🏘️ Culture & Social Expectations
Culture helps teach us what life is supposed to look like—but culture is created by people, passed between people, and capable of changing.
Culture is much more than food, clothing, holidays, or religion.
Researchers study culture as including shared practices, values, meanings, expectations, institutions, and ways of understanding ourselves and others.
Culture influences people—but people also continually reproduce and change culture. (Annual Reviews)
🌎 Humans Have Culture Everywhere—But Not the Same Culture
Every known human society transmits knowledge and practices between people and generations.
But the specific behaviors and expectations being transmitted can vary considerably.
Children acquire culture through combinations of observation, participation, imitation, exploration, and instruction. The relative importance of these learning methods also differs among communities. (Annual Reviews)
Research: The Development of Cumulative Cultural Learning — Annual Review of Developmental Psychology
https://www.annualreviews.org/content/journals/10.1146/annurev-devpsych-121318-084848
What this means
Humans have a remarkable ability to learn a way of life.
But there isn't only one human way of life.
👶 Culture Begins Reaching Us Early
Families are important environments for socialization.
Research describes socialization as a two-way process involving children, caregivers, biological predispositions, relationships, and broader sociocultural influences. Children aren't simply passive recipients of whatever adults teach them. (Annual Reviews)
Research: Socialization Processes in the Family — Annual Review of Psychology
https://www.annualreviews.org/content/journals/10.1146/annurev.psych.121208.131650
What this means
Families can pass along ideas about:
Fairness • Gender • Work • Religion • Money • Authority • Helping • Success • Family • Community
Often, parents are passing along lessons they once received themselves.
Culture moves through generations of people who are learning from one another.
🧠 Culture Can Influence How We Understand Ourselves
Cross-cultural psychology has documented differences in areas including self-concept, motivation, social relationships, emotion, cognition, and interpretations of behavior.
At the same time, researchers caution against treating enormous populations as if everyone within a culture thinks alike. (Annual Reviews)
Research: Cultural Psychology: Beyond East and West — Annual Review of Psychology
https://www.annualreviews.org/content/journals/10.1146/annurev-psych-021723-063333
Research: Personality: The Universal and the Culturally Specific — Annual Review of Psychology
https://www.annualreviews.org/content/journals/10.1146/annurev.psych.60.110707.163655
What this means
Ideas that can feel deeply personal—
Who am I?
What makes me successful?
How independent should I be?
What do I owe other people?
—can have both individual and cultural influences.
👤 Individualism and Collectivism Are Not Simply “Good” or “Bad”
Researchers often study cultural differences involving individualism and collectivism, although modern cultural psychology treats these as more complicated than simply dividing countries into two categories. (Annual Reviews)
Broadly, individualistic cultural patterns may place greater emphasis on personal autonomy and individual goals, while collectivistic patterns may place greater emphasis on relationships, obligations, and group goals.
Research: Culture Three Ways — Annual Review of Psychology
https://www.annualreviews.org/content/journals/10.1146/annurev-psych-122414-033617
What this means
Both raise valuable human questions.
How much freedom should individuals have?
and
What responsibilities do we have to one another?
A healthy community may need both autonomy and interdependence.
🏘️ Culture Exists Inside Countries Too
There isn't one single “American culture,” “Christian culture,” “Asian culture,” or “working-class culture.”
Countries contain overlapping cultures and subcultures shaped by things like:
Region
Religion
Family
Generation
Occupation
Economic conditions
Neighborhood
Migration
Education
Historical experience
Research specifically cautions against treating national averages as complete descriptions of individuals. (Annual Reviews)
Research: Culture Three Ways: Culture and Subcultures Within Countries — Annual Review of Psychology
https://www.annualreviews.org/content/journals/10.1146/annurev-psych-122414-033617
What this means
Culture can help us understand patterns.
It should never become an excuse to stereotype individual people.
🌳 Environments Can Help Shape Culture
Culture doesn't develop separately from the physical world.
