Within-Cultural Variation and the Scope of Cultural Neuroscience

Chiao and colleagues (this issue) describe a mul-tidisciplinary field that has recently debuted and it is clear that in only a relatively short time has made sub-stantial progress and a number of exciting discoveries. In this commentary, I first offer some general remarks on the emergence of the field and highlight some as-pects that seem particularly promising. I then describe three issues that the authors did not seem to address in their article, including (a) the possible complications of variation and heterogeneity within a single culture, (b) the need to carve out the scope of cultural neu-roscience and have a working definition of “culture,” and (c) the promise of using neuroscience to constrain cultural psychological theory. I then end with some conclusions