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- American cultural traditions define personality, achievement, and the purpose of human life in ways that leave the individual suspended in glorious, but terrifying, isolation. These are limitations of our culture, of the categories and ways of thinking we have inherited, not limitations of individuals… —Robert N. Bellah et. al, 1985
- …we should not expect reality to be independent of our participation in it…Every person is stimulus bound, and every stimulus is person bound. That is what it means for culture and psyche to make each other up. That is why a cultural psychology signals an end for the purely psychological in psychology. —Richard A. Shweder, 1991
- We are perhaps most gratified by the fact that as cultural psychology has grown, psychology has become diversified in important ways not only in perspective, theory, and empirical findings but also in its participants. Many students from contexts other than European American ones have taken up the study of cultural psychology and this comparative study not only illuminates other worlds and ways of being but has the potential to enrich and expand psychological theory and research. —Hazel Rose Markus & Shinobu Kitayama, 2003
- The experimental method changes our between-culture comparison from one of comparing the magnitude of means across cultures (which is problematic) to one of comparing the pattern of means across cultures (which is fine). — Steven J. Heine, 2008
- … there exist coherent sets of attributes that can differentiate groups and yet, their correlations at the individual level would not necessarily be expected. Being thrifty, working hard, and avoiding a show of wealth, can distinguish Ascetic Protestantism from other denominations . However, there is no particular reason to expect that the thriftier members of an ascetic Protestant group would also be the harder workers. —Na et al., 2010
- … scientists have been surprised at how deeply culture—the language we speak, the values we absorb—shapes the brain, and are rethinking findings derived from studies of Westerners. To take one recent example, a region behind the forehead called the medial prefrontal cortex supposedly represents the self: it is active when we ("we" being the Americans in the study) think of our own identity and traits. But with Chinese volunteers, the results were strikingly different. The "me" circuit hummed not only when they thought whether a particular adjective described themselves, but also when they considered whether it described their mother. The Westerners showed no such overlap between self and mom. —Sharon Begley, 2010
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