Responsibility and Justice: A View Across Cultures

Abstract

A psychological theory needs both universal and specific components in order to describe and predict human behaviour across cultures. It is argued that the purpose of conducting cross‐cultural studies is not merely to demonstrate cultural variations in human behaviour, but also to build better universal laws so that we can generalize from culture to culture. From this cross‐cultural point of view, the six papers of this special issue are discussed. The distinction between individualism and collectivism, as an example, is evaluated in relation to a specific case—Japanese culture—and a few observations are made, including the suggestion that variances associated with within‐culture sources are often larger than between‐culture variances. Finally, the implications of cross‐cultural studies in a rapidly changing world are discussed.