Patricia Greenfield

University of California, Los Angeles | UCLA · Department of Psychology

How does a life-threatening pandemic affect a culture? The Theory of Social Change, Cultural Evolution, and Human Development predicts that danger, as indicated by rising death rates and narrowing social worlds, shifts human psychology and behavior toward that found in small-scale, collectivistic, and rural subsistence ecologies. In particular, mor...

How does a life-threatening pandemic affect a culture? The Theory of Social Change, Cultural Evolution, and Human Development predicts that danger, as indicated by rising death rates and narrowing social worlds, shifts human psychology and behavior toward that found in small-scale, collectivistic, and rural subsistence ecologies. In particular, mor...

Analyzing three sets of video data collected in one Maya community, we examined apprenticeship and learning of backstrap loom weaving over three generations spanning the years 1970 to 2012. Like many cultural groups, the Maya of Chiapas are experiencing rapid sociodemographic shifts. Three generations of girls (N = 134) were observed at their looms...

This research focuses on peer-peer cultural value mismatch – perceived mismatch between collectivistic ideologies and practices of one student and individualistic ideologies and practices of another – among students living in the dormitories during the transition to college. Two survey studies examined the antecedents and correlates of two types of...

Quantitative analysis in this special issue (Greenfield, Brown, & Du, 2021) showed that the COVID-19 pandemic has led most parents to report greater expectations for their children to help with family subsistence. This familistic development exemplifies the shifts in behavior and values predicted by Greenfield's Theory of Social Change, Cultural Ev...

During the past four decades, China has gone through rapid urbanization and modernization. As people adapt to dramatic sociodemographic shifts from rural communities to urban centers and as economic level rises, individualistic cultural values in China have increased. Meanwhile, parent and child behavior in early childhood has also evolved accordin...

Neuroscience has been a growing field since the 1940s and, with the advent of new tools for investigating the brain, has skyrocketed in scientific interest. However, most of what is known about human brain development may be applicable only to a restricted set of populations. This situation is problematic because we know cultural features (e.g., va...

This handbook is currently in development, with individual articles publishing online in advance of print publication. At this time, we cannot add information about unpublished articles in this handbook, however the table of contents will continue to grow as additional articles pass through the review process and are added to the site. Please note...

Qualitative work has documented home-school cultural value mismatch—a mismatch between collectivistic family obligations and individualistic academic obligations—experienced by Latinx first-generation college students during their first year of study at a 4-year university. This study extends prior research by examining home-school cultural value m...

What are the psychological effects of the coronavirus pandemic? Greenfield's Theory of Social Change, Cultural Evolution, and Human Development predicts that when survival concerns augment, and one's social world narrows toward the family household. life shifts towards activities, values, relationships, and parenting expectations typical of small-s...

Greenfield's theory of social change and human development is based on the distinction between Gemeinschaft (low-income agricultural communities with low levels of formal education and technology) and Gesellschaft (wealthier commerce-based societies with high levels of formal education and technology). Cooperation is more adaptive in a Gemeischaft...

The goal of this project was to reduce parent-child conflict and promote intergenerational harmony among Central American families who had experienced long-term parent-child separations in the immigration process. Through combining intensive case study of six families with experimental design, we show how a series of four workshops for immigrant pa...

We present a qualitative interdisciplinary study of seven Ethiopian potters who immigrated to Israel as adults. Data sources include cultural products (their clay sculptures), interviews, and archival photos at the time of immigration. Together these data sources show how these women carried African values (procreation, family closeness, sharing, a...

What Did Language Grow From? Ape Hands, Mouths, or Both? Kristen Gillespie-Lynch , Sue Savage-Rumbaugh , Heidi Lyn , & Patricia M. Greenfield Did language grow from gestures? That is, was using the hand, arm, or head to communicate a step towards the development of language?. We studied gestures and symbols used by a chimpanzee, a bonobo, and a...

The current study tests the application of Greenfield’s theory of social change and human development to an Arab Bedouin community transitioning from a nomadic to a sedentary way of life. We predicted that sociodemographic change across three generations away from a rural subsistence way of life (a Gemeinschaft ecology) toward an urban, educated, a...

