I have always been dreaming to meet and work with people like Stanley Milgram. The field of Social Psychology has much evolved since his remarkable research efforts. And much more is now known about how culture relates with the emotion of people and places, how the measurement of the latter is sensitive to the variation and level of aggregation relationship, and best of all - this young field has evolved into its own pathways and subtypes and is now seeking multidisciplinary cooperation. Apparently many social psychologists are part of Business Schools in many top universities, but much more of this is needed in the broader academic arena. WHY?

Culture Based Development (CBD) engages especially with this big WHY. CBD points that rational men do not exist in pure form and our bounded rationality is culturally bounded, where culture is the meta survival code with which our minds are coded to have an agreed understanding what is good and bad for our survival - thus breathing meaning in our feelings and emotions about the world that surrounds us. But also making us culturally bounded and not real (emotionally authentic) or rational in our responses to the world. In this context, there is much to learn about emotions and their variation in space, showcased with proper quantitative methods by this beautiful tribe of social psychology, which has also banded with geography most lately (a great entry into regional economics indeed). 

What stood out most for me at the amazingly exciting #RCDC 2025 meeting in Vancouver, Green College of University of British Columbia, was finding a brilliant example supporting the claim that culture is a meta survival strategy for avoidance of uncertainty in our existence - the work by Prof. Michele Gelfand, Stanford University. You can find below her figure on Tight vs Loose norms and their relation with well-being (see Gelfand et al., 2011). As well as the image of the CBD Cultural Entropy and Robert Putnam's image from the most recent book THE UPSWING (Putnam & Garrett, 2020). Have a good look at these three figures: do you notice something?

Why do these three figures look the same? That is the reason why CBD is the Economics of WHY. Tightness (norms and institutions) as well as social capital are derived from culture, that is why they have the same pattern! Culture and the emotions it codes in us regarding our survival is the big WHY behind all human processes - form the way we organise our societies through norms and institutions, to our economies ebbs and flows and ultimately to our conflicts and wars. The patterns in culture are then repeated in the patterns of norms and social capital and all our choices. Understanding CULTURE is what saves us from an infinite-turtle-religiosity in understanding why the socio-economic world evolves the way it does. And what is more - if we understand this fluctuation of culture - we can rewind indeed the brain, so that especially during conflict mediation it flips from win-loose to a win-win mindset, as recently discussed by Stefania Stancheva in her invited article in The Economist (Stancheva, 2025).

But this was not everything - at RCDC there were absolutely marvellous examples of using language as a proxy for culture and emotion (like the work of Tessa Charlesworth or Sandra Matz), for the sake of predicting ecological behaviour and even voting throughout the world (or at least USA and UK). But for more - you have to join next time the #RCDC in its biennial re-appearance in 2027!

References:

Gelfand, M. J., et al. (2011). Differences between tight and loose cultures: A 33-nation study. Science, 332(6033), 1100–1104. https://doi.org/10.1126/science.1197754 

Putnam, R. D., & Garrett, S. R. (2020). The upswing: How America came together a century ago and how we can do it again. Simon & Schuster.

Stancheva, S. (2025) To understand America today, study the zero-sum mindset, writes Stefanie Stantcheva The Economist, July 2025. https://www.economist.com/by-invitation/2025/07/07/to-understand-america-today-study-the-zero-sum-mindset-writes-stefanie-stantcheva 

Tubadji, A. et al. (2025) PASCAL Briefing Paper 30 - Aesthetic Education and Learning Cities, International PASCAL Observatory & CARDALL, https://cradall.org/content/pascal-briefing-paper-30-aesthetic-education-and-learning-cities  

Tubadji, A., (2025). Culture Based Development: Modelling Cultural Bias in Economic Choice. Cheltenham: Edward Elgar.  https://www.e-elgar.com/shop/gbp/culture-based-development-9781035341092.html 

Tubadji, A. (2025). Cultural Entropy, Innovation, and Growth. Politics & Policy, 53(4), e70050.  https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/polp.70050?casa_token=Focl8sTvP8cAAAAA%3AZYTeGAVHH-AD851HR60gk9iO1u9jQyrI-3OCe8emUyRDn2gj_J2mMOuscEm0-HQViaPB_TVRpuqBl90 

p.s. And yet again - across the pond - the same archetypal image of the mill - that mills warmth, bread, certainty. We have a saying in Bulgarian: they mill well together :-) Lets mill well ideas together, my friends!

Join the conversation: #CultureBasedDevelopment #CBDParadigm #CulturalEntropy #CulturalEconomics #AestheticEducation #CultureMatters #PolicyInnovation #HumanFlourishing