues at Harvard Business Review Press have published, offer some insights.  Here’s a clip from one speech that’s included.  The book is called Invent and Wander.

And our guest today, who has spent years studying both Amazon and Bezos, is here to talk with me about some of the key themes in it, including the broad drivers of both the company and the CEO’s success.  Sunil Gupta is a professor of business administration at Harvard Business School and cochair of its executive program, and cochair of its executive program on driving digital strategy, which is also the title of his book.  Sunil, thanks so much for being on the show.

SUNIL GUPTA:  Thank you for having me, Alison.

ALISON BEARD:  So Invent and Wander.  I get that Bezos is inventive.  You know, he created a new way for us to buy things – everything.  How is he also a wonderer?

SUNIL GUPTA:  So he’s full of experiments.  His company and his whole style is known for experimentation, and he says that in so many words that if you want big winners, then you have to be willing to have many failures.  And the argument is, one big winner will take care of a thousand failed experiments.  So I think that’s the wandering part.  But also his experiments are not aimless.  There is a certain thought and process behind what experiments to do and why they will connect to the old, old picture of what Amazon is today.

ALISON BEARD:  And your expertise is in digital strategy.  How does he break the traditional rules of strategy?

SUNIL GUPTA:  So for the longest time the way, at least I was taught in my MBA program and the way we teach to our MBA students and executives, is strategy is about focus.  But if you look at Amazon, Amazon certainly doesn’t look like it’s focusing on anything, so obviously Jeff Bezos missed that class, otherwise it’s a very, very different thing.

And then you’d say, why is it that so called lack of focus strategy seems to be working for Amazon?  And I think the fundamental underlying principle that he’s guiding his whole discussion of strategy is, he’s changed the rules of strategy.  So the old rules of strategy were, the way you gained competitive advantage is by being better or cheaper.  So if I am selling you a car, my car is better of cheaper.  But the inherent assumption in that strategy statement is, I’m selling one product to one customer.  And what Amazon is basically arguing is, the digital economy is all about connection.  We have got to connect products and connect customers.  Let me explain why that is so powerful.

So connecting products, here the idea is, I can sell you, this is a classic razor and blade strategy.  I can sell you a razor cheap in order to make money on the blade.  So I can sell you Kindle cheap in order to make money on the ebooks.  Now, at some level you might say, hey, razor and blade have been around forever.  What’s so unique today?  I think unique today is razor could be in one industry and blades could be in completely different industrys.

So for example, if you look at Amazon’s portfolio of businesses, you sort of say, not only Amazon is an e-commerce player, but also is making movies and TV shows, its own studio.  Well, why does it make sense for an e-commerce player, an online retailer to compete with Hollywood.  Well, Walmart doesn’t make movies.  Macy’s doesn’t make movies?  So why does it make sense for Amazon to make movies?

And I think once you dig into it, the answer becomes clear that the purpose of the movies is to keep and gain the Prime customers. Two day free shipping is fine, but if  you ask me to pay $99 or $119 for two day free shipping, I might start doing the math in my head, and say, OK, how many packages do I expect to get next year?  And is the Prime membership worth it or not?

But once you throw in, in addition to the two-day free shipping, you throw in some TV shows and movies that are uniquely found only on Amazon, I can’t do this math.  And why is Prime customers important to Amazon?  Because Prime customers are more loyal.  They buy three or four times more than the non-Prime customers, and they’re also less price sensitive.

And in fact, Jeff Bezos has said publicly that every time we win a Golden Globe Award for one of our shows, we sell more shoes.  So this is, and he said it in your book, Invent and Wander, also, that we might be the only company in the world which has figured out how winning Golden Globe Awards can actually translate into selling more products on the online commerce.

So this is a great example of the razor being in a very different industry and blade being in another industry.  Take another example.  Amazon has a lending business where they give loans to small and medium enterprises. If Amazon decides to compete with banks tomorrow, Amazon can decide to offer loans to the small merchants at such a low price that banks would never be able to compete.  And why would Amazon be able to do that?  Because Amazon can say, hey, I’m not going to make money on loans, as much money on loans, but I’ll make more money when these businesses, small businesses grow and do more transactions on my marketplace platform.  And I get more commissions.  So again, loan can become my razor in order to help the merchants grow and make money on the transaction and the commission that I get from that.  The moment I make somebody else’s, in this case the banks, core business my razor, they will make a very hard time competing.  So I think that’s the key change, the fundamental rules of strategy and competition in that direction.

