The role of the Cultural Diversity content anchor is to integrate perspectives from cross-cultural psychology, anthropology, ethnography, linguistics, and geography to explore how human behavior, thinking, values, and social practices vary across cultures while remaining grounded in a shared evolutionary history.  

Within OpenEvo, this anchor is central for helping learners understand how diverse the human mind is and that we humans can organize our communities in many diverse ways through norms, traditions, beliefs, language, technologies. Our culture and the language we speak influences everything from how we teach and learn, how we perceive (or rather – construct in our minds) colors, space, time, emotions, our social environment and our place in it, how we interact with family and strangers, the kinds of personalities that we might develop, the kinds of things we value, and our judgment of right and wrong. Historic factors like how our ancestors made a living, their experience of conflict and cooperation, migration, or epidemics still influence our cultural minds today. But through cross-cultural research we can also come to an appreciation of what all humans have in common, no matter their cultural background, and hence what it means to be human.

Perspectives from this content anchor can contribute to learners developing a more metacognitive and flexible relationship with their own and others’ cultures and cultural minds.