Please join Dean Andrew Martin in honoring Professor Shinobu Kitayama on his appointment to the Robert B. Zajonc Collegiate Professor of Psychology.

The study of culture in psychology has come of age. I was fortunate to live this development through my professional career. Along with a number of colleagues, I have explored cultural pluralism – the hypothesis that there are multiple equilibriums in human cultural adaptation while relying on epistemological positivism – a set of scientific methods employed to evaluate claims made on different cultures. One primary domain of interest has been a macroscopic comparison between (relatively interdependent) East and (relatively independent) West. The resulting field is now called cultural psychology. In this lecture, I will discuss three core themes of the field and put forward new questions that have emerged on the horizon. Specifically, the success of cultural psychology was initially anchored in (i) an experimental approach to document cultural variations in mentality. Subsequently, it has been reinforced by both (ii) an effort to identify situational, historical, ecological, and, more recently, evolutionary forces that shape the contemporary cultural variations in mentality and (iii) the adoption of neuroscience methods to assess the “depth” of cultural influences on mentality. Now, the field is poised to address novel questions on the biological mechanisms that are recruited to support culture, including neuroplasticity, gene x culture co-evolution, and epigenetic pathways of socio-cultural adaptation.