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This chapter examines the theory of emerging adulthood from the perspective of cultural psychology. First it provides a brief overview of the theory. Then it addresses the ways “one size fits all” with respect to emerging adulthood, that is, the demographic and cultural changes that have taken places in many regions worldwide to lay the groundwork for the emerging adulthood life stage. Next it describes the demographic and cultural variability that exists in emerging adulthood worldwide. Finally, the chapter bridges cultural and developmental psychology by focusing on the cultural beliefs that are at the heart of emerging adulthood, in the West and in other world regions.

This chapter reviews past literature to elucidate the relationship between culture, group processes and trust. Culture has a profound impact on trust, and the underpinning processes are often linked to the shared understanding of the relation between individual and group in a cultural context. The current chapter highlights the impact of culture has on the three separate trust processes – trust formation, dissolution and restoration. Specifically, three contributing factors -- trustor’s characteristics, trustee’s characteristics, and the institutional processes affect trust, but the relative importance of these factors differs across cultures. The chapter concludes by reviewing how cultural lay beliefs and cultural norms can lead to the relative preference for using one of the factors over others in different cultures.

This chapter examines political liberalism's ideal of tolerance, starting out with the troubling observation that recent years have seen a “culturalization of conflict”, in which an opposition has been drawn between liberal culture, premised upon moral autonomy, neutrality, and tolerance, on the one hand, and non-liberal, intolerant, and ultimately barbaric cultures, on the other. The transposition of conflict from questions of the market, the state, capitalism, or democracy to “culture” on an “overt premise of liberal tolerance,'' namely, that “religious, cultural, or ethnic differences are sites of natural or native hostility”. This chapter asks two sets of related questions: What is the relation between the binding force of the social contract and the binding force of culture or religion? Why isn't the social contract sufficient for reducing the significance of subnational group hostilities? With liberalism and the Kantian conception of individual autonomy and reason on which it is based, Sigmund Freud's pathologization of groups shares the conviction that cultural beliefs are more volatile if they are “public” rather than “private” or “familial”. This chapter also probes Strauss's account of modern liberalism through his critique of Eric Havelock, and expounds on Americanism and terrorism.

Traditional medicines continue to be widely used worldwide despite the increasing availability of modern medicines. We term this phenomenon the ‘traditional medicines paradox’. We investigate a potential explanation for such a paradox, namely the presence of ‘entrenched cultural beliefs’ in explaining continued use. As such, this paper draws upon unique data collected in Ghana to examine the impact of 6 attitudes towards traditional medicines and healers on utilisation. To further test the importance of attitudes, we look at data from the Philippines. In both cases, cultural attitudes such as perceived healer knowledge, trust, belief in ability to cure, and acceptability are found to be significantly associated with utilisation. Hence it is unlikely that traditional medicines will be supplanted simply by increasing access to modern drugs as they are not perceived to be substitutes and the systems exhibit divergent logic.

This chapter describes the community examined in this book and the Wilton Way and details the more-or-less shared beliefs that comprise this ideology, including the distinctiveness of the community, community members' awareness of competition, expectations for individual success, and paramount beliefs in the importance of self-worth. The cja[ter shows how class cultural beliefs underlie the local philosophy of schooling, and discusses how this fluid linkage between the community and its schools was a key point of articulation in this cultural system. Details of the Wilton Way are provided in this chapter because it gave the ideological basis for how its residents lived their everyday lives, including the parenting practices, school policies, student identities, and academic strategies. It is noted that nearly ten years earlier, the cultural psychologist William Damon (1995) referred to such parenting styles as “overindulgent.”

To be able to understand human social behaviour and human diversity, this chapter focuses on the relations between one's biological heritage and the complexities of cultural beliefs in more complex societies. Its aim is to merely sketch an emphasis on the need to understand social behaviour in terms of levels of social complexity; provide a brief reference to the nature of ‘culture’; give a discussion of human universals; and show some examples of the dialectical relations between individuals, the successive levels of social complexity, and the ‘socio-cultural structure’.

Ideas and claims about children’s development (e.g., concerning attachment relationships) that have found broad acceptance in the academic community have impacted the development of policy in governmental and international organizations. These accepted ideas and claims, in turn, have been incorporated into practice and services provided to families in various forms (e.g., social work, child care). The reconceptualization of attachment systems proposed in this volume—in particular, the explicit evaluation of the influence of multiple attachment figures on children that is normative in many societies—should have profound effects on both policy and practice. This chapter addresses issues that need to be considered if society is to integrate current understanding of the cultural nature of attachment into policy and practice.

This chapter highlights some of the salient points in each of the book's five topical sections. It seeks to demonstrate, with concrete recent examples, that cultural bias significantly distorts the study of peace and war. Rather than relax the striving for objectivity and the canons of science, addressing this serious problem means developing a greater awareness of the powerful grasp that cultural beliefs have on research related to peace and war, striving for self-awareness of one's own beliefs and biases regarding this topic, and applying the rigors of well-practiced science to one's own research and to the assessment of the findings of others.

