The Department of Comparative Cultural Psychology combines approaches from developmental, cross-cultural, and comparative psychology, to study uniquely human cultural diversity and the universal cognitive mechanisms that enable and constrain it.

  • We study the interaction between culture and mind by comparing people from different social and physical environments around the world.

  • Second, we investigate the developmental processes that lead to similarities and differences in human behavior by studying children’s early development cross-culturally.

  • Third, we study the uniquely human aspects of these developmental processes by comparing the development of human infants with the early development in other, non-human great apes species.

Our category on OpenEvo is a place for our researchers and scientific staff to share their knowledge and skills with students and future or current researchers. It is also possible to organize collaborative projects in this space. 



Modules [access may be restricted for some modules]

Welcome to the introductory module for comparative cultural psychology! This module is collaboratively developed and team taught by researchers within the Department of Comparative Cultural Psychology at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology.   Over the course of this semester, you will learn about this interdisciplinary field of study which combines approaches from developmental, cross-cultural and comparative psychology, to study uniquely human cultural diversity and the universal cognitive mechanisms that enable and constrain it. We study the interaction between culture and mind by comparing people from different social and physical environments around the world. Second, we investigate the developmental processes that lead to similarities …