Explore the vast range of titles available.

Music has been called “the universal language of mankind.” Although contemporary theories of music evolution often invoke various musical universals, the existence of such universals has been disputed for decades and has never been empirically demonstrated. Here we combine a music-classification scheme with statistical analyses, including phylogenetic comparative methods, to examine a well-sampled global set of 304 music recordings. Our analyses reveal no absolute universals but strong support for many statistical universals that are consistent across all nine geographic regions sampled. These universals include 18 musical features that are common individually as well as a network of 10 features that are commonly associated with one another. They span not only features related to pitch and rhythm that are often cited as putative universals but also rarely cited domains including performance style and social context. These cross-cultural structural regularities of human music may relate to roles in facilitating group coordination and cohesion, as exemplified by the universal tendency to sing, play percussion instruments, and dance to simple, repetitive music in groups. Our findings highlight the need for scientists studying music evolution to expand the range of musical cultures and musical features under consideration. The statistical universals we identified represent important candidates for future investigation. Which features of music are universal and which are culture-specific? Why? These questions are important for understanding why humans make music but have rarely been scientifically tested. We used musical classification techniques and statistical tools to analyze a global set of 304 music recordings, finding no absolute universals but dozens of statistical universals. These include not only commonly cited features related to pitch and rhythm but also domains such as social context and interrelationships between musical features. We speculate that group coordination is the common aspect unifying the cross-cultural structural regularities of human music, with implications for the study of music evolution.

Do caregivers in non-Western communities adapt their behaviors to the needs of infants? This question reflects one of the most long-standing debates on the universality versus culture-specificity of caregiver-infant interactions in general and sensitive responsiveness to infants in particular. In this article, an integration of both points of view is presented, based on the theoretical origins of the sensitive responsiveness construct combined with the ethnographic literature on caregivers and infants in different parts of the world. This integration advocates universality without uniformity, and calls for multidisciplinary collaborations to investigate the complexities and nuances of caregiver-infant interactions in different cultures. Salient issues are illustrated with observations of infants (ages 7-31 months) in Mali, the Republic of Congo, and the Philippines.

This article presents culture as a vehicle of labor market sorting. Providing a case study of hiring in elite professional service firms, I investigate the often suggested but heretofore empirically unexamined hypothesis that cultural similarities between employers and job candidates matter for employers' hiring decisions. Drawing from 120 interviews with employers as well as participant observation of a hiring committee, I argue that hiring is more than just a process of skills sorting; it is also a process of cultural matching between candidates, evaluators, and firms. Employers sought candidates who were not only competent but also culturally similar to themselves in terms of leisure pursuits, experiences, and self-presentation styles. Concerns about shared culture were highly salient to employers and often outweighed concerns about absolute productivity. I unpack the interpersonal processes through which cultural similarities affected candidate evaluation in elite firms and provide the first empirical demonstration that shared culture—particularly in the form of lifestyle markers—matters for employer hiring. I conclude by discussing the implications for scholarship on culture, inequality, and labor markets.

We aim to raise awareness of context by examining its role in empirical research. We apply the dichotomy of universalism and particularism, and discuss the interaction of theory and culture in order to consider the scope of validity for research findings and conclusions. We illustrate our arguments by referencing three cases, each of which has contextual inadequacies. We aim to discourage the conduct of research, and acceptance of papers, that falsely implies universalism, relies on convenient samples or ignores indigenous constructs. We offer specific prescriptions for authors, editors and reviewers to help ensure that both the research context and scope of validity are adequately communicated and understood.

Most research on culture in international business either aggregates people within a country into a single, homogeneous, national culture, or examines heterogeneity within countries based on exogenous criteria. In this study, we explore heterogeneity in cultural values within and across countries endogenously through the configurations of values people share in common. We develop a theory of culture archetypes and use a novel methodology that identifies a small number of distinct configurations of values - archetypes - in our data. These data come from the World Values Survey 2005 and Schwartz's model of culture. We identify four culture archetypes in japan, USA and China, and six in India. The existence of transnational and subnational archetypes across the four countries suggests the need to recognize culture as a combination of universaletic - as well as unique - emic - characteristics. Our approach also distinguishes between those individuals represented by our archetypes and those individuals who more closely resemble the average values of a country. By unifying both archetypes and national averages within one theoretical and methodological schema we thus reconcile the conflicting perspectives in the field.

The practice of medicine—and especially the patient-doctor relationship—has seen exceptional shifts in ethical standards of care over the past few years, which by and large originate in occidental countries and are then extrapolated worldwide. However, this phenomenon is blind to the fact that an ethical practice of medicine remains hugely dependent on prevailing cultural and societal expectations of the community in which it serves. One model aiming to conceptualise the dichotomous efforts for global standardisation of medical care against differing sociocultural expectations is the individualism-collectivism model, with the ‘West’ being seen as individualistic and the ‘East’ being seen as collectivistic. This has been used by many academics to explain differences in approach towards ethical practice on key concepts such as informed consent and patient autonomy. However, I argue that this characterisation is incomplete and lacks nuance into the complexities surrounding cross-cultural ethics in practice, and I propose an alternative model based on the ethics of clinical care in Hong Kong, China. Core ethical principles need not be culture-bound—indeed, their very existence mandates for them to be universal and non-derogable—but instead cultural alignment occurs in the particular implementation of these principles, insofar as they respect the general spirit of contemporary ethical standards.

