The culture cycle is a model from cultural psychology that pictures culture as a multilayered, dynamic system of four nested levels — individuals, interactions, institutions and ideas — each shaping and shaped by the others. It was developed by Hazel Rose Markus and Alana Conner in Clash! 8 Cultural Conflicts That Make Us Who We Are (2013; paperback Clash! How to Thrive in a Multicultural World, 2014), and grows out of Markus’s long collaboration with Shinobu Kitayama, whose 1991 paper on independent and interdependent selves first argued that cultures and selves make each other. Markus and Kitayama’s 2010 paper names the mechanism directly: a “cycle of mutual constitution”.
Individuals
Identities, self-concepts, thoughts, feelings, mindsets, biases and behaviours — the self at the centre of experience, attuned to its environments.
Interactions
Everyday situations that follow seldom-spoken norms about the right ways to behave at home, school, work, worship and play — and the cultural products people interact with: stories, songs, advertisements, social media, tools.
Institutions
Government, religious, legal, economic, educational and scientific institutions, which provide incentives that foster certain practices and behaviours while inhibiting others.
Ideas
Pervasive, often invisible, historically derived and collectively held ideologies, beliefs and values about what is good, right, moral, natural, powerful, real and necessary.
The cycle runs both ways. Read from the ideas end, the ideas, institutions and interactions of a person’s mix of cultures shape the self, so they think, feel and act in ways that reflect and perpetuate those cultures. Read from the individual end, people participate in and create — reinforce, resist or change — the cultures that others then adapt to. Hamedani and Markus put the practical corollary plainly: “one way to change minds and behaviors is to change cultures, just as one way to change cultures is to change minds and behaviors.”
That is why it matters to us. The cycle is an argument against single-level intervention. A new policy, a message, a training course or a personal epiphany each touches one level; change is most likely to hold when there is change at every level and the changes reinforce one another, and it stalls when macro-level reforms never reach the interactional and individual levels where people actually live them. The cycle also maps closely onto our Canvas: its individuals, interactions and institutions sit near our three Layers of Self, Community and Society, and its ideas level is the deep-narrative water the whole Canvas swims in. Where it differs is emphasis — the culture cycle keeps the self at the centre and treats ideas as a level in their own right, while our articulation foregrounds the processes by which people absorb and remake all four.
Key sources: Markus & Kitayama, ‘Culture and the Self: Implications for Cognition, Emotion, and Motivation’, Psychological Review (1991); Markus & Kitayama, ‘Cultures and Selves: A Cycle of Mutual Constitution’, Perspectives on Psychological Science 5(4), 420–430 (2010); Markus & Conner, Clash! (Hudson Street Press, 2013); Hamedani & Markus, ‘Understanding Culture Clashes and Catalyzing Change: A Culture Cycle Approach’, Frontiers in Psychology (2019), open access and the fullest statement of the four levels. Stanford SPARQ’s RaceWorks concept guide shows the cycle applied to race.
Also see Enculturation, Enculturated Cognition, Habitus, Mindsets, Ecological Systems Theory and Three Levels of Organisational Culture