ABSTRACT
Cultural theory holds that the patterns of social interaction within which people live their lives come to shape, in predictable ways, their worldviews and in turn their attitudes and behavior. The most pressing problem is to find good methods for operationalizing grid and group for both actual and preferred social patterns. Broadly speaking, the pattern of correlations between attitudinal items and social context supports cultural theory’s core notion that different combinations of grid and group produce different biases. According to cultural theory, a commitment to traditional structures of morality is basic to the hierarchist worldview. The high-grid-low-group category appears to combine aspects of two worldviews—fatalism and individualism; cultural theory predicts that the individualist worldview should occur only in the low-grid-low-group cell. Once grid and group are measured, there are further problems in using them to represent a two-dimensional system. Conceptualizing grid-group cross-classifications as continuous Cartesian coordinate systems.