Evidence increasingly suggests that neural structures that respond to primary and secondary rewards are also implicated in the processing of social rewards. The "Like" - a popular feature on social media - shares features with both monetary and social rewards as a means of feedback that shapes reinforcement learning. Despite the ubiquity of the Lik...

Around the world, people migrate from poorer countries with less educational opportunity to richer ones with greater educational opportunity. In this journey, they bring their family obligation values into societies that value individual achievement. This process can create home–school cultural value conflict—conflict between family and academic ob...

In a time of massive social change around the world, a major goal of the present article is to provide interdisciplinary methods for studying social change, culture, and human development and an interdisciplinary theory that can serve as a framework for this research (Greenfield, 2009, 2016). The purpose is to provide developmental researchers with...

China, having gone through rapid economic reform, supported by urbanization, educational expansion, and family size reduction over past decades, is an important part of a worldwide sociodemographic trend that can be summarized as a shift from community/Gemeinschaft to society/Gesellschaft. Correlated with this sociodemographic trend, our qualitativ...

Jerome Seymour Bruner died on 5 June 2016 at the age of 100. Beginning as a standard experimental psychologist working with laboratory animals, he next ventured into the field of human social psychology, working in intelligence and public opinion polling during World War II. He then gained fame for his ‘New Look’ studies of perception. With A Study...

By continuing to focus on the necessity for replication, psychological science misses an important and all-pervasive psychological phenomenon: the impact of social and cultural change on behavior. Or put otherwise, our discipline misinterprets failure to replicate behavioral results if we do not consider that social and cultural change can produce...

Instagram is a popular photo-sharing application. Viewers interact with those who post photographs through registering “likes” and making comments. This experiment investigated what kinds of photos teenagers “like.” Two teenagers created and selected photo stimuli of different types and posted them to their existing Instagram accounts. In this way,...

Mobile social media often feature the ability to "Like" content posted by others. This study examined the effect of Likes on youths' neural and behavioral responses to photographs. High school and college students (N = 61, ages 13-21) viewed theirs and others' Instagram photographs while undergoing functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (fMRI). Part...

In this article, we explore theory-driven hypotheses linking ecological change with changing patterns of socialization. These studies are part of a larger project begun by Garcia in 2004; it aims to assess the effects of social change on Millard Madsen’s experimental findings concerning social behavior and socialization strategies in different regi...

The Great Recession's influence on American undergraduate students' values was examined, testing Greenfield's and Kasser's theories concerning value development during economic downturns. Study 1 utilised aggregate-level data to investigate (a) population-level value changes between the pre-recession (2004-2006: n = 824,603) and recession freshman...

Psychologist who shaped ideas about perception, cognition and education.

Studying how social network site (SNS) users from different countries present themselves is crucial for inquiring into the dynamics of culture and youth. This study of 100 adolescents age 14-18 (Mage= 15.90, SD = .1.48) was designed to determine whether cultural differences between adolescents in the U.S. and Turkey would manifest themselves in the...

We investigated a unique way in which adolescent peer influence occurs on social media. We developed a novel functional MRI (fMRI) paradigm to simulate Instagram, a popular social photo-sharing tool, and measured adolescents’ behavioral and neural responses to likes, a quantifiable form of social endorsement and potential source of peer influence....

The gross generalization that East is collectivistic and West is individualistic overlooks the within-group variability among East Asians in the current era of social change and globalization. The aim of this study was to disentangle the role of sociodemographic factors, ethnic heritage culture, and immigration in shaping the individualistic–collec...

Electronic screens on laptop and tablet computers are being used for reading text, often while multitasking. Two experimental studies with college students explored the effect of medium and opportunities to multitask on reading Study 1 and report writing Study 2. In Study 1, participants N = 120 read an easy and difficult passage on paper, a laptop...

Social change has accelerated globally. Greenfield's interdisciplinary and multilevel theory of social change and human development provides a unified framework for exploring implications of these changes for cultural values, learning environments/socialization processes, and human development/behavior. Data from societies where social change has o...

We explored whether Latino first-generation college students would experience cross-cultural value conflicts as a result of the mismatch between more collectivistic values learned at home and more individualistic practices of their peers in a multiethnic college setting. Culturally structured conflict resolution styles were also explored. Participa...

