The Culture and Social Behavior Lab

The Culture and Social Behavior Lab is an interdisciplinary social psychology research laboratory. Our lab seeks to understand the relationship between cultures and our behaviors, identities, and cognitions. We seek to leverage self-and identity-related constructs to help generate solutions to real world social problems.

Our research has focussed mostly on the interaction of people, culture, and situations. We try to understand both individual differences (within-culture variation) and cultural differences (between-culture variation) in an integrated way. So, we try to understand the cultural logics that make each culture distinct, and we try to understand how people postion themselves either toward or against the dominant logic of their culture (Leung & Cohen, 2006a). In this work, we have mostly compared face, dignity, and honor cultures. Another area of interest has to do with phenomenological perspectives on the self. How do people of different cultures experience the self?

In our work, we have examined the insider and outsider perspectives that people may take on the self in Euro-American and Asian-American contexts (Cohen & Gunz, 2002; Cohen, Hoshino-Browne, & Leung, in press; Leung & Cohen, 2006b).

Two very new areas for us concern: 1) cultural difference in language use. More particularly, we are interested in how people of different cultures may describe reality in some fundamentally different ways. 2) The embodiment of cultural values, in which cultural values get encoded in the way we actually physically comport our bodies. (*hard embodiment*) or the way we psychologically represent our bodies in our mental models (*soft embodiment*) (Leung & Cohen , 2006b).