2026 Sage-CASBS Award Lecture featuring Hazel Rose Markus

The Hidden Power of Cultural Defaults

Why do the same social policies and behavioral interventions succeed in some places but fail in others? This talk will argue that one answer lies in cultural defaults. Cultural defaults are the taken-for-granted ways of thinking, feeling, and acting that people understand as normal, rational, and moral in specific sociocultural contexts. They provide answers to fundamental existential questions such as “Who am I?”, “Who are we?”, and “What should I or we be doing?” Reflecting history, philosophy, and religion, these defaults are built into institutions, social networks, norms, and everyday interactions, yet they often remain invisible to the people who live by them.
In middle-class U.S. contexts, for example, cultural defaults tend to promote individualism and independent agency, including optimism and uniqueness, single causes, high arousal, influence and control, personal choice and self-regulation, and promotion. In contrast, in many other sociocultural contexts, within the U.S. and globally, common behavioral defaults can be strikingly different. In East Asian contexts, for example, cultural defaults tend to promote collectivism and interdependent agency, including realism and similarity, multiple causes, low arousal, adjusting and waiting, social choice and social regulation, and prevention. Research examples from Covid, education, climate change, economic development, and emerging technologies show that behavioral interventions that leverage, rather than ignore or counter, cultural defaults are far more likely to motivate intention and action. Many interventions fail to fulfill their promise not because they are poorly designed, but because they do not align with the cultural defaults that shape how people understand problems and solutions.

View an extended summary of the talk as well as Hazel Rose Markus' bio.

The event will conclude with the 2026 Sage-CASBS Award presentation to Hazel Rose Markus.
Free to the public with registration | Outdoor reception 5:00pm | Event starts 5:30pm sharp | There will be complimentary valet parking at this in-person event

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Host or Publisher Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences