Psychological universals, or core mental attributes shared by humans everywhere, are a foundational postulate of psychology, yet explicit analysis of how to identify such universals is lacking. This article offers a conceptual and methodological framework to guide the investigation of genuine universals through empirical analysis of psychological patterns across cultures. Issues of cross-cultur...

Human societies are remarkably diverse but this diversity is not limitless. Human cultural and linguistic variation is patterned and the spectrum of variation is not as wide as the “ethnographic hyperspace” we could think of. There are phenomena regularly found in all human cultures. Among the better known examples out of hundreds of universals are ethnocentrism, incest avoidance and social rec...

The discovery of general patterns and their subsequent explanation is a familiar method in linguistics and other cross-cultural research. This paper addresses the computerized enumeration of significant cultural and linguistic patterns, specifically implicational universals. We dispute published suggestions that the mechanical generation of universals is inadvisable, by arguing that such claims...

Looking across human societies reveals regularities in the languages that people speak and the concepts that they use. One explanation that has been proposed for these “cultural universals” is differences in the ease with which people learn particular languages and concepts. A difference in learnability means that languages and concepts possessing a particular property are more likely to be acc...

In 1969, Berlin and Kay proposed that there exist crosscultural universals in the form of basic color terms. To test this hypothesis, the World Color Survey (WCS) collected color naming data from 110 non-industrial societies, identifying regularities in the structure of languages with different numbers of terms. This leaves us with the question of where these universals come from. We use a simp...

This article features an elementary teacher who has worked with the authors for the past 10 years in research on building a classroom community and using cultural universals as the centerpiece for elementary social studies for all children. Cultural universals are basic human needs and social experiences found in all societies, past and present, and include food, shelter, clothing, transportati...

Contemporary research on emotions has been increasingly demarcated into four self-contained segments: the cultural, biological, inner, and outer aspects of emotional processes. A parallel trend is the increasing hegemony of the perspective of those who study only the cultural and outside segments. Research on cultural variation, the causation of emotional states, and cultural universals is revi...