The second part of connection is connecting customers, and this is the classic network effect.  So marketplace is a great example of network effects.  The more buyers I have, the more sellers I have.  The more sellers I have, the sellers I have, the more buyers I get, because the buyers can find all the items.  And that becomes flywheel effect, and it becomes a situation where it’s very hard for a new player to complete with Amazon.

ALISON BEARD:  In this diversification that Amazon has done, how have they managed to be good at all of those things?  Because they’re not focused.  You know, they’re not concentrated on an area of specific expertise.  So how have they succeeded when other companies might have failed because they lacked that expertise, or they were spreading themselves too thin?

SUNIL GUPTA:  So I think it depends on how you define focus.  Most of us, when we define focus, we sort of define focus by traditional industry boundaries, that I’m an online retailer, therefore going into some other business is lack of focus.  The way Amazon thinks about is focus on capabilities.

So if you look at it from that point of view, I would argue that Amazon had three fundamental core capabilities.  Number one, it’s highly customer focused, not only in its culture, but also in its capability in terms of how it can actually handle data and leverage data to get customer insight.  The second core capability of Amazon is logistics.  So it’s now a world class logistics player.  It uses really frontier technology, whether it’s key word, robotics, computer vision, in its warehouse to make it much more efficient.

And the third part of Amazon’s skill or the capability is its technology.  And a good example of that is Amazon Web Services, or AWS.  And I think if you look at these three core capabilities, customer focus and the data insight that it gets from that, the logistics capability, and the technology, everything that Amazon is doing is some way or the other connected to it.  In that sense, Amazon, and there’s no lack of focus, in my judgment on Amazon.

Now, if he starts doing, starts making cream cheese tomorrow or starts making airplane engines, then I would say, yes, it’s got a lack of focus.  But one of the other things that Jeff Bezos has said again and again is this notion of work backwards and scale forward.  And what that means is, because you’re customer obsessed, you sort of find ways to satisfy customers, and if that means developing new skills that we don’t have because we are working backwards from what the customer needs are, then we’ll build those skills.

So a good example of that is, when Amazon started building Kindle, Amazon was never in the hardware business.  It didn’t know how to build hardware.  But Bezos realized that as the industry moved, people are beginning to read more and more online, rather, or at least on their devices, rather than the physical paper copy of a book.  So as a result, he says, how do we make it easier for consumers to read it on an electronic version?  And they’re spending three years learning about this capability of hardware manufacturing.  And by the way, Kindle came out long before iPad came out.  And of course, that capability now has helped them launch Echo and many other devices.

ALISON BEARD:  Right.  So it’s the focus on the customer, plus a willingness to go outside your comfort zone, the wander part.

SUNIL GUPTA:  Exactly.

ALISON BEARD:  Yeah.  How would you describe Bezos’s leadership style?

SUNIL GUPTA:  So I think there are at least three parts to it.  One is, he said right from day one that he wants to be a long-term focus.  The second thing is being customer obsessed.  And many times he has said that he can imagine, in the meetings he wants people to imagine an empty chair.  That is basically for the customer. And he says, we are not competitor focused.  We are not product focused.  We are not technology focused.  We are customer focused.  And the third is, willingness to experiment.  And fail, and build that culture in the company that it’s OK to fail.

ALISON BEARD:  What about personally, though?  Is he a hard charger?  Is he an active listener?  What’s it like to be in a room with him?

SUNIL GUPTA:  Oh, he’s certainly a hard charger.  I mean, he’s also the kind of guy, when he hires people, he says, you can work long, hard, or smart.  But at Amazon, you can choose two out of three.  And I think this is similar to many other leaders.  If you look at Steve Jobs, he was also a very hard charging guy.  And I think some people find it exhilarating to work with these kind of leaders.  Some find it very tough.

ALISON BEARD:  Do you think that he communicates differently from other successful CEOs?

SUNIL GUPTA:  So the communication style that he has built in the company is the very famous now, there’s no PowerPoints.  So it’s a very thoughtful discussion.  You write six-page memos, which everybody, when their meeting starts, everybody sits down and actually reads the memo.

