IUPsyS State‐of‐the‐Art Keynote Addresses

Psychological acculturation – i.e., changes in psychological and behavioural patterns due to sustained contact with another culture – is both timely and relevant: about 30 pct. of European and US citizens are ethnic minorities and debates on ‘integration’ are omnipresent. Yet, our scientific understanding of psychological acculturation is still poor, partly because research narrowly focuses on ethnic minorities' cultural attitudes and identities that reflect their explicit (i.e., aware, self-ascribed) cultural affiliations. Pushing boundaries, I aim to prove the existence of acculturation in ‘core’ psychological processes that differ systematically across cultures and thus signal cultural affiliations implicitly, such as emotion, self-construal, cognition, and motivation. In this keynote, I outline this novel cultural psychology approach to acculturation and discuss its implications for the malleability of the psyche. Specifically, I will present evidence from over twenty studies with immigrant minorities and their majority peers in Belgium, the US and the UK (N >6000) showing how (i) emotions and self-construal may acculturate and thus change upon (new) cultural engagements; (ii) ‘cultural fit’ in emotions and self are not associated with explicit attitudes towards that culture; (iii) higher cultural fit is linked to positive outcomes; and (iv) cultural changes may be driven by specific micro-processes, such as establishing common ground, in meaningful intercultural interactions. Hence, I invite you to re-think psychological acculturation: no longer as minorities' willingness vis-à-vis cultures, but as a multi-faceted process of change that emerges from meaningful interactions, affecting all of us engaging in diverse societies. Furthermore, I will illustrate how the ‘cultural fit’ method helps move beyond comparing group-means toward modelling within-group variation in adherence to dynamic group norms. I will conclude by discussing the findings' potential implications for psychology at large as they not only profoundly question a universal approach, but also offer a dynamic culturally constructed alternative to understanding the psyche. AI-based systems are increasingly supporting decisions that affect the fate of human beings. Particularly in high-risk contexts such as at court, for mental health diagnoses, or in personnel selection, the use of AI-based systems to inform and partially automate decision-making is controversial among stakeholders. This is particularly true of the issue of fairness in AI-based decisions. Providers of AI-based systems emphasise the potential of their tools to improve human decisions by making them less susceptible to common human biases. However, they also emphasise that the final decision should always be in the hands of human decision-makers. Policymakers point to the potential dangers of AI-based decisions in high-risk contexts, such as AI-based systems reproducing or even exacerbating existing unfairness. To mitigate such risks, emerging legislation around the world, such as the European AI Act, proposes that human decision-makers should oversee AI-based systems and detect possible unfairness. The risks associated with AI-based decisions are ultimately relevant to the people affected by AI-based decisions – patients, employees, job applicants. They are often sceptical about the use of AI-based systems. However, this scepticism can be mitigated by having a human decision-maker oversee AI-based systems in high-risk contexts. Overall, it seems that providers, policymakers, and people affected by AI-based decisions have high hopes for the “human touch” in AI-based decision-making. In this keynote, I will discuss the perspectives of providers, policymakers, and people affected by AI-based decisions on fairness and human oversight of AI-based systems. I will then present evidence on decision makers' perspectives on the fairness of AI-based systems, evidence on the (in)effectiveness of human oversight of AI-based systems, and ways forward where psychological science can play a major role. All human behaviour is shaped during the course of development by ecological, cultural and intercultural experiences. The subsequent expression of individual behaviour is promoted or constrained by these same factors. My own programme of cross-cultural research in many societies has demonstrated that these variations in behaviour are rooted in species-wide shared basic psychological processes, allowing for the emergence of a number of universal psychological principles. This programme has involved fieldwork with Indigenous Peoples in many continents, community studies with immigrant and ethnocultural communities in many societies, and national surveys of attitudes and social and cognitive behaviours. Much of this work has been carried out within an “Ecocultural Framework” that seeks to link ecological, cultural and intercultural experiences to the development and display of individual behaviour. One guiding belief when undertaking this work has been the view that one cannot be international without first being national. That is, knowing oneself, one's values and one's assumptions is a prerequisite to learning about those of people in other cultures. In my case, a Canadian perspective on human diversity and its understanding and management has pervaded this programme of research. I believe that this combination of these Canadian and international ways of working has been the hallmark of my work, and underlies this award, for which I am very thankful. A hallmark of human cognition is our ability to think about observable experience in ways that are non-obvious – from scientific concepts (such as genes or quarks) to everyday understandings (such as germs or souls). My talk will discuss the origins of this capacity. Contrary to what is often assumed, young children are not wholly concrete thinkers. Instead, from an early age, children have an impressive capacity to reason about hidden, invisible, and abstract entities. I will discuss the implications of these findings for how children learn, and how tendencies that underlie remarkable human achievements can also be sources of distortion and bias. Eurocentric ideas of modernity, of knowledge, of humanity and how Indigenous Peoples still manage to exist within them is a remarkable testimony to the refusal and resistance of Indigenous peoples to give up their identities, languages, cultures and ways of knowing and being. My research over 40 years has been three-fold; firstly, to decolonise academic disciplinary knowledge systems and their self-congratulatory myths and find spaces for Indigenous Peoples to become, themselves, to reclaim their languages, knowledges and cultures, secondly, to rebuild Indigenous communities as knowledge seekers, creators and researchers able to draw on the past and imagine new futures, and thirdly, to gain insight into and healing from the way intergenerational colonial trauma has impacted on our communities. My talk will cover aspects of these three broad areas of my work.

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