Interpreting comparative observations from diverse world cultures poses the dilemma of how to unfold the wide variety of functional and historical processes observed in cultural systems. Do correlations among cultural variables represent functional relations or historical adhesions? Some elements are acquired through independent invention (including functional adaptation), others through common...

Cultural evolution and cognitive science need each other. Cultural evolution needs cognitive science to find out whether the conditions necessary for Darwinian evolution are met in the cultural domain. Cognitive science needs cultural evolution to explain the origins of distinctively human cognitive processes. Focusing on the first question, I argue that cultural evolutionists can get empirical...

Purpose: To assess the cross-cultural clinical utility of the Visual Motor Integration (VMI) standardized U.S. norms for typically developing Palestinian, Israeli, and American kindergarten children. The cross-cultural comparisons tested the extent to which the VMI standardized U.S. norms for all three tests (a) are appropriate for use with the aforementioned groups without the need for cross-c...

BACKGROUND The Boston Naming Test is frequently used to evaluate naming deficits. The scores used in Brazil have been the same as those used in the American version. In the case of individuals with poor schooling associated to cerebral lesions, a frequent situation in our country, one runs the risk of considering a poor performance as a deficit, what in fact is a consequence of lack of knowledg...

BACKGROUND The importance of cultural adaptations in behavioral interventions targeting ethnic minorities in high-income societies is widely recognized. Little is known, however, about the effectiveness of specific cultural adaptations in such interventions. AIM To systematically review the effectiveness of specific cultural adaptations in interventions that target smoking cessation, diet, an...

We examined reference point adaptation following gains or losses in security trading using participants from China, Korea, and the US. In both questionnaire studies and trading experiments with real money incentives, reference point adaptation was larger for Asians than for Americans. Subjects in all countries adapted their reference points more after a gain than after an equal-sized loss. When...

Interpreting comparative observations from diverse world cultures poses the dilemma of how to unfold the wide variety of functional and historical processes observed in cultural systems. Do correlations among cultural variables represent functional relations or historical adhesions? Some elements are acquired through independent invention (including functional adaptation), others through common...

SUMMARY If culture is defined as variation acquired and maintained by social learning, then culture is common in nature. However, cumulative cultural evolution resulting in behaviors that no individual could invent on their own is limited to humans, song birds, and perhaps chimpanzees. Circumstantial evidence suggests that cumulative cultural evolution requires the capacity for observational le...

How do people adapt to organizational culture and what are the consequences for their outcomes in the organization? These fundamental questions about culture have previously been examined using self-report measures, which are subject to reporting bias, rely on coarse cultural categories defined by researchers, and provide only static snapshots of cultural fit. In contrast, we develop an interac...

Adapting user interfaces to cultural preferences has been shown to improve a user’s performance, but is oftentimes foregone because of its timeconsuming and costly procedure. Moreover, it is usually limited to producing one uniform user interface (UI) for each nation disregarding the intangible nature of cultural backgrounds. To overcome these problems, we exemplify a new approach with our cult...