Culture as an ontological universe: Toward a broader model of culture in the globalizing era

Strong-ties and weak-ties rationalities

According to Sundararajan (2020c), strong-ties and weak-ties rationalities are the reasoning and logic behind two basic ontological orientations that have co-evolved with strong-ties and weak-ties social-ecological niches. In downstream analysis of the social environment, strong-ties and weak-ties networks have long been identified by anthropologists as two basic social structures that have emerged in the course of human history. According to Curtin et al. (2020), strong-ties societies are those with intensive, deep, and narrow kinship, “characterized by extended family networks, cousin marriage, polygyny, endogamy, unilineal descent, and an increase in relatedness within kin groups” (p. 417); weak-ties societies are those with extensive, broad, and shallow kinship that “tend to encourage the formation of broad social networks with unrelated individuals, and often feature exogamy and bilateral descent” (p. 417).

The extreme form of weak-ties society, known as WEIRD (Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, and Democratic) is a latecomer, whose rise Schulz et al. (2019) have traced to medieval Western Europe, where the strong-ties social structure had been systematically weakened by the Catholic Church. More specifically, due to the Pope’s ban on cousin marriage, Western Europeans were forced to leave their extended household to find mates, to gather in cities, to network with non-genetically related others and strangers in an anonymous society.

By moving upstream to engage in an ontological analysis of social networks, Sundararajan (2020c) is following Lévi-Strauss in making a paradigm shift from epistemology to ontology in cultural analysis (Descola, 2013). The ontological turn initiated by Lévi-Strauss has been further developed by his students such as Descola (2013), who seeks to “reject the sociocentric assumption [of Durkheim] and opt for the idea that sociological realities (stabilized relational systems) are analytically subordinate to ontological realities (the systems of properties attributed to existing beings)” (p. 124). Along this line, Sundararajan’s (2020c) strong-ties and weak-ties rationalities may be understood in terms of what is referred to by Descola (2013) as fundamental modes of “ontological identification” (p. 388) that specify “the ontological properties of terms” (p. 114), and thereby “modulates the general awareness that I may have of the existence of the ‘other’” (p. 115).

In Sundararajan’s (2020c) framework, ontological discriminations are made along the continuum of psychological distance between self and the other. Thus, socially proximal others, such as kith and kin, are classified as “strong-ties,” whereas socially distal others, such as acquaintances and strangers, are “weak-ties.” Furthermore, psychological and ontological distances tend to coalesce, as Descola (2013) points out, since the other can be classified on the basis of “whether or not that alter is or is not equivalent to me on an ontological level” (p. 310). For instance, the Chinese refer to persons closely related to the self (strong-ties) as “one of us” (自己人), and those unrelated to the self (weak-ties) as “outsiders” (外 人) (Y. Yang, 2009). Going beyond the social arena, our strong-ties may extend to Nature (Misra et al., in press) such that it is possible, for instance in animism (Descola, 2013), to consider nonhuman animals “one of us” (equivalent ontological status with the self), or in other words, “persons” just like me.

According to Descola (2013), ontological identification and social relations in combination “suffice to explain the principles underlying most known ontologies and cosmologies” (p. 114). To see how strong-ties and weak-ties rationalities are intimately related to different world orders or cosmoses, we turn to Bourdieu (1977)—another student of Lévi-Strauss. Sundararajan’s (2020c) notion of rationality as embodied cognition is compatible with what Bourdieu (1977) refers to as “habitus,” which is defined as socially inculcated “systems of durable, transposable dispositions” (p. 72), or as a cognitive and motivational system that “causes an individual agent’s practices, without either explicit reason or signifying intent, to be nonetheless ‘sensible’ and ‘reasonable’” (p. 79). Reiterating the intimate connection between rationality and its ancient ecological niche (Sundararajan, 2020c), Bourdieu (1977) writes that habitus is “history turned into nature” (p. 78). That is, habitus not only internalizes the structure of the ecological niche which produced it but also tends to perpetuate that very structure, namely to “reproduce the objective structures of which they are the product” (p. 72).

According to Bourdieu (1977), different dispositions (habitus) are associated with different world orders or cosmoses. For instance, he noted two different economic cosmoses—“archaic” or “good-faith economy” (p. 172) in contrast to market economy—that are associated with strong-ties and weak-ties rationalities/dispositions, respectively:

The general law of exchanges means that the closer the individuals or groups are in the genealogy, the easier it is to make agreements, the more frequent they are, and the more completely they are entrusted to good faith. Conversely, as the relationship becomes more impersonal, i.e., as one moves out from the relationship between brothers to that between virtual strangers (people from two different villages) or even complete strangers, so a transaction is less likely to occur at all, but it can become, and increasingly does become, purely “economic” in character, i.e., closer to its economic reality, and the interested calculation which is never absent even from the most generous exchange . . . can be more and more openly revealed. (p. 173)

In sum, strong-ties and weak-ties rationalities are modes of ontological identifications that determine how we relate to the world and to others (both human and non-human). As socially inculcated dispositions (habitus), strong-ties and weak-ties rationalities also lead to different world orders or cosmoses.

