Although cross-cultural studies in psychology have existed for more than 100 years, it has only been in the past decade or two that contemporary, mainstream psychology has embraced the importance of culture as a significant influence on psychological processes. In the past two decades, we have gained much knowledge and improved our understanding of the nature, contents, and functions of culture as a macrosocial variable and of its relationship to behavior on the individual level. At a time when more and more of psychology is looking inward and at the micro-level building blocks of behavior in neurons, neurochemicals, and brain processes, the study of culture and its relationship with psychology is refreshing as it looks outward, beyond the individual, into groups and contexts to find frameworks and platforms for understanding human behavior.

This work is still in process, however, and one of the major problems that psychologists doing work involving cultures face entails how to link individual-level human behavior with cultural-level phenomena. Indeed, the field is still plagued by studies dominated by quasi-experimental designs, in which differences are observed across supposed cultural groups and researchers interpret the source of these differences as cultural with little or no empirical justification (Matsumoto & Yoo, 2006). In fact, many researchers go beyond making these ecological fallacies (Campbell, 1961) and even attribute causal mechanisms to culture from such data, interpreting that culture “caused” the differences observed or that their data highlighted “cultural influences on” psychological processes.