Globalization has made exposure to multiple cultures not only possible, but often necessary and unavoidable. This article focuses on how people react and adapt to increasing globalization and multiculturalism. We posit that reactions to multiculturalism and intercultural contact are not universal and are themselves shaped by cultural experiences. That is, culture provides a frame of reference for reconciling and negotiating the inflow of foreign cultures and peoples. Although exposure to foreign cultures can widen one’s worldview, thereby enhancing creativity and reducing prejudice, intercultural contact can also bring about negative exclusionary responses such as aversion, disgust, and defensiveness. We explore how culture and individual differences, such as a belief in racial essentialism, critically shape reactions to intercultural contact. Our discussion sheds light on recent geopolitical and societal shifts that reflect an increased backlash against rising globalization and cultural diversity.

In the mid-twentieth century, in the aftermath of WWII and the Nazi atrocities and in the midst of decolonisation, a new discipline of transcultural psychiatry was being established and institutionalised. This was part and parcel of a global political project in the course of which Western psychiatry attempted to leave behind its colonial legacies and entanglements, and lay the foundation for a more inclusive, egalitarian communication between Western and non-Western concepts of mental illness and healing. In this period, the infrastructure of post-colonial global and transcultural psychiatry was set up, and leading psychiatric figures across the world embarked on identifying, debating and sometimes critiquing the universal psychological characteristics and psychopathological mechanisms supposedly shared among all cultures and civilisations. The article will explore how this psychiatric, social and cultural search for a new definition of ‘common humanity’ was influenced and shaped by the concurrent global rise of social psychiatry. In the early phases of transcultural psychiatry, a large number of psychiatrists were very keen to determine how cultural and social environments shaped the basic traits of human psychology, and ‘psy’ practitioners and anthropologist from all over the world sought to re-define the relationship between culture, race and individual psyche. Most of them worked within the universalist framework, which posited that cultural differences merely formed a veneer of symptoms and expressions while the universal core of mental illness remained the same across all cultures. The article will argue that, even in this context, which explicitly challenged the hierarchical and racist paradigms of colonial psychiatry, the founding generations of transcultural psychiatrists from Western Europe and North America tended to conceive of broader environmental determinants of mental health and pathology in the decolonising world in fairly reductionist terms—focusing almost exclusively on ‘cultural difference’ and cultural, racial and ethnic ‘traditions’, essentialising and reifying them in the process, and failing to establish some common sociological or economic categories of analysis of Western and non-Western ‘mentalities’. On the other hand, it was African and Asian psychiatrists as well as Marxist psychiatrists from Eastern Europe who insisted on applying those broader social psychiatry concepts—such as social class, occupation, socio-economic change, political and group pressures and relations etc.—which were quickly becoming central to mental health research in the West but were largely missing from Western psychiatrists’ engagement with the decolonising world. In this way, some of the leading non-Western psychiatrists relied on social psychiatry to establish the limits of psychiatric universalism, and challenge some of its Eurocentric and essentialising tendencies. Even though they still subscribed to the predominant universalist framework, these practitioners invoked social psychiatry to draw attention to universalism’s internal incoherence, and sought to revise the lingering evolutionary thinking in transcultural psychiatry. They also contributed to re-imagining cross-cultural encounters and exchanges as potentially creative and progressive (whereas early Western transcultural psychiatry primarily viewed the cross-cultural through the prism of pathogenic and traumatic ‘cultural clash’). Therefore, the article will explore the complex politics of the shifting and overlapping definitions of ‘social’ and ‘cultural’ factors in mid-twentieth century transcultural psychiatry, and aims to recover the revolutionary voices of non-Western psychiatrists and their contributions to the global re-drawing of the boundaries of humanity in the second half of the twentieth century.

The significance of teaching to the evolution of human culture is under debate. We contribute to the discussion by using a quantitative, cross-cultural comparative approach to investigate the role of teaching in the lives of children in two small-scale societies: Aka foragers and Ngandu farmers of the Central African Republic. Focal follows with behavior coding were used to record social learning experiences of children aged 4 to 16 during daily life. “Teaching” was coded based on a functional definition from evolutionary biology. Frequencies, contexts, and subtypes of teaching as well as the identity of teachers were analyzed. Teaching was rare compared to observational learning, although both forms of social learning were negatively correlated with age. Children received teaching from a variety of individuals, and they also engaged in teaching. Several teaching types were observed, including instruction, negative feedback, and commands. Statistical differences in the distribution of teaching types and the identity of teachers corresponded with contrasting forager vs. farmer foundational cultural schema. For example, Aka children received less instruction, which empirically limits autonomous learning, and were as likely to receive instruction and negative feedback from other children as they were from adults. Commands, however, exhibited a different pattern suggesting a more complex role for this teaching type. Although consistent with claims that teaching is relatively rare in small-scale societies, this evidence supports the conclusion that teaching is a universal, early emerging cognitive ability in humans. However, culture (e.g., values for autonomy and egalitarianism) structures the nature of teaching.

The discussion about linguistic universals, initiated over 50 years ago by J. Greenberg, remains a topic of significant interest today. While there’s an ongoing debate on the universality of linguistic forms - with some supporting the notion and others dismissing it as baseless—the idea of a unifying linguistic essence stands firm. The article aims to explore the linguacultural values of language, particularly how they enable the reconstruction of ideas and stereotypes within specific segments of a language system. The research found that universal language characteristics serve as a rich source of information for those studying linguacultural aspects. These traits offer nationally determined interpretations of words, drawing from associations rooted in either tangible or cultural codes. When delving into cultural codes present within every culture, the study discerned the presence of basic and universal codes. The existence of these codes provides insights into the formation of stereotypes, which encapsulate the experiences and knowledge intrinsic to the bearers of a culture. Linguistic universals, underpinned by universal grammar and semantic foundations, occupy a central position in linguacultural examinations, especially when reconstructing cultural ideas and stereotypes. Basic and universal cultural codes inherent in each culture facilitate the creation of linguistic worldviews.