Cultural Psychology and Big Data

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Background

Existing works of cultural psychology deepen our understanding of the interdependence and interaction between cultural and psychological processes. Here, culture could be defined as a broad meaning that a group, in a time and place, comes to adopt or develop, and that facilitates smooth social coordination and clarifies group boundaries. It alerts us that the psychological processes of a population may not apply to other populations. Nonetheless, most of the cultural psychology findings come from experimental or survey studies, which are often criticized for their lack of ecological validity due to their inherent limitations, such as small samples and measurements’ bias and discrepancies between innate psyche and human behavior.

Big data presents an unprecedented opportunity to understand human cultural and behavioral patterns on a very large scale. Although it also has its inherent shortcomings, big data can help to validate previous findings in real-life settings, explore underlying mechanisms, and propose new perspectives on cultural psychology. For example, will human behaviors on social media platforms be consistent with the existing cultural psychology findings? What could explain or predict them? While combining cultural psychology with big data seems to be of vital importance, studies on culture and big data are scarce.

Therefore, this Research Topic in Frontiers aims to provide a forum for researchers interested in cultural psychology and big data to publish thought-provoking articles that enhance our understanding of human behavior from cultural perspectives. In particular, the goals of this Research Topic are:

• to expand existing methodologies of culture psychology by incorporating big data analytical approaches and tools,
• to deepen the theoretical understanding of cultural psychology by testing competing hypotheses or validating existing theories using real-life data,
• to explore interrelations between culture and psychological processes by revealing large-scale cultural phenomena and behavioral patterns, and
• to provide a critical review of the use of big data in cultural psychology research and identify challenges and opportunities in this emerging field.

Topics may include, but not limited to, cultural differences and similarities, cultural norms, cultural products, cultural evolution, cultural transmission, cultural adaptation, and cultural ecology. Both empirical and theoretical papers are welcome.

Keywords: culture, culture psychology, culture differences, big data, computational social psychology

Important note: All contributions to this Research Topic must be within the scope of the section and journal to which they are submitted, as defined in their mission statements. Frontiers reserves the right to guide an out-of-scope manuscript to a more suitable section or journal at any stage of peer review.

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