Culturally Wise Interventions and Their Influence on Meaning Making and Behavior Across Diverse Cultural Contexts

People are enculturated actors, shaped by their sociocultural and socioecological contexts. A vast empirical literature has documented that, in the Global North contexts that afford greater choice and material abundance, people tend to see themselves as more independent than interdependent actors and to be more motivated by personal interests and autonomy over social norms and obligations. However, the literature on self, motivation, and behavior suffers from glaring gaps in low resource Global South contexts. An agenda on ‘culturally wise’ interventions seeks to fill this gap by experimentally comparing different culturally grounded behavioral science approaches across diverse contexts. Building on theoretical principles of wise interventions (Walton & Wilson, 2018) and culture match (e.g., Markus, 2016; Stephens et al., 2012), culturally wise interventions are attuned to how culturally specific models of self, motivation, and relationality can exert powerful effects on meaning making and behavior. In this talk, I will define “culturally wise interventions” and their theoretical foundations. I then show experimental tests of culturally wise interventions in the lab in Kenya (N=565) and the field in Niger (N=4,712, N=2,628) and illustrate how these interventions can be leveraged to address complex social issues, including mitigating poverty and inequality. Through experimental evaluations of such intervention approaches in understudied contexts, this research agenda seeks to advance a more comprehensive account of human behavior as well as strategies for promoting psychological, social, and economic well-being around the globe.