Nurturing culture in psychology: Conversations with Gustav

Over the course of his long career, Gustav Jahoda was both a supporter and a trenchant critic of my efforts to elaborate a theory of culture and cognition. Toward the end of his life, he argued that cross-cultural psychologists' attempts (including my own) to provide a viable common definition had proven themselves futile. He urged that the quest for a true definition was misguided and should be replaced by more local efforts that explain the specific manner in which the term is being used for the specific research problem at hand. This essay offers an example of a decades-long research project that adopted his advice and applied it to the design of activities for the promotion of children's learning and development.