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Cultural Psychology Steven J. Heine University of British Columbia Please address correspondence to Steven J. Heine 2136 West Mall, University of British Columbia Vancouver, BC, V6T 1Z4 Canada Tel: (604) 822-6908. Fax (604) 822-6923 E-mail: heine@psych.ubc.ca Introduction Imagine what it must have been like. About 8 million years ago, rustling about the savannas of East Africa, there lived a family of apes. They had their ape-like concerns, struggling to get enough food, avoid the lions, negotiate the power hierarchy in their troupe, groom themselves, and take care of their offspring. Their lives would have looked awfully ordinary if we could see them now, and it is doubtful that there would have been any signs of the things that would happen to their descendants. Some of the descendants of those apes would evolve into what we recognize today as the species of chimpanzees and bonobos – clever apes living in small pockets of the jungles of central Africa. Some of the other descendants of these apes would evolve into a species whose members have gone on to populate the furthest reaches of the planet, split the atom, paint the Sistine Chapel, and invent the iPhone. What factors have determined the different trajectories of these biologically similar species? Much of the answer to this question has to do with culture. Humans are a cultural species. That is, we depend critically on cultural learning in virtually all aspects of our lives. Whether we’re trying to manage our resources, woo a mate, protect our family, enhance our status, or form a political alliance – goals that are pursued by people in all cultures – we do so in culturally particular ways (Richerson Boyd, 2005). Of course, there are many psychological phenomena that appear similarly across cultures, while there are also many which reveal pronounced differences (for a review see Norenzayan Heine, 2005). The point is that all psychological phenomena, whether largely similar or