As a world without colors would be extremely boring, we are luckily able to perceive various different colors that enrich our environment. Recently, Keiko Ishii and colleagues found that the colors we prefer and use for our paintings vary systematically across cultures. But that doesn’t mean that tomorrow’s multi-cultural world is becoming black-and-white or grey, rather there is hope that it will become even more colorful than it is today. In this post, we will illustrate how individuals and cultures engage in mutual construction and thus enhance variety.

In August 2000, global superstar Madonna released the single “Music” from her soon to be hit album. Other than the brilliant lyrics “Do you like to Boogie woogie”, you might remember that one of the lines in the chorus was “Music makes the people come together.” In this post, I will discuss the social psychological research, which suggests that she was more right then even she must have thought.

In this post, I recount part of my journey into the nitty-gritty of cross-cultural differences in behavior. More specifically, I discuss the link between skateboarding across the USA, attractive Japanese women in tights, and the paradoxical nuances in conformity between cultures.