Culture and Group Processes

Human beings are adapted for group living. Groups have a wide range of adaptive functions for individuals, including both material benefits of mutual aid and collective action, and subjective psychological benefits of affiliation and social identity. Recent development of cultural psychology, however, has uncovered that culture plays crucial roles in group processes: patterns of group behavior and underlying psychological processes are shaped within specific culturalcontexts, and cultures emerge in group-based interactions. Culture and Group Processes, the inaugural volume of the Frontiers of Culture and Psychology series, is the first edited book on this rapidly emerging research topic. The eleven chapters included in this volume, all authored by distinguishedscientists in the field, reveal the role of culture in group perceptions, social identity, group dynamics, identity negotiation, teamwork, intergroup relations, and intergroup communication, as well as the joint effect of cultural and group processes in interpersonal trust and creativity.

Masaki Yuki, is a professor of the Department of Behavioral Science and the Center for Experimental Research in Social Sciences at Hokkaido University. His current research interest centers around how structure of social ecology affects a broad range of psychological and behavioral tendencies of people who reside there, including self-evaluation, happiness, interpersonal behaviors, and inter- and intra-group behaviors.Marilynn B. Brewer received her doctoral degree from Northwestern University in the U.S. in 1968 and over the course of her academic career has been a member of the faculty of Psychology at the University of California, Santa Barbara, the University of California, Los Angeles, and Ohio State University. She is Professor Emeritus from the Ohio State University and a Visiting Professor of Psychology at the University of New South Wales.