Psychology of Culture Change: The Power of Situations Returns

Creating inclusive cultures with equal opportunity and belonging is a goal of most communities and organizations, but achieving that goal has been uneven at best. Many attempts at inclusive culture change have not worked, while others have backfired. One reason is that these attempts have exclusively emphasized individual efforts and underestimated the power of situations in nudging individuals’ beliefs, behaviors, interactions, and relationships, which together create local culture. This article disaggregates the power of situations into four distinct types of situational forces, by integrating research from social psychology and adjacent disciplines, to illustrate how some situational forces shift beliefs, behaviors, social interactions, and relationships toward greater inclusion and equality while other situational forces move in the opposite direction. An important goal is to illuminate how individual beliefs and behaviors connect to higher-order changes in local cultures and to identify where research is lacking to chart a future research agenda.