In fact, this was a very interesting experience that I had.  One of my students, who was in the executive program, works at Amazon in Germany.  And he is, he was at that point in time thinking of moving to another company and becoming a CEO of that company.  So he said, can I talk to you about this change of career path that I’m thinking about?  I said, sure.  So we set up a time, and five minutes before our call, he sends me an email with a six-page memo.  And I said, well, shouldn’t he have sent this to me before, so I could at least look at it?  He says, no, that’s the Amazon style.  We’ll sit in silence and read it together.  And so I read it together, because then you’re completely focused on it.  And then we can have a conversation.  But this discipline of writing a six-page memo, it’s a very, very unique experience, because you actually have to think through all your arguments.

ALISON BEARD:  You also mentioned the long term focus, and that really stood out for me, too, this idea that he is not at all thinking of next year.  He’s thinking five years out, and sometimes even further.  But as a public company, how has Amazon been able to stick to that?  And is it replicable at other companies?

SUNIL GUPTA:  I think it is replicable.  It requires conviction, and it requires a way to articulate the vision to Wall Street that they can rally behind.  And it’s completely replicable.  There are other examples of companies who have followed a similar strategy.  I mean, Netflix is a good example.  Netflix hadn’t made money for a long period of time.  But they sold the vision of what the future will look like, and Wall Street bought that vision.

Mastercard is exactly the same thing.  Ajay Banga is giving three year guidance to Wall Street saying, this is my three-year plan, because things can change quarter to quarter.  I’m still responsible to tell you what we are doing this quarter, but my strategy will not be guided by what happens today.  It will be guided by the three-year plan that we have.

ALISON BEARD:  There are so many companies now that go public without turning any profit, whereas Amazon now is printing money, and thus able to reinvest and have this grand vision.  So at what point was Bezos able to say, right, we’re going to do it my way?

SUNIL GUPTA:  I think he said it right from day one, except that people probably didn’t believe it.  And in fact, one of the great examples of that was, when he was convinced about AWS, the Amazon Web Services, that was back in the early 2000s, when a majority of the Wall Street was not sure what Jeff Bezos was trying to do, because they say, hey, you are an online retailer.  You have no business being in web services.  That’s the business of IBM.  And that’s a B2B business.  You’re in a B2C business.  Why are you going in there?

And Bezos said, well, we have plenty of practice of being misunderstood.  And we will continue with our passion and vision, because we see the path.  And now he’s proven it again and again why his vision is correct, and I think that could give us more faith and conviction to the Wall Street investors.

SUNIL GUPTA:  Oh, absolutely.  And he’s one of the persons who has his opinion, and you always surround yourself with people better than you.

ALISON BEARD:  How has he managed to attract that talent when it is so fiercely competitive between Google, Facebook, all of these U.S. technology leaders?

SUNIL GUPTA:  So a couple of things I would say.  First of all, it’s always good fun to join a winning team.  And all of us want to join a winning team, so this certainly is on a trajectory which is phenomenal.  It’s like a rocket ship that is taking off and has been taking off for the last 25 years.  So I think that’s certainly attractive to many people, and certainly many hard charging people who want to be on a winning team.

And a second thing is, Amazon’s culture of experimentation and innovation.  That is energizing to a lot of people.  It’s not a bureaucracy where you get bogged down by the processes.  So the two type of decisions that we talked about, he gives you enough leeway to try different things, and is willing to invest hundreds of millions of dollars into things that may or may not succeed in the future.  And I think that’s very liberating to people who are willing to take on the ownership and build something.

ALISON BEARD:  But don’t all of the tech companies offer that?

SUNIL GUPTA:  They do, but if you think about many other tech companies, they’re much more narrow in focus.  So Facebook is primarily in social media.  Google is primarily in search advertising.  Yes, you have GoogleX, but that’s still a small part of what Google does.  Whereas if you ask yourself what business is Amazon in, there are much broader expansive areas that Amazon has gone into.  So I think the limits, I mean, Amazon does not have that many limits or boundaries as compared to many other businesses in Silicon Valley.

ALISON BEARD:  So let’s talk a little bit about Bezos’s acquisition strategy.  I think the most prominent is probably Whole Foods, but there are many others.  How does he think about the companies that he wants to bring in as opposed to grow organically?