Using Greenfield's theory of sociocultural change and human development as a point of departure, we carried out two experimental studies exploring the implications of decades of globalised social change in Mexico for children's development of cooperation and competition. In rural San Vicente, Baja California, the baseline was 1970 and the historica...

Chinese people have held collectivistic values such as obligation, giving to other people, obedience and sacrifice of personal interests for thousands of years. In recent decades, China has undergone rapid economic development and urbanisation. This study investigates changing cultural values in China from 1970 to 2008 and the relationship of chang...

We studied the implications of social change for cognitive development in a Maya community in Chiapas, Mexico, over 43 years. The same procedures were used to collect data in 1969-1970, 1991, and 2012-once in each generation. The goal was to understand the implications of weaving, schooling and participation in a commercial economy for the developm...

This study tested and extended Greenfield’s theory of social change and human development to adolescent development in Arab communities in Israel undergoing rapid social change. The theory views sociodemographic changes—such as contact with an ethnically diverse urban setting and spread of technology—as driving changes in cultural values. In one re...

U.S. colleges place a high value on the fulfillment of academic obligations by their students. The academic achievement of each individual student is the institutional priority; this is an individualistic frame of reference. However, many Latino first-generation college students have been raised to prioritize family obligations; their home socializ...

Past research found that messages in popular television promote fame as a top value, while social media allow anyone to reach broad audiences (Uhls & Greenfield, 2011; Uhls & Greenfield, 2012). During a sensitive developmental phase, preteens are the largest users of media, consuming over seven-and-a-half hours a day, seven days a week, outside of...

What are the implications of similarities and differences in the gestural and symbolic development of apes and humans?This focused review uses as a starting point our recent study that provided evidence that gesture supported the symbolic development of a chimpanzee, a bonobo, and a human child reared in language-enriched environments at comparable...

A field experiment examined whether increasing opportunities for face-to-face interaction while eliminating the use of screen-based media and communication tools improved nonverbal emotion–cue recognition in preteens. Fifty-one preteens spent five days at an overnight nature camp where television, computers and mobile phones were not allowed; this...

We examined infant sleeping arrangements and cultural values of Japanese mothers in 2008 and 2009. Based on Greenfield's theory of social change and human development, we predicted that social change in Japan over the last decades (higher economic and education level, urbanization, complex technology, more women in the work force) would lead to a d...

Greenfield's () theory linking sociodemographic change to dynamic cultural values for family interdependence versus individual independence is applied to sexual and gender role socialization and development. The theory explains how cultural pathways for sexual and gender-role development transform in concert with sociodemographic changes: urbanizat...

This mixed-method study assessed the nature of language brokering and the relationship between language brokering and prosocial capacities in a sample of 139 college students from ethnically diverse immigrant families. The prosocial capacities of interest were empathic concern and two forms of perspective-taking: general perspective-taking (underst...

Based on Greenfield’s theory of social change and human development, we predicted that adolescents’ values, behaviors, and self-assessments would become more collectivistic and less individualistic during the Great Recession (2008–2010) compared to the prerecession period (2004-2006), thereby reversing long-term trends from the 1970s. Data came fro...

Values vary more within countries than between countries because cultural values are adapted to sociodemographic conditions. The globalization of capitalism and commerce has increased economic differences between the haves and the have-nots within countries around the world; at the same time, it has decreased differences between countries, as virtu...

The Google Books Ngram Viewer allows researchers to quantify culture across centuries by searching millions of books. This tool was used to test theory-based predictions about implications of an urbanizing population for the psychology of culture. Adaptation to rural environments prioritizes social obligation and duty, giving to other people, socia...

Considerable research on computer-mediated communication has examined online communication between strangers, but little is known about the emotional experience of connectedness between friends in digital environments. However, adolescents and emerging adults use digital communication primarily to communicate with existing friends rather than to ma...

Using a naturalistic video database, we examined whether gestures scaffold the symbolic development of a language-enculturated chimpanzee, a language-enculturated bonobo, and a human child during the second year of life. These three species constitute a complete clade: species possessing a common immediate ancestor. A basic finding was the func-tio...

Is there a trade-off between having large networks of social connections on social networking sites such as Facebook and the development of intimacy and social support among today's generation of emerging adults? To understand the socialization context of Facebook during the transition to adulthood, an online survey was distributed to college stude...

