We consider the mind as a tool that we use to help us adapt to our environment, especially the social environment. As we use different tools for different purposes-pounding nails with a hammer and cutting trees with a saw-, we use different psychological tools to perform social adaptation tasks. From this perspective, it is natural to speculate that we have different sets of tools in our psychological tool box depending on the nature of the social adaptation tasks we face in different cultural settings. Sources of cultural differences in our psychological functioning can thus be found in the differences in social adaptation tasks generated and maintained in each culture. For example, in achieving the most fundamental social adaptation task-inferring an other's intentions and predicting an other's behavior-, whether we attend to the target person's inner attributes or the contextual information surrounding the target person, depends on the extent to which the individual's behaviors are constrained by the surrounding social environment. Cultural psychologists have found that those who internalized individualistic cultures were likely to attend to the target person and attribute the causes of the target person's behavior to the person's inner attributes. In contrast, those who have internalized a collective culture are likely to attend to the context that surround the target person and attribute the causes of the target person's behavior to the surrounding environment. We interpret these findings to reflect the degree to which individuals in each culture are constrained by their social environments. CEFOM/21 focuses on two fundamental tasks in social adaptations: (1) the prediction of another person's behavior, and (2) the establishment of cooperative relationships with others. We plan to conduct a series of experiments to identify the socio-institutional conditions that lead to the adoptionof a combination of attention allocation and decision making strategies, and then illustrate how a group of people come to adopt these strategies. Preliminary studies conducted in 2002 have already shown very interesting results with respect to this issue. These findings will be available shortly.

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The generation of norms | Mind and culture mediated by social institutions