SUNIL GUPTA:  So some acquisitions are areas where he thinks that he can actually benefit and accelerate the vision that he already has.  So for example, the acquisition of Kiva was to improve the efficiency and effectiveness of the systems that he already put in place in his warehouse.  And logistics and warehouse is a key component or key part of Amazon’s business, and he saw that Kiva already was ahead of the curve in technology that he probably wanted to have that in his own company.  So that was obvious acquisition, because that fits in the existing business.

Whole Foods is kind of a slightly different story, in my judgment, because I some ways, you can argue, why is Amazon, an online player, buying an offline retail store, Whole Foods?  And in fact, they bought it at 27% premium.  So that doesn’t make sense for an online retailer commerce to go to offline channels.  And I think, in fact, part of the reason in my judgment is, it’s not just Whole Foods, but it’s about the food business, per se.  And why is Amazon so interested in food?  In fact, Amazon has been trying this food business, online food delivery for a long period of time without much success.  And Whole Foods was one, another way to try and get access to that particular business.  And why is that so important to Amazon, even though you could argue, food is a low margin business?

And I would say, part of the reason is, food is something, grocery is something that you buy every week, perhaps twice a week.  And if I, as Amazon, can convince you to buy grocery online from Amazon, then I’m creating a habit for you to come onto Amazon every week, perhaps twice a week.  And once you are on Amazon, you will end up buying other products on Amazon.  Whereas if you are buying electronics, you may not come to Amazon every day.

So this is a habit creation activity, and again, it may not be a very high margin activity to sell you food.  But I’ve created a habit, just like Prime.  I’ve created a loyal customer where you think of nothing else but Amazon for your daily needs, and therefore you end up buying other things.

ALISON BEARD:  And Amazon isn’t without controversy.  You know, and we should talk about that, too.  First, there are questions about its treatment of warehouse employees, particularly during COVID.  And Bezos, as you said, has always been relentlessly focused on the customer.  But is Amazon employee centric, too?

SUNIL GUPTA:  So I think there is definitely some areas of concern, and you rightly said there is a significant concern about the, during the COVID, workers were complaining about safety, the right kind of equipment.  But even before COVID, there were a lot of concerns about whether the workers are being pushed too hard.  They barely have any breaks.  And they’re constantly on the go, because speed and efficiency become that much more important to make sure customers always get what they are promised.  And in fact, more than promised.

Clearly Amazon either hasn’t done a good job, or hasn’t at least done the public relations part of it that they have done a good job.  Now, if you ask Jeff Bezos, he will claim that, no, actually, they have done things.  For example, they offer something called carrier choice, where they give 95% tuition to the employees to learn new skills, whether they’re relevant to Amazon or not.  Pretty much like what Starbucks does for its baristas, for college education and other things.  But I think more than just giving money or tuition, it requires a bit of empathy and sense that you care for your employees, and perhaps that needs, that’s something that Amazon needs to work on.

ALISON BEARD:  And another challenge is the criticism that it has decimated mom and pop shops.  Even when someone sells through Amazon, the company will then see that it’s a popular category and create it itself and start selling it itself.  There’s environmental concerns about the fact that packages are being driven from warehouses to front doors all over America.  And boxes and packaging.  So how has Bezos, how has the company dealt with all of that criticism?

SUNIL GUPTA:  They haven’t.  And I think those are absolutely valid concerns on both counts, that the small sellers who grow to become reasonably big are always under the radar, and there are certainly anecdotal evidence there, small sellers have complained that Amazon had decided to sell exactly the same item that they were so successful in selling, and becoming too big is actually not good on Amazon, because Amazon can get into your business and wipe you away.  So that’s certainly a big concern, and I think that’s something that needs to be sorted out, and Amazon needs to clarify what its position on that area is, because it benefits from these small sellers on his platform.

And your second question about environmental issues is also absolutely on the money, because not only emission issues, but there’s so many boxes that pile in, certainly in my basement, from Amazon.  You sort of say, and it’s actually ironical that Millennials who are in love with Amazon are extremely environmentally friendly.  But at the same time, they would not hesitate to order something from Amazon and pile up all these boxes.  So I think Amazon needs to figure out a way to think about both those issues.

ALISON BEARD:  And at what point will it have to?  I mean, it seems to be rolling happily along.

SUNIL GUPTA:  Well, I think those issues are becoming bigger and bigger, and it’s certainly in the eye of the regulators, also, for some of these practices.  And not only because it’s too big, and there might be monopoly concerns, but these issues will become larger, and any time you become a large company, you become the center of attraction for broader issues than just providing shareholder value.