This book explores the origins of the Cherokee diaspora, focusing on the years roughly between 1756 and 1945. It investigates how or why the Cherokee people became a traveling, diasporic people and the manner in which they interpreted narratives about their origins, understood their relationships to other human beings, and reimagined their cultural beliefs and kinship practices in new places. It considers the impact of eighteenth-century colonialism on the purpose of travel and the nature of Cherokee politics and diplomacy. The discussion centers on three interconnected concepts: migration and resettlement, memory, and identity. Part I of the book deals with the significance of Cherokee narratives about human creation and migration, whereas Part II examines the nuances of Cherokee identity during the American Civil War, the tumultuous decades of Reconstruction, and the rise of the allotment, assimilation, and termination era in the period spanning the 1880s and World War II.

Lay theories of change refer to beliefs people hold about how events develop over time and are related to each other. This chapter reviews cultural differences in lay theories of change between East Asians and Euro-Americans/Canadians. The overarching theme from the existing research is that East Asians tend to believe more than Westerners that phenomena change in a cyclical way, whereas Westerners tend to believe that events are either relatively stable or develop in a linear fashion. This cultural variation is manifested in a wide range of predictions and decisions. Furthermore, Euro–North Americans are more likely than East Asians to hold linear beliefs about the correspondence between cause and effect in magnitude, and between appearance and reality (e.g., a strong appearance corresponds to a strong internal state). The chapter also discusses the cultural underpinnings of lay theories of change and directions for future research.

This chapter undertakes a conceptual analysis of the relationship between the individual and the collective with a view to understanding the processes and conditions, which bring about ‘unity’ of the two within diverse cultures. The individual is seen as being constituted by several types of selves, which seek unity with several types of collectives. The chapter discusses the processes and factors that explain how a collective comes to inhabit the individual, and individual the collective. Another question that is examined is how certain processes and cultural contexts create permeable and impermeable boundary conditions between self and the other, between the individual and the collective. The chapter draws from the discourses and approaches in disciplines other than psychology.

This chapter summarizes the findings and restates the case for the Matsigenka Indians as a family level society. It explains that family level societies similar in their general characteristics to the Matsigenka are a basic form of human society and they were the predominant form of human society for much of prehistory. It clarifies that the Matsigenka live in an extraordinarily complex, culturally constructed world that differs from tribal societies primarily in the flexibility allowed within its social structure and cultural beliefs for family autonomy in response to changing opportunities.

This chapter focuses on the cultural ideals of the institution of marriage and the implications of changing cultural beliefs about marriage for the domestic organization of households. It uses survey data to rank countries on the importance placed on intimacy in marriage and examines how dominant beliefs about marriage within countries are related to a less gendered division of housework between spouses.

This chapter aims to understand why part-time work and gender interact with one another in the field experiment. The masculine nature of the ideal worker norm and the feminized nature of part-time employment are central to understanding the gender-differentiated ways that hiring professionals treat workers with histories of part-time employment. During initial screening, employers likely do not have information about why a worker was in a part-time position, leaving them with significant uncertainty. Given a job applicant's narrative is unlikely to be available at this moment of initial screening, one way that employers make sense of part-time employment is by drawing on the stereotypes and cultural beliefs about the gender of the worker to weave a narrative about the applicant's part-time experience. In this way, hiring professionals develop stratified stories.

This chapter discusses family group conferences (FGCs) and marginalised communities. FGCs offer an alternative and more sustainable approach to working with families who are marginalised or socially excluded. Used in the right way, and with due regard paid to the culture and context in which families are living, FGCs are a powerful and effective intervention. The danger is that practitioners and services believe that it is automatically culturally competent, and they need to be aware that it operates as a framework that embraces culture if true partnerships are formed with families and they are empowered to make choices about the way that the model works for them. In order to do this, practitioners must be able to have conversations with families about their cultural beliefs, values, and practices and work with them to ensure that the FGC embodies this. Furthermore, FGCs have the potential to strengthen and build communities and social capital.

In chapter 4, we foreground how residents think about their cities, and the critical role that their cultural beliefs play in underwriting the Market City and the People City—as well as contesting it. Specifically, we examine five survey questions that detail how Copenhageners and Houstonians have vastly different beliefs about work, inequality, and government, even across income levels. We also detail how residents are more heterogeneous in their beliefs than are city elites or government, and that it is residents who have the greater capacity for social change. We detail our “solar system” approach of considering how different ideas and groups relate to the gravitational pull of the Market City and People City.

This chapter discusses how lifecourse imperatives require an intergenerational transmission of family land about every twenty-five to thirty years. How parents transfer family resources to children is strongly influenced by inheritance priorities intrinsic to cultural beliefs about land. Household-level decisions—the inheritance patterns of previous generations and the responses of sibling heirs to the patrimony received—have cumulative effects on farm community land tenure patterns. Loyalty among siblings and to the farm—symbolized by a sense of a shared patrimony—is powerfully shaped by the family environment. Families, aware that sibling strife can potentially destroy a landed patrimony, generally attempt to forge solidarity by socializing children to honor an “axiom of amity.”

This chapter deals with an aspect of the new phenomenon of Japanese retirement housing that has not yet been well understood by the Japanese themselves: cultural beliefs and expectations about “welfare” as it applies to the care of the aged. A lack of clear concepts which can guide expectations—specifically, the expectations that management and residents have of one another—has caused serious friction. The chapter analyzes the negative images held by the management and the residents of each other, and the residents' uncooperative attitude, stemming from conflicting interpretations of “contract welfare.”