From the wild African savanna to frozen Siberia, from warm, humid Sicily to fresh and beautiful New Zealand, from London to Tokyo and New York to Shanghai, human communities live and flourish across our ancient, vast Earth.

Almost everyone lives within a particularculture,yet we often remain unaware of its influence. Like water to fish or air to humans, culture is taken for granted and invisible. You cannot see it, but it is everywhere.

In Latin, culture carries two meanings: cultivation of the soil and cultivation of the soul. Many contemporary sociologists and anthropologists define culture as values, systems of meaning, and material entities shared by a society’s members.For individuals, culture is a detailed, rich, concrete set of norms and implicit assumptions about how everyday life unfolds (Oyserman, 2017). Wearing a filter made from these norms and assumptions, we view ourselves, others, and the world and live our lives, usually unaware that the filter exists.When do we notice it? Upon encountering another culture. Difference awakens cultural awareness.

Just as individuals differ, cultural differences are readily visible. Many entering an unfamiliar culture experienceculture shockbecause tools acquired in their native culture no longer work. Those tools include basic values, cognition and thought, and ways of understanding the world and constructing the self.

Cultures vary endlessly. Are there fundamentalcultural dimensionsthat organize differences as the Big Five organizes personality?

Indeed there are. In 1965 Dutch psychologist Geert Hofstede founded a personnel-research department at IBM and later surveyed value differences among over one hundred thousand employees of the multinational’s subsidiaries worldwide. The research continued until recently, expanding to ninety-three countries. After several developments it proposed six continuous dimensions on which cultures differ systematically—perhaps culture’s Big Six (Hofstede, 1983, 2001, 2010).