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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. I’m from New...

Although a popular belief (and a heartwarming children’s song) hold that we all laugh in the same language, recent research has found that people are remarkably adapt at detecting local accents in the way that emotions are expressed. In this blog, I will review research that suggests that the long...

Parents in societies around the world have big ambitions for their children. At the same time, those societies have become more competitive. In order to become a successful lawyer, you need a degree from an ‘excellent’ university. To get into that excellent university, you need to have outperformed...

In a recent cross-cultural study of Facebook users in Japan and the US, I show that Japanese SNS users are more concerned about Internet privacy than American SNS users. And it turns out that because Americans have higher general trust, they less likely to believe that a stranger would take...

Do you feel the need to feel good about yourself in order to be happy? Research suggests that if you have a lot of opportunities to make new friends, it is more likely that you will answer this question with a ‘yes’ than when you have more of a set group of people you spend time with. In this blog...

Imagine that your national football team has to play against the team of a neighboring country. You are very excited about this event and invited your friends over to watch the game together. When the other team scores a second goal and is winning, you see that the football fans of that team are

Natural selection is the process by which populations change as individual organisms succeed or fail to adapt to their environments. One of the more famous examples of natural selection is the peppered moth of England. Before the Industrial Revolution, these moths were lightly colored, allowing them...