Exercises — Chapter 38: Cultural Psychology — How Culture Shapes the Mind

Part A: Mapping Your Cultural Assumptions

Exercise 38.1 — The Water You're Swimming In

The most important and most difficult step in cultural psychology is recognizing your own cultural assumptions — the taken-for-granted beliefs that feel so natural they're rarely examined.

Complete the following inventory honestly. There are no right answers — the goal is to surface assumptions, not correct them.

1. When a problem arises in a group, do you first look for who is responsible, or what situation produced it?
2. When you succeed at something important, do you attribute it primarily to your own ability and effort, or to luck, relationships, and context?
3. When you meet a new person, do you want to know what they do, or who they are connected to?
4. When a family obligation conflicts with a professional commitment, which has a stronger default claim?
5. Is silence in a conversation uncomfortable (something to fill) or a natural form of communication?
6. When someone gives you direct, critical feedback, do you experience it primarily as useful information or as a relational threat?
7. When you think about your goals, are they primarily individual goals or goals shared with a group?
8. Is emotional restraint generally a virtue or an obstacle to authentic connection?

After completing the inventory: 1. Which answers surprised you? 2. Which answers reflect values you actively chose versus assumptions you absorbed without examination? 3. Where do your answers place you on the individualism-collectivism spectrum?

Exercise 38.2 — Individualism-Collectivism Self-Assessment

Place yourself on each of the following dimensions (1 = strongly individualist, 10 = strongly collectivist):

1. Are your positions consistent across dimensions, or do you find yourself individualist on some dimensions and collectivist on others?
2. Where does your self-placement differ from the culture(s) you were raised in?
3. Are there domains where you deliberately diverge from the modal values of your cultural context?

Part B: Cultural Dimensions in Your Life

Exercise 38.3 — Power Distance in Your Relationships

Power distance refers to how comfortable you are with hierarchical differences in authority and status. This exercise maps your own power distance orientation.

Identify three authority relationships in your current life (workplace supervisor, family elder, institutional authority, professional mentor, etc.).

For each: 1. How comfortable are you with openly disagreeing? 2. How much do you defer to their judgment versus your own? 3. How do you communicate — more directly or more indirectly? 4. How does your behavior change when the authority is present versus absent?

Now compare this to a peer relationship: How different is your behavior? What does this suggest about your power distance orientation?

Cross-cultural observation: Identify one relationship where the other person has a significantly different power distance orientation than you. How has this difference produced friction or misunderstanding?

Exercise 38.4 — Tight vs. Loose Norms Audit

Gelfand's tight/loose culture dimension applies to groups and institutions as well as national cultures. Map the tightness/looseness of your current contexts.

Rate each of the following contexts in your life on a tight-to-loose scale (1 = very tight, 10 = very loose):

• Your workplace or educational institution
• Your family of origin
• Your current household
• Your religious or spiritual community (if applicable)
• Your professional peer group
• Your country as a whole

For each context, identify: 1. What are the three most clearly enforced norms? 2. What happens when those norms are violated? 3. Is the tightness functional (does it serve a purpose you value) or constraining (does it limit something important to you)?

Reflection: Which of your current contexts is the most different from where you grew up? What has adapting to that difference required?

Part C: Culture and Cognition

Exercise 38.5 — Holistic vs. Analytic Thinking

Nisbett's research documents a tendency for East Asian holistic cognition (attention to context and relationships) and Western analytic cognition (focus on objects, rule-based inference). Most people use both, but often with a default.

For each of the following scenarios, describe how you would approach it:

1. A friend behaves uncharacteristically rudely at a dinner party. Do you think first about what kind of person they are, or what might be going on in their life?
2. A work project fails. Do you first look for who made the key mistake, or what conditions produced the failure?
3. You're evaluating two job candidates. One is more impressive as an individual; one has a stronger network and team history. Which do you weight more?
4. You're in a conflict with a partner or family member. Do you focus primarily on what each person said and did, or on the relationship dynamics that produced the conflict?

After completing each scenario: 1. Do you see a consistent default — object-focused/dispositional or context-focused/relational? 2. Are there domains where your default is different? 3. How does your default affect the kinds of explanations and solutions you naturally generate?

Exercise 38.6 — Attribution Patterns

The fundamental attribution error (over-attributing behavior to dispositions, under-attributing to situations) is stronger in individualist cultures. This exercise maps your attribution tendencies.

For each of the following, write down your immediate attribution: 1. A driver cuts you off in traffic. 2. A colleague misses a deadline. 3. A student fails an exam. 4. A stranger acts generously toward you. 5. A political leader makes a bad decision. 6. You yourself acted badly in a situation recently.