ALISON BEARD:  Yeah.  So those are weaknesses possibly for the company.  What are some of Bezos’s personal weaknesses that you’ve seen in studying him and the company?

SUNIL GUPTA:  So I think one thing that stands out to me, and at least in the public forums, I have not seen any empathy.  And it’s, I mean, we talk about that the leaders have, should have three qualities.  They should be competent.  They should have a good character.  And they should have compassion.  So he’s certainly very competent.  I mean, he’s brilliant in many aspects, right, from the computer vision and AI and machine learning, to the nuances of data analytics, to the Hollywood production, etc.  He also seems to have good character, at least I have not heard any personal scandals, apart from his other issues in his personal life, perhaps.

Those characteristics of competence and character make people respect you.  What makes people love you is when you show compassion, and at least I haven’t seen compassion or empathy that comes out of him.  I mean, he certainly comes across as a very hard charging, driven person, which probably is good for business.  But the question of empathy is perhaps something lacking right now.

ALISON BEARD:  Yeah.  The other issue is his just enormous wealth.  He did invent this colossally valuable company, but should anyone really be that rich?

SUNIL GUPTA:  Well, I guess that’s, you can say that’s the good or the bad thing about capitalism.  But I think, and again, my personal view is there’s nothing wrong in becoming rich, if you have been successful and done it with hard work and ingenuity.  But how you use your wealth is something that perhaps will define Jeff Bezos going forward.  I think Bill Gates is a great example how he actually has used his wealth and his influence and his expertise and his brilliance into some certain thing that actually is great for humanity.

Now, whether Jeff Bezos does that down the road, I don’t know, whether his space exploration provides that sort of outlet which is both his passion as well as good for humanity, I don’t know.  But at some point in time, I think it’s the responsibility of these leaders to sort of say, my goal is not simply to make money and make my shareholders rich, but also help humanity and help society.

ALISON BEARD:  If you’re talking to someone who’s running a startup, or even a manager of a team at a traditional company, what is the key lesson that you would say, this is what you can learn from Jeff Bezos?  This is what you can put to work in your own profession?

SUNIL GUPTA:  So I would say two things that at least I would take away if I were doing a startup.  One is customer obsession.  Now, every company says that, but honestly, not every company does it, because if you go to the management meetings, if you go to the quarterly meetings, you suddenly go focus on financials and competition and product.  But there’s rarely any conversation on customers.  And I think, as I mentioned earlier, that Jeff Bezos always tells his employee to think of the imaginary chair in which a customer is sitting, because that’s the person that we need to focus on.  Howard Shultz does the same thing at Starbucks, and that’s why Starbucks is so customer focused.

So I think that’s the first part.  And the argument that Bezos gives is, customers are never satisfied.  And that pushes us to innovate and move forward, so we need to innovate even before the rest of the world even sees that, because customers are the first ones to see what is missing in the offering that you have.

And the second I would say that I would take away from Jeff Bezos is the conviction and passion with what you do.  And many times that goes against the conventional wisdom.  And the Amazon Web Services is a great example of that.  The whole world, including the Wall Street Journal and the Wall Street analysts were saying, this is none of Amazon’s business to do web services.  But he was convinced that this is the right thing to do, and he went and did that.

And part of that conviction may come from experiments.  Part of that conviction comes from connecting the dots that he could see that many other people didn’t see.  I mean, that’s why he went, left his job, and went to Seattle to do the online bookstore, because he could see the macro trends as to what the Internet is likely to do.  So, I think that’s the vision that he had.  And once you have the conviction, then you follow your passion.

ALISON BEARD: Sunil, thanks so much for coming on the show.

SUNIL GUPTA:  Thank you for having me. Alison.

HANNAH BATES: That was Harvard Business School professor Sunil Gupta, in conversation with Alison Beard on the HBR IdeaCast .

We’ll be back next Wednesday with another hand-picked conversation about business strategy from Harvard Business Review. If you found this episode helpful, share it with your friends and colleagues, and follow our show on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts. While you’re there, be sure to leave us a review.

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This episode was produced by Mary Dooe, Anne Saini, and me, Hannah Bates. Ian Fox is our editor. And special thanks to Maureen Hoch, Nicole Smith, Erica Truxler, Ramsey Khabbaz, Anne Bartholomew, and you – our listener. See you next week.

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