In this introductory chapter, we outline some conceptual building blocks for an ecosocial view of the co-construction of mind, brain, and culture. The brain is the organ of culture; mind and experience are processes located in loops of active engagement of brain and body with the social world. This engagement occurs on multiple time scales, from evolution and co-evolutionary adaptation to humanly designed niches, through the cultural history of populations and communities, to individual developmental trajectories, narratives of the self, and moment-to-moment engagements with social contexts. We are born biologically equipped to acquire culture and, across our lifespan, we become attuned to particular social and cultural environments. The niches we inhabit are cooperatively constructed and presented to us as cultural affordances that enable our cognitive capacities, sense of self, adaptive skills, and meaning-making capacity. The rewiring of brain circuits, synaptic plasticity, and underlying changes in gene regulation only make sense in relation to the particular resources, affordances, and adaptive tasks presented to us by specific cultural environments. Answering the question of what makes us human then turns out to involve not just an evolutionary story in deep time, but also cultural and individual stories in historical, developmental, and biographical time.

In this epilogue, we reflect on the prospects for advancing interdisciplinarity in the sciences of culture, mind, and brain. Neuroscience is increasingly applied to address questions of central concern to the social sciences. Social sciences, in turn, can contribute to neuroscience research in a variety of ways, including: (1) the study of social factors that influence the brain across the lifespan; (2) the context-sensitive translation of neuroscience research into applications in clinical and other social settings; (3) critical social analyses of cultural, conceptual, and institutional framing and constraints on neuroscience research, knowledge production, and applications; and (4) integration of each of these approaches in an ecosocial view of the brain in its social-cultural niche. Obstacles to interdisciplinarity stem from institutional structures, methodological strategies, epistemic commitments, and divergent ontologies. We describe strategies to surmount these obstacles, including: (1) institutionally, creating spaces for collaborative work, supporting interdisciplinary career tracks, and ensuring sustained funding; (2) conceptually, borrowing models and metaphors across disciplines, establishing boundary objects of common interest, using system diagrams to locate diverse levels and processes in the same model; and (3) methodologically, establishing convergent validity through mixed and hybrid methods, and creating shared databases and pipelines to facilitate integration of multiple perspectives.

Culture is composed of meanings (e.g., values, beliefs, and norms) and practices (e.g., conventions, scripts, and routines) that are shared, albeit unevenly, in a given community and group. Culture is integral to biological adaptation, not an overlay to the human mind but part and parcel of how the human mind functions. Since the mind is shaped through culture, it also contributes to the reproduction of culture. This chapter highlights a broad contrast thought to separate the West from the “rest,” with Westerners being more independent or less interdependent than non-Westerners, although non-Western regions themselves are highly variable, reflecting diverse adaptive strategies for achieving interdependence under varying socio-ecological conditions. We review existing behavioral and neuroscience evidence to support a broad distinction between the West and the non-West based on three core features of interdependence: predictors of happiness, holistic attention, and holistic social cognition. We also summarize recent evidence suggesting that culture influences cortical volume in specific brain regions. We conclude by pointing out that while cultural shaping of mentality is highly idiosyncratic at the individual level, it can nonetheless be systematic at the collective level, enabling faithful reproduction of the cultural system by which individuals have been trained and shaped.

Early in the fall of 1982, I arrived in Ann Arbor from Japan as a new social psychology graduate student, and met Hazel Markus. She was on the University of Michigan faculty back then. Over the next five years, we frequently discussed cultural differences between her country (the United States) and mine (Japan). This conversation eventually culminated in a Psychological Review paper. We argued that many aspects of the East–West cultural variations in thinking and feeling, as well as in behavior, could be linked to cultural construals of the self as either independent (dominant in the United States) or interdependent (dominant in Japan). We reviewed a wide range of available evidence. Fortunately for us, the notion of independent and interdependent self-construal gained traction, not only on our home turf of social and cultural psychology, but also in a wide range of other fields, including cognitive psychology, marketing, organizational behavior, education, and, more recently, neuroscience and genetics.

In this essay, I would like to reflect on this development. In particular, I would like to highlight two lines of work I have done. The goal is to shed new light on future directions of the study of the human mind as biologically prepared and, yet, culturally completed.

What Was New?

At the highest level of abstraction, our proposal was analogous to some existing ideas in sociology, anthropology, and cross-cultural psychology. All these ideas, ours included, pertained to the ways in which social structures or cultural meaning systems are organized. Like all others, we also spent a lot of pages to delineate how collectively shared ideas and institutions could be patterned by the cultural models of independence and interdependence.

However, we went a step further by proposing that the cultural patterns and social structures are related to basic psychological processes. This means that the sociocultural is inherently intertwined with the psychological, including the nature of agency. The proposal to delineate this interdependence, or mutual constitution, between culture and the self, in some empirically tractable fashion was new back then. It still is current today.