This is Part 4 of The Impact of Environment—a series exploring how behavior and belief are shaped by context.
Part 1 reframed willpower as a response to trust and stability.
Part 2 examined how choice is conditioned by access.
Part 3 explored how money shapes not just comfort, but emotional and structural freedom.
This essay turns to culture—the most foundational and least visible environment of all.
I didn’t learn about culture from books or classrooms. I learned it by living in two of them at once.
I was born in the United States to immigrant parents, and I grew up speaking two languages. But “bilingual” doesn’t quite capture it. I wasn’t just switching words—I was translating between worlds. My family speaks a non-Mandarin dialect of Chinese, so even my Mandarin carries layers. But more than that, I was translating intention, expectation, behavior, and belief. At school, it was good to speak up and be independent. At home, to listen and contribute.
This wasn’t confusing. It was clarifying. It taught me that behavior doesn’t exist in a vacuum—its meaning changes depending on the cultural context that surrounds it. These weren’t contradictions. They were cultural cues.
That experience did more than help me move between two environments. It helped me see that there were environments. Because you don’t see culture by staying inside it. You see it by comparison.
Later, in clinical work, the influence of culture was no longer theoretical—it was present and integrated into everything. It shaped what questions got asked, how symptoms were interpreted, and which explanations were considered legitimate. It didn’t just inform the conversation. It framed it—and that framing was often so familiar it went unnoticed.
This essay isn’t organized around a single case or argument. It’s structured as a mosaic—each section showing a different way that cultural framing shapes the questions, categories, and outcomes of psychology. Together, they build toward a single claim: culture isn’t an extra variable in the room. It is the room. What we often call “human nature” is really just local culture in disguise. This may be the most foundational installment in The Impact of Environment series, because culture is the one environment we are least likely to recognize as environment at all, and yet it defines the default assumptions upon which all of our other beliefs are built.
Most of Us Are Not WEIRD
Most psychology research is based on samples from Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, and Democratic populations. These cultures represent only about 10 percent of the people of the world, making them WEIRD in more ways than one. And yet, these cultural outliers are often treated as the baseline. Findings based on 200 undergraduates at an American university are frequently used to draw conclusions about universal human nature. But should they be? Should these narrow samples define what’s considered normal or abnormal, healthy or unhealthy—across all societies?
This concern was central to a landmark paper by Joseph Henrich, Steven Heine, and Ara Norenzayan titled The Weirdest People in the World? (2010). The authors demonstrated that WEIRD populations often occupy the extreme end of the global distribution on many psychological variables—things like spatial reasoning, moral judgment, and notions of fairness—yet their data are treated as if they speak for all humans. The study should be a wake-up call to researchers and clinicians alike: if your understanding of the human mind is built mostly from WEIRD samples, you’re likely studying a cultural outlier while thinking you’re studying the species.
There is such a thing as WEIRD culture—it’s just not representative. But when WEIRD norms are treated as universal truths, they don’t just mislead. They cause harm.
And those harms show up everywhere: in how we define emotions, how we measure personality, how we assign moral weight to individual versus collective action, and even how we name mental illness. The sections that follow aren’t digressions from this bias—they are its consequences.
Same Feelings, Felt Differently
What we feel—and how we show it—is never just biology. It’s culture.
Paul Ekman’s research on universal emotions proposed that all humans recognize the same six facial expressions: happiness, sadness, anger, fear, disgust, and surprise. His studies, including those conducted in remote populations like the Fore in Papua New Guinea, appeared to confirm that facial recognition of emotion is biologically hardwired.
But Lisa Feldman Barrett challenged this claim. She argued that emotions are not pre-programmed reactions, but constructed experiences. What we feel is shaped by language, culture, and learned expectation. Some cultures lack direct translations for emotions Westerners assume are universal. Others prioritize emotional states that don’t exist in English at all.
Both researchers found evidence to support their views—Ekman’s facial expressions, Barrett’s emotional concepts. Both are partly right. But their disagreement reveals something deeper: even the most “basic” emotions are not culturally neutral. They are interpreted, expressed, and even felt differently depending on the environment.
This isn’t just theory. It shows up in the therapy room—where emotional expression is pathologized or normalized based on cultural assumptions. It shows up in the hiring office—where confidence is read as competence only if it looks a certain way. And it shows up at the traffic stop—where perceived threat is filtered through race, class, and emotion. Cultural frames don’t stay in research papers. They shape outcomes—in mental health, in institutions, in everyday judgment.
