Travelling into culture : a social psychologist encounters many strangers from many strange lands
Event Title
International Interdisciplinary Conference: Advances in Comparative Culturology
Location
MBG06, Lam Woo Lecture Theatre, Patrick Lee Wan Keung Academic Building, Lingnan University
Start Date
16-5-2025 10:00 AM
End Date
16-5-2025 10:30 AM
Language
English
Description
As I survey my intellectual journey post-PhD, I detect four, overlapping stages in my development as a cross-cultural psychologist. My first stage, that of innocence, involved examining human responses using the social-personality constructs and measures extracted from my training in North America up to that date. My second stage, that of discovery, involved applying those constructs and measures in the different cultural settings of Japan and Hong Kong, only to discover that the constructs worked differently to produce different responses. My third stage, that of understanding, involved using Mainstream and indigenously developed constructs and measures to begin understanding how cultural differences might be producing these differences in the responses of a culture’s individual members. Moving into the 21st Century, we cross-cultural psychologists either collected or were gifted with access to multi-cultural data sets tapping multiple constructs whose role in shaping psychological responses could be analyzed with increasingly sophisticated statistical packages. These resources now increasingly enable us to explore the moderating impact on individual responses of a growing set of cultural measures provided by culturologists studying various types of culture in addition to the national. My current and fourth stage, that of enlightenment, involves halting attempts to integrate this complexity of constructs and their measures into a coherent model of how an individual’s many cultural socializations across the lifespan affects his or her psychological responses. My journey continues…
Document Type
Presentation
Recommended Citation
Bond, M. (2025, May 16). Travelling into culture: A social psychologist encounters many strangers from many strange lands. Presented at the International Interdisciplinary Conference: Advances in Comparative Culturology, Lingnan University, Hong Kong.
Travelling into culture : a social psychologist encounters many strangers from many strange lands
MBG06, Lam Woo Lecture Theatre, Patrick Lee Wan Keung Academic Building, Lingnan University
As I survey my intellectual journey post-PhD, I detect four, overlapping stages in my development as a cross-cultural psychologist. My first stage, that of innocence, involved examining human responses using the social-personality constructs and measures extracted from my training in North America up to that date. My second stage, that of discovery, involved applying those constructs and measures in the different cultural settings of Japan and Hong Kong, only to discover that the constructs worked differently to produce different responses. My third stage, that of understanding, involved using Mainstream and indigenously developed constructs and measures to begin understanding how cultural differences might be producing these differences in the responses of a culture’s individual members. Moving into the 21st Century, we cross-cultural psychologists either collected or were gifted with access to multi-cultural data sets tapping multiple constructs whose role in shaping psychological responses could be analyzed with increasingly sophisticated statistical packages. These resources now increasingly enable us to explore the moderating impact on individual responses of a growing set of cultural measures provided by culturologists studying various types of culture in addition to the national. My current and fourth stage, that of enlightenment, involves halting attempts to integrate this complexity of constructs and their measures into a coherent model of how an individual’s many cultural socializations across the lifespan affects his or her psychological responses. My journey continues…
Additional Information
Speaker
Michael Harris BOND (Hong Kong Polytechnic University)
Michael Harris Bond was born and raised by Anglo-Canadian parents in Toronto, Canada as part of what Wikipedia terms the “Silent Generation”. Following undergraduate education at University of Toronto, he left his birthplace for graduate school in the United States followed by an early career in Japan. There he learned the basics for doing cross-cultural research and living in a different culture. Since then, he has practiced as an academic in Hong Kong over the last 50 years and written widely on cultural differences in cognition, emotions, and behavior. In his recent research, he has been cooperating with colleagues in many societies to do cross-level, multi-cultural research on trust, gender bias, and satisfaction with life. For the last 10 years, he has been teaching “cross-cultural management” to Master’s students at the Faculty of Business of the Hong Kong Polytechnic University, trying to prepare Generation Z as best he knows how for life in the 21st century.