COLLEGE PARK, Md. – A University of Maryland-led research team is working to help diplomats, military personnel, global managers and others who operate abroad to peer inside the minds of people from very different cultures.
"Some cultures are 'loose' and others very 'tight' – quick to spot and react to violations of social norms. Yet we know very little about how these vast cultural differences are realized in the brain," says University of Maryland cross-cultural psychologist Michele Gelfand, who is leading the interdisciplinary research team. "This work builds upon an exciting new field of cultural neuroscience to examine how differences in the strength of norms across the globe are 'embrained.'"
The team will focus on developing tools to assess the strength of social norms, as well as policy recommendations for managing clashes of moralities, and techniques for better intercultural interaction. Gelfand's co-investigators are Luiz Pessoa, who directs the University of Maryland Neuroimaging Center, Shinobu Kitayama, director of the University of Michigan Culture and Cognition Program, and Klaus Boehnke, a professor of social science methodology at Bremen, Germany's Jacobs University. The research builds upon on an earlier 33-nation study in Science, in which a Gelfand-led team assesses the degree to which countries are restrictive or permissive and the factors that made them that way. The research grant was awarded by the Defense Department's Minerva Initiative, which aims to improve the department's basic understanding of the social, cultural, behavioral, and political forces that shape regions of the world of strategic importance to the United States. The UMD project is one of only 14 funded by Minerva from a total pool of 280. Gelfand received a prior Minerva grant in 2012 to study radicalization and a MURI grant in 2008 to study culture and negotiation in the Middle East. She can be contacted at mgelfand@umd.edu. See also http://www.umdrightnow.umd.edu/news/research-can-climate-change-heat-conflict.
July 19, 2013 Prev Next |
Mapping the Brain To Understand Cultural Differences
Connect

Office of Technology Commercialization
2130 Mitchell Building
7999 Regents Dr.
University of Maryland
College Park, MD 20742
2130 Mitchell Building
7999 Regents Dr.
University of Maryland
College Park, MD 20742
Phone: 301-405-3947 | Fax: 301-314-9502
Email: umdtechtransfer@umd.edu
© Copyright 2013 University of Maryland
Did You Know
UMD's Neutral Buoyancy Research Facility, which simulates weightlessness, is one of only two such facilities in the U.S.