Social comparison theory maintains that people think about themselves compared with similar others.  Those in one culture, then, compare themselves with different others and standards than do those in another culture, thus potentially confounding cross-cultural comparisons.

The author examines the following limitations of research on individualism and collectivism: It treats nations as cultures and culture as a continuous quantitative variable; conflates all kinds of social relations and distinct types of autonomy; ignores contextual specificity in norms and values; measures culture as the personal preferences and behavior reports of individuals; rarely establishes the external validity of the measures used; assumes cultural invariance in the meaning of self-reports and anchoring and interpretation of scales; and reduces culture to explicit, abstract verbal knowledge.

This report presents an overview of what the universalists and cultural relativists argue are the main problems and difficulties of current disarmament, demobilization and reintegration (DDR) programmes for child soldiers.

In this article, the authors posit that dispositional learning orientation and self-set goal level are two critical motivational antecedents to cross-cultural adjustment.

The present article addresses human functioning in cultural embeddedness from the agentic perspective of social cognitive theory.

Militaries are quite adept at generating a limited amount of procedural and declarative knowledge about other cultures when they deem it valuable in achieving operational success. These efforts have demonstrated generally positive results by facilitating mission accomplishment and reducing suffering, injury, and death of both combatants and civilians.  Nevertheless, these efforts are generally narrow, superficial, short-term responses to pressing needs.

The Big Five Inventory (BFI) is a self-report measure designed to assess the high-order personality traits of Extraversion, Agreeableness, Conscientiousness, Neuroticism, and Openness. The resulting cross-cultural data set was used to address three main questions: Does the factor structure of the English BFI fully replicate across cultures?  How valid are the BFI trait profiles of individual nations? And how are personality traits distributed throughout the world?

The purpose of this task was to identify measures that are reliable and valid for the measurement of cultural competency.

Conventional wisdom and decades of psychological research have linked the provision of choice to increased levels of intrinsic motivation, greater persistence, better performance, and higher satisfaction.  This investigation examined the relevance and limitations of these findings for cultures in which individuals possess more interdependent models of the self.

D. Oyserman, H. M. Coon, and M. Kemmelmeier (2002) challenge the stereotype that European Americans are more individualistic and less collectivistic than persons from most other ethnic groups.