Culture in the Blender

My psychology of culture textbook tells me if you consider a culture to include all individual variations within the culture, cultural differences disappear. For example, the differences between Japanese and American culture disappear. Maybe that’s why it’s so easy as a TCK to take a part of a culture that you like and use that [...]

A visualization popped into my head late last night of the culture networks I wrote about in my previous post, and it wants to get out. So here it is. Two culture networks within a bicultural person Blue circles are cultural ideas from the blue culture. They are connected to each other to make a [...]

While reading worldculturenet, I saw a link from Greg Helden’s blog discussing a Stanford-MIT-University of New York at Stony Brook study that shows differences in how visual information is processed in Americans and East Asians. (The MIT press release can be found here. The reference for those of you with access is Hedden, T., Ketay, [...]

This semester, I’ve arranged to audit a very exciting-sounding class: Cultural Psychology. The course description is Centers on cross-cultural study of substantive areas such as personality, motivation, socialization, interpersonal behavior, psychological environments, cognition and cognitive development, ethnocentrism and stereotypes, and visual perception; emphasis on methodological limitations and contributions of cross-cultural study; and discussion of current [...]

Even though I have tried imagining that I’d lived all my life in every country I’ve lived in, I’m starting to come to the conclusion that I never have and never will understand completely what life is like when you’ve only lived in one country. I can project and imagine, and that works well for [...]

(Rant warning: I am generally unhappy with the way things are and seem to be going through a mild bout of reverse culture shock combined with uncertainty of where I could be happy.) I think that the US is seriously misreading where the future is going and I think the US is seriously forgetting where [...]