This paper suggests an approach to interaction design that builds on the concept of cultural forms. Specifically, I propose that designers can shape objects and situations to intentionally evoke cultural forms thereby cueing users' existing cognitive, physical, and emotional resources. The emphasis is less about improving the usability of an interface and more about improving the overall social...

This study compares age identities of middle-aged and older adults in the United States and Germany. Differences between countries in social systems and cultural meanings of old age are expected to produce different age identities. Data are from respondents between ages 40 and 74 in the United States (MIDUS; n = 2,006) and Germany (German Aging Survey; n = 3,331). Americans and Germans tend to ...

Major health care problems such as patient dissatisfaction, inequity of access to care, and spiraling costs no longer seem amenable to traditional biomedical solutions. Concepts derived from anthropologic and cross-cultural research may provide an alternative framework for identifying issues that require resolution. A limited set of such concepts is described as illustrated, including a fundame...

The 21st century has brought an increasing demand for expertise in science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM). Although strides have been made towards increasing gender diversity in several of these disciplines, engineering remains primarily male dominated. In response, the U.S. educational system has attempted to make engineering curriculum more engaging, informative, and welcoming to g...

Cultural evolutionary models have identified a range of conditions under which social learning (copying others) is predicted to be adaptive relative to asocial learning (learning on one's own), particularly in humans where socially learned information can accumulate over successive generations. However, cultural evolution and behavioural economics experiments have consistently shown apparently ...

BACKGROUND Social anxiety disorder (SAD) has been repeatedly shown to be very prevalent in the Western society with prevalence rates of 10% or above. However, very few studies have been performed in the Middle East and in Arab countries. METHODS A total of 300 Israeli students participated in our study and were administered the Liebowitz Social Anxiety Scale (LSAS), the Cheek and Buss Shyness...

Evolutionary psychologists argue that because humans are biological creatures, cultural explanations must include biology. They thus offer to unify the natural and social sciences. Evolutionary psychologists rely on a specific history of cultural anthropology, particularly the work of Alfred Kroeber to make this point. A close examination of the history of cultural anthropology reveals that Kro...

“Social disciplining” is the name that has been given to attempts by the authorities throughout early modern Europe to regulate people’s private lives. In explicit contrast to “social control,” the informal mechanisms by which people have always sought to put pressure on one another in traditional societies, “social disciplining” was a set of formal, legislative strategies through which the eme...

Purpose – Based on the cybernetic agency theory of part 1, the paper creates a parallel theory to Maruyama’s Mindscape theory called mindset theory, relying on the three-trait organisational value system of Sagiv and Schwartz that arises from extensive theoretical and empirical work on cultural values originally undertaken by Shalom Schwartz. The derived normative personality types are embedded...

Our species is characterized by a great degree of cultural variation, both within and between populations. Understanding how group-level patterns of culture emerge from individual-level behaviour is a long-standing question in the biological and social sciences. We develop a simulation model capturing demographic and cultural dynamics relevant to human cultural evolution, focusing on the interf...