Acknowledgments:We,gratefully acknowledge,the National Science Foundation for funding the Children's Digital Media Center and HopeLab for supporting Dr. Lalita Suzuki's research. The CDMC at UCLA is part of a consortium of four centers funded by the National Science Foundation; the other 3 centers are located at Georgetown University, Northwestern...

Adolescents today interact with digital media in almost all aspects of their lives, including communication, entertainment, and formal education. Research indicates that adolescents are using interactive media to grapple with many normative offline developmental issues such as identity development, peer interaction, relationship building, and learn...

In line with Greenfield's (2009) theory of social change and human development, current popular preadolescent TV shows suggest that fame, an individualistic goal, is an important and achievable aspiration (Uhls & Greenfield, 2011). Such messages may be particularly salient for preadolescents, ages 10-12. This study used focus groups and mixed analy...

What are the evolutionary and developmental origins of linguistic creativity? Cross-species comparison of the clade consisting of bonobo, chimpanzee, and human suggests that creative word combinations arise from conversation. Analysis of conversational data shows that novel symbol combinations are initially dependent upon conversational input – thr...

Communicative combinations of two bonobos (Pan paniscus) and a chimpanzee (Pan troglodytes) are compared. All three apes utilized ordering strategies for combining symbols (lexigrams) or a lexigram with a gesture to express semantic relations such as agent of action or object of action. Combinatorial strategies used by all three apes revealed commo...

The period of adolescence involves growth, adaptation, and dramatic reorganization in almost every aspect of social and psychological development. The Encyclopedia of Adolescence offers an exhaustive and comprehensive review of current theory and research findings pertaining to this critical decade of life. Leading scientists offer accessible and e...

Background: Do Social Networking Sites (SNS) allow individuals with autism to compensate for difficulties socializing offline? SNS help other socially isolated groups, such as people with anxiety, overcome isolation (Pierce, 2009). Computers are reinforcing for individuals with autism (Moore & Calvert, 2000) who may use computer based social inte...

Background: The neurodiversity movement, a civil rights moment started by individuals with autism, contests the pathologization of behavioral differences arising from neural differences (Harmon, 2004). Qualitative evidence suggests that the temporal asynchrony and text basis of Internet communication provides a medium wherein individuals with autis...

While numerous publications have shown that apes can learn some aspects of human language, one frequently cited difference between humans and apes is the relative infrequency of declaratives (comments and statements) as opposed to imperatives (requests) in ape symbol use. This paper describes the use of declaratives in three language-competent apes...

Abstract Life narratives of four middle-aged Maya women in Chiapas, Mexico illustrate how social change toward a Gesellschaft environment—formal schooling, urbanization, and the development of commerce—leads to an indigenous form of feminism, marked by a desire for autonomy and egalitarian relations between men and women. The study advances Greenfi...

Recent proliferation of TV programming for the tween audience is supported on the Internet with advertising, fan clubs, and other online communities. These Internet tools expand TV's potential influence on human development. Yet little is known about the kinds of values these shows portray. To explore this issue, a new method for conducting content...

Abstract— In “Independence and Interdependence in Children’s Developmental Experiences,”C. Raeff (2010) sensitively depicts the interrelations of varying sorts of independence and interdependence within a given culture while showing the distinct ways in which these 2 overarching variables are structured across different cultures. Based on a new the...

Recent discussions about the evolution of communication have stressed a perceived qualitative distinction between humans and our closest evolutionary relatives, the great apes, wherein human nature is described as uniquely cooperative relative to the more competitive great apes (e.g. Tomasello, 2007). One major argument at the root of this cooperat...

When Greenfield wrote her chapter on video games in her 1994 landmark book Mind and Media, video games were played primarily in arcades, and popular opinion held that they were at best a waste of time and at worst dangerous technology sure to lead to increased aggression. As a cognitive psychologist and media scholar, she was interested in what was...

When Greenfield wrote her chapter on video games in her 1994 landmark book Mind and Media, video games were played primarily in arcades, and popular opinion held that they were at best a waste of time and at worst dangerous technology sure to lead to increased aggression. As a cognitive psychologist and media scholar, she was interested in what was...