Related Experiment Video
Updated: Jun 19, 2026

Perspectives on Neuroscience
Published on: July 31, 2007
Cultural neuroscience: a once and future discipline
1Department of Psychology, Northwestern University, Evanston, IL, USA. jchiao@northwestern.edu
Abstract:
The study of culture and biology has long stood stratified within the social and natural sciences, a gap that physicist C.P. Snow (1959) famously called "the two cultures." Cultural neuroscience is an emerging, interdisciplinary field that examines the bidirectional influence of culture and genes to brain and behavior across multiple timescales. Integrating theory and methods from cultural psychology, brain sciences, and population genetics, cultural neuroscience is the study of how cultural values, practices and beliefs shape brain function and how the human brain gives rise to cultural capacities and their transmission across macro- (e.g., phylogeny, lifespan) and micro timescales (e.g., situation). The current article presents the aims and methods of cultural neuroscience, highlights recent empirical findings in the field, and discusses the potential implications of this field for bridging the social and natural sciences as well as informing interethnic ideology and population health concerns, more broadly construed.
Related Concept Videos
Cognitivism
Previously dominated by behaviorism, which prioritized observable behaviors and largely ignored mental processes, psychology transformed in the 1950s. Cognitive psychologists argue that understanding how we think and process information is...
Neuroplasticity
Psychology as a Science
The scientific method in psychology involves six critical steps: making observations, formulating hypotheses, conducting tests, analyzing...
Neurons as Communicators of the Brain
Cell Body
The cell body, also known...
Scientific Nature of Social Psychology
Organization of the Brain
Hindbrain
The hindbrain, located at the base of the brain, plays a vital role in regulating automatic processes that sustain life. It includes the medulla oblongata, which is essential for...