Even the frameworks we use to teach empathy aren’t immune. Marshall Rosenberg’s Nonviolent Communication, for example, has had a deep influence on both my personal life and professional practice. His approach to naming feelings and needs can be transformative. But I disagree with his claim that anger is “always” a secondary emotion—one that covers over fear, grief, or vulnerability.
That assumption may reflect more than just psychology. Race is a cultural frame too, and Rosenberg’s is his own: a white one. In that white cultural frame, anger is seen as episodic, avoidable, and resolvable through insight. But if you’re Black in America, anger isn’t secondary. It’s not masking anything. It’s the primary, appropriate, and enduring response to chronic injustice.
Always being angry in an unjust system is no more pathological than always being anxious in a chronically unsafe one. But here’s the difference: white frameworks have made room for chronic anxiety. They’ve created diagnoses, support groups, and treatment models. Chronic anger? That still gets framed as dysfunction. As immaturity. As threat.
This is what happens when WEIRD emotional norms are treated as global defaults. They don’t just define what emotion is. They decide whose emotions are valid—and whose must be explained away.
The Cult(ure) of Personality
What do personality tests really measure? That depends on what culture you’re standing in.
The Myers-Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI) is one of the most widely used psychological assessments in non-clinical circumstances—but it’s not reliable. A meta-analysis by Pittenger (2005) found that as many as half of people got different results within five weeks. Its categories show poor stability over time, and they don’t predict behavior well. But beyond the statistics, the deeper issue is what MBTI assumes about the self: that identity is internal, fixed, and discoverable through introspection.
That’s not a universal truth. That’s a Western one.
A cross-cultural study by McCrae et al. (2005) revealed wide global variation in personality profiles, suggesting that MBTI doesn’t capture intrinsic traits—it reveals cultural norms. In the U.S., personality tests are often used in professional development or team-building. In South Korea, they’re used to make friends or find dates. In neither case is the tool scientifically sound. But in both cases, it’s socially useful. That’s revealing: MBTI isn’t a measure—it’s a mirror, reflecting the values of the people using it.
Even the Big Five (OCEAN) personality traits—often treated as the gold standard—carries bias. Traits like extraversion and assertiveness are prized in American settings, but might be read as rude or immature in collectivist cultures. Cheung et al. (2001) developed the Chinese Personality Assessment Inventory (CPAI) precisely because so many culturally salient traits were missing from Western models.
So yes, personality exists. But the traits we measure, the scales we use, the value judgments we attach—they’re all shaped by culture. When we ignore that, we don’t just risk bad science. We risk mislabeling people as broken or deviant for not matching someone else’s template. The tests may be standardized. But the assumptions behind them never are.
The Cost of a Worldview
One of the clearest examples of how cultural values shape behavior—and outcomes—comes from the COVID-19 pandemic. In the United States, the dominant response was filtered through a lens of individual rights and personal liberty. Decisions about masking, quarantining, and vaccination were often framed as personal choices. States competed for resources. Guidelines varied widely. Public health became politicized. Medical expertise was cast into doubt. This is not surprising coming from the most individualistic culture in the world.
Contrast that with Taiwan or South Korea, where collectivist cultural norms shaped a very different trajectory. Masking was nearly universal—not because of government mandates alone, but because the public viewed it as a social responsibility. Contact tracing and quarantine compliance were high. Trust in public institutions remained largely intact. And the results were staggering. In the first two years of the pandemic, the U.S. had more than 1 million COVID-related deaths. South Korea had under 6,000. Taiwan had fewer than 900 (even when adjusted for population, those differences remain massive—South Korea and Taiwan saw death rates more than ten times lower than the U.S.).
That’s not just policy. That’s culture shaping life-or-death outcomes—reminding us that values aren’t abstract. They operationalize into behavior, and behavior into survival.
Collectivist cultures tend to emphasize interdependence, relational identity, and duty to the group. Individualist cultures, like the U.S., often emphasize autonomy, self-expression, and personal freedom. These values shape moral reasoning, family structure, and even sense of identity. None of these values are neutral. And some—like American hyper-individualism—aren’t just different; they’re dangerous. The celebration of personal freedom above collective care doesn’t just shape behavior. It can cost lives.