Contemporary cultural psychology examines how ecology, geography, economic activity, institutions, and historical conditions can contribute to cultural practices and meanings. (Annual Reviews)
Research: Cultural Psychology: Beyond East and West — Annual Review of Psychology
https://www.annualreviews.org/content/journals/10.1146/annurev-psych-021723-063333
What this means
Sometimes a cultural practice developed because it made sense under particular conditions.
The environment changes.
Technology changes.
Economies change.
Communities change.
But the expectation can remain.
Understanding why something developed helps us ask whether it still serves the same purpose.
🔄 Culture Can Outlive the Conditions That Created It
Research on social norms describes cultural mismatch: situations where a norm that may have fit an earlier environment persists after circumstances change. (Annual Reviews)
Research: Norm Dynamics — Annual Review of Psychology
https://www.annualreviews.org/content/journals/10.1146/annurev-psych-033020-013319
What this means
A tradition surviving for generations tells us that it is culturally powerful.
It does not automatically tell us whether it remains beneficial.
That requires another question:
What happens when people follow it today?
⚖️ Culture Can Support Us—and Sometimes Harm Us
Culture can provide:
Belonging
Identity
Knowledge
Family connection
Moral frameworks
Traditions
Cooperation
Meaning
Community support
But cultural expectations can also reinforce practices that limit or harm people.
Research on norms shows something especially important:
A norm does not have to be beneficial simply because a group maintains it.
People can enforce both helpful and harmful social expectations. (Annual Reviews)
Research: Norm Dynamics — Annual Review of Psychology
https://www.annualreviews.org/content/journals/10.1146/annurev-psych-033020-013319
What this means
Respecting culture doesn't require pretending every cultural practice is equally beneficial.
And identifying harm doesn't require rejecting an entire culture.
We can do something more thoughtful:
Preserve what helps people. Examine what hurts people.
🔄 Culture Is Not Frozen
Culture changes.
Research examines how cultural information can spread, stabilize, disappear, and transform through interactions among individuals, groups, institutions, social networks, environments, and generations. (Annual Reviews)
Research: The Psychology of Cultural Dynamics — Annual Review of Psychology
https://www.annualreviews.org/content/journals/10.1146/annurev-psych-010418-103112
What this means
Many things considered normal today would have seemed strange to people living centuries ago.
And some things considered unusual today may feel completely ordinary to future generations.
Culture isn't something humans simply inherit.
We also participate in creating it.
💛 We Don't Have to Choose Between Tradition and Change
Traditions can connect people to:
family,
ancestors,
history,
faith,
place,
identity,
and one another.
Change doesn't require treating the past as foolish.
Instead, we can ask:
What wisdom should we carry forward?
What developed for conditions that no longer exist?
What helps people flourish?
What causes measurable harm?
Whose experiences have been overlooked?
What could we adapt instead of simply abandoning?
Loving where we came from and imagining where we could go are not opposites.
🌱 Culture Can Make Community Easier
If culture helps shape what people expect from one another, then community-building isn't only about creating programs.
It can also mean making helpful behaviors increasingly ordinary.
Imagine communities where it feels normal to:
Know your neighbors.
Borrow things.
Repair things.
Share food.
Ask for help.
Offer help.
Spend time together without spending money.
Care for public spaces.
Know people from different backgrounds.
Resolve disagreements without dehumanizing one another.
Contribute according to your abilities.
Research doesn't guarantee that any particular community model will succeed.
It tells us that human cultural behavior is flexible enough to change.
💭 Question the Culture—With Care
When examining something you've always considered normal, ask:
Where did this practice come from?
What problem was it originally solving?
Does that problem still exist?
Who benefits from the practice?
Who carries its costs?
What does research show about its effects?
Do other communities handle this differently?
What would we lose by changing it?
What might we gain?
Could we preserve the meaningful part while improving the harmful part?
🌎 We Are Part of the Process
Culture isn't something happening somewhere above us.
Every time we:
teach a child,
reward a behavior,
repeat a tradition,
challenge an expectation,
share an idea,
create a community space,
welcome someone,
exclude someone,
or show another person what we value—
we participate in culture.
That gives us responsibility.
But it also gives us hope.
We inherited a world shaped by countless generations before us.
We don't have to disrespect them to continue the work.