ABSTRACT
I wish to use this opportunity to consolidate some recent thinking and apply its results to our emerging work on the construct of general social axioms. For the last thirty years I have been struggling intellectually to develop a framework by which culture, in its myriad ways, may be brought into a model for the study of social behavior. This focus on behavior is a sobering, infrequently applied but practical standard to use in the psychological study of culture. I believe that by foregrounding behavior, however, practitioners of our discipline will be prodded to consider currently neglected aspects of culture’s pervasive reach. As psychologists, we presume that this reach is mediated through the agency of internal processes, called psychological mediators. I will describe one of these mediators, general social beliefs, and illustrate the role such a mediator may play in a fuller model for social behavior that accommodates culture.