Culture-Bound Syndromes and Power
In psychiatry, there’s a category known—perhaps problematically—as “culture-bound syndromes.” These are listed in the DSM, or Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, which serves as the authoritative guidebook for psychiatric diagnosis in the United States and influences diagnostic frameworks globally. These are conditions that appear tied to specific cultural contexts: ataques de nervios in Latin America, susto in Mexico, koro in Southeast Asia. Their presence in the DSM reflects a slow and somewhat reluctant recognition that not all distress fits neatly into Western diagnostic boxes. These syndromes weren’t included because psychiatry suddenly became more inclusive—they were included because enough people kept showing up with symptoms that didn’t fit the existing categories. The system had to make room, and even then, they weren’t given equal standing. Most remain in the DSM’s appendix—a token acknowledgment, more like an invitation to an event without a real seat at the table.
This isn’t just about what gets included or excluded from the DSM—it’s about who gets to define reality in the first place. That gatekeeping plays out not just in classification, but in what forms of suffering are even acknowledged inside the system’s logic. And that question becomes even more urgent when we examine traditions that name and treat suffering in ways Western psychiatry barely recognizes.
Traditional Chinese Medicine (TCM) and practices like Qigong have long acknowledged a phenomenon called zouhuorumo (走火入魔), sometimes translated as “qigong deviation,” “spirit possession,” or “obsessing mind.” It refers to psychological or somatic disturbances during intense or improper self-cultivation. Symptoms can include disordered thinking, emotional disruption, and physiological discomfort—what Western psychiatry might interpret as mania or psychosis.
In the Qigong context, zouhuorumo is not seen as pathology, but as energetic disturbance—something to realign, not suppress. Whether someone experiencing this is hospitalized or mentored depends on the interpretive framework. The distinction isn’t semantic. It’s structural.
Another revealing case is eating disorders. Unlike other syndromes that remain in the appendix, eating disorders are given full diagnostic status in the main text of the DSM—even though their most recognizable forms have historically been highly culture-bound, concentrated in Western, industrialized societies. This discrepancy isn’t about scientific clarity—it’s about which cultural expressions of suffering get treated as universal, and which are marked as exceptions. They rose in parallel with Western media and ideals. Globally and historically, food has been more than fuel—it’s been ritual, memory, tradition, identity. In most of the world, food is integrated into daily life as a source of meaning, pleasure, and social cohesion. But in American culture, food is often reduced to biochemistry and willpower. American food culture is, in many ways, pathologically reductionistic—stripping meals of history, joy, and connection, and replacing them with calorie counts and control. Tasty foods are treated with suspicion. Virtue is assigned to blandness. Meals are tracked in macros and parsed like lab data. This isn’t a minor detail—it’s the cultural soil in which disordered eating can grow.
So when anorexia—a form once nearly invisible outside the West—appears in cultures absorbing these norms, it isn’t coincidence. It’s exportation. And when we label some syndromes as “culture-bound,” we imply others are not—that some suffering is local, while others are universal. But every diagnosis is culturally shaped. The only difference is which culture gets to write the manual—and which ones are relegated to the appendix as afterthoughts.
Our Most Personal Environment
I began this piece by sharing what it meant to grow up bilingual and bicultural—how translating between languages also meant translating between worlds. That early experience gave me a front-row seat to something I would later recognize in my clinical work: that what we call “mental health” is never separate from environment—and no environment is more quietly powerful, or more easily overlooked, than culture.
Culture tells us what emotions to express and which to suppress. It decides whether personality traits are signs of strength or immaturity. It dictates how we define moral behavior, who we believe deserves help, and even what suffering counts as “real.”
From the WEIRD biases baked into research, to the way Black anger is misread, to the popularity of MBTI in Korea, to the drastically different COVID outcomes between the U.S. and Taiwan, to culture-bound syndromes that expose the cracks in our diagnostic language—every example in this mosaic points to the same truth:
Culture isn’t peripheral. It is foundational. It shapes our defaults before we even know we have them.
This is the fourth essay in The Impact of Environment series, and it may be the most essential. Because before institutions, before policies, before relationships—we inherit culture. Not through choice, but osmosis. It’s the first environment we breathe in.
It teaches us how to interpret all the others.
So this isn’t just a story about cultural difference. It’s a correction. Culture shapes the entire frame. And when we fail to name it, we risk mistaking one environment’s assumptions for human nature itself.
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