Review your attributions: - For items 1–5: Did you attribute primarily to the person's character/disposition, or to circumstances and context? - For item 6: Did you attribute primarily to your own disposition or to the situation? - Is there a self-serving pattern (situational explanation for yourself, dispositional for others)?

Cross-cultural angle: How might your attributions about items 1–5 differ if you were operating from a more holistic, contextual cognitive style?

Part D: Acculturation and Bicultural Experience

Exercise 38.7 — Your Acculturation History

Most people have navigated at least one significant acculturation experience — a move between cultural contexts that required adaptation. This could be immigration, regional relocation, socioeconomic mobility, educational transition (first-gen college), professional culture change, or religious transition.

Identify one significant acculturation experience in your life.

1. What were the two cultural contexts you were navigating between?
2. Which of Berry's four strategies best describes how you approached it: integration (maintaining both), assimilation (adopting the new), separation (maintaining the old), marginalization (neither)?
3. What did you gain from the acculturation experience?
4. What did you lose, or what was the cost?
5. Looking back, would you have approached it differently? What would that look like?

If you have not had a major acculturation experience: Describe one context where you needed to adapt significantly to different cultural norms — a new workplace, a new family (through marriage or partnership), a different socioeconomic context, a different generation.

Exercise 38.8 — Bicultural Identity Integration

If you hold multiple cultural identities (heritage and adopted culture, professional and personal, generational and community), this exercise examines how integrated or conflicted those identities feel.

Identify two significant cultural identities you hold (they need not be national — they could be first-gen college student + working class family background; professional culture + community culture; religious + secular).

For each pair: 1. Do these identities feel compatible or conflicting? 2. Are there situations where you feel you have to choose between them? 3. Do you experience richer perspective from holding both, or primarily friction? 4. What would higher bicultural identity integration look like for you — what would change?

Reflection: Research shows that people with higher bicultural identity integration (seeing their cultural identities as complementary rather than conflicting) tend to be more creative and cognitively flexible. What would it take for you to experience your multiple cultural identities as resources rather than tensions?

Part E: Cultural Humility in Practice

Exercise 38.9 — Cultural Assumption Audit in a Relationship

Select one significant relationship — professional, personal, or clinical — where the other person comes from a different cultural background than you (nationality, ethnicity, religion, socioeconomic class, generational cohort, regional culture).

1. What cultural assumptions are you bringing to this relationship? (About communication style, appropriate self-disclosure, time orientation, authority, emotional expression, obligation)
2. What cultural assumptions might they be bringing?
3. Where have misunderstandings occurred that might be partially explained by different cultural frameworks?
4. What would genuine curiosity (rather than cultural knowledge application) look like in this relationship?
5. What is one question you could ask them — not as a cultural informant, but as a specific person — that would help you understand their experience better?

Exercise 38.10 — WEIRD Self-Assessment

The WEIRD critique suggests that many psychological frameworks are built for Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, Democratic contexts. This exercise examines how WEIRD your own psychological framework is.

For each of the following psychological concepts you've encountered in this book, consider: does this concept assume a specific cultural context?

1. Self-actualization (Maslow's hierarchy)
2. Autonomy as a core psychological need (SDT)
3. The value of self-expression and authenticity
4. Therapy's emphasis on individual goals and self-understanding
5. Career development frameworks emphasizing individual achievement
6. The concept of "healthy boundaries" in relationships
7. Mindfulness as practiced in Western therapeutic contexts

For each: 1. What cultural assumptions does this concept embed? 2. For whom might this concept work well? For whom might it fit poorly? 3. Does recognizing the cultural embedding change how you use or value it?

Reflection: The WEIRD critique doesn't mean these frameworks are useless or should be abandoned. It means they should be held with more cultural humility — applied with awareness of what they assume, not as universal psychological truths.

Part F: Integration

Exercise 38.11 — Cultural Psychology Applied to Your Current Challenges

Select one significant challenge in your current life — a relationship difficulty, a professional challenge, an identity question, a decision under uncertainty.

Analyze it through the cultural psychology lens: 1. What cultural frameworks are you using to define the problem? (What would this look like if you defined it through a more collectivist framework? A higher power-distance lens? A different time orientation?) 2. Are there cultural differences between you and the other parties involved that might be shaping the conflict or misunderstanding? 3. What assumptions about the self (independent vs. interdependent) are embedded in the solutions you're considering? 4. What would cultural humility — ongoing curiosity rather than confident cultural knowledge — look like in your approach to this challenge?

Cultural psychology does not tell you that your cultural framework is wrong. It tells you that it is a framework — one among many — and that recognizing it as such is the beginning of the kind of flexibility and humility that makes cross-cultural effectiveness possible.

Next: Quiz 38 — Test Your Knowledge of Cultural Psychology