The rationality and niche connection: Key to a coherent universe

To recapitulate, strong-ties and weak-ties can be analyzed at two different levels: as rationalities and habitus behind ontologies and cosmologies at the higher level or upstream analysis, or as social-ecological niches and associated cultural practices at the lower level or downstream analysis. When upstream rationality and downstream socioecological niche are well connected, we have a coherent universe or cosmos. For an account of the rationality and niche connection, we turn to Fiske’s (2000) complementarity theory.

Complementarity theory

The counterpart of rationality/habitus in the complementarity theory of Fiske (2000) is the “mods” which are “highly structured, evolved (predominately universal), attentional, motivational, cognitive, and developmental proclivities” (p. 79) that bind with congruent cultural elements. It is through the binding of psychological proclivities with local cultural elements that the mind as “mod” is able to build cultural traditions. First, mods have an innate tendency to seek out and bind with congruent local norms referred to as “preos” which are “precedents, prototypes, paragons, precepts, propositions, practices, and paradigms” (p. 83). Then, the “culture-specific mod-preo combinations” (p. 84) translate the mod into particular cultural coordinating devices (CCDs), such as values, beliefs, attitudes, scripts, norms, myths, rituals, institutions, and so on.

To illustrate, let us go back to the question concerning the widow’s diet. Shweder et al. (1987) asked the participants in a temple town of East India whether it is a sin for widows to eat fish. They said, yes, it was a sin. The reasoning behind this response may be parsed as follows:

Mod: strong-ties rationality as an evolved proclivity (or disposition) for the preservation of close relationship in extended time (beyond the grave) and scope (extended family network).

Preo: a congruent prototype (chaste widow) that complements strong-ties rationality to form a strong-ties, mod-preo combination.

CCDs: Implementation of the strong-ties, mod-preo combination results in strong-ties CCDs, such as attitudes, values, beliefs, and norms about devotion and purity which include food restrictions for widows, such as avoiding fish and garlic that may increase sexual desires, unsuitable for a chaste widow.

Shweder et al. (1987) posed the same question to participants in Chicago. Their answer was no, it was not a sin for widows to eat fish. The reasoning behind this response may be parsed as follows:

Mod: weak-ties rationality as an evolved proclivity for forming contractual relationship with others with delimited commitment in time (“til death do us part”), and scope (nuclear family).

Preo: a congruent cultural precept (gender equality for widows) that complements weak-ties rationality to form a weak-ties, mod-preo combination.

CCDs: Implementation of the weak-ties, mod-preo combination results in weak-ties CCDs, such as the ideologies of personal choice and independence, and the practice of dieting for nutritional purposes, rather than for the fulfillment of relationship obligations.

As we can see, Shweder et al.’s (1987) question leads to two very different answers depending on whether “widowhood” is understood along the lines of strong-ties rationality (a widow has the obligation to uphold the relationship with her deceased husband and their extended families) or weak-ties rationality (a widow has the right to be treated like anyone else). It is when strong-ties and weak-ties rationalities bind with their congruent cultural norms (preos) that we arrive at two distinct economic cosmoses as described by Bourdieu (1977). A summary of the key concepts of our model is presented in Table 1.

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Table 1.

Key Constructs in the Model of Culture as an Ontological Universe.

Construct	Level of Analysis	Definition/Function	Example in the Paper
Rationality	Upstream, higher level	Embodied reasoning guiding perception, motivation, and judgment; foundational logic behind the vision of a world or cosmos.	Strong-ties vs. weak-ties rationality
Mod	Upstream, higher level	Evolved, universal proclivities in attention, motivation, and cognition; require cultural complements.	Inclination toward communal sharing or independence/self-sufficiency
Habitus	Upstream, higher level	Socially inculcated dispositions that shape practice and perception without conscious deliberation.	Different dispositions supported by kin-based good-faith economy or market economy, respectively
Preos	Downstream, lower level	Local cultural norms, prototypes, and practices that bind with mods to mold cultures into enduring traditions.	Prototype of the “chaste widow” or “gender-equal individual”
CCDs (cultural coordinating devices)	Downstream, lower level	Cultural traditions such as language, religion, social institutions.	Values, beliefs, rituals, etc. Widowhood food taboos, ideologies of independence

Note. Ontological universe or cosmos: a coherent meaning of existence emerges through the congruent connection between upstream rationality (mod or habitus) and downstream practices in the social-ecological niche.

In sum, our model suggests that for the cultural insiders, culture entails a coherent ontological universe or what we refer to as cosmos, which is sustained by a rich web of connections between upstream rationality and downstream social-ecological niches (see Figure 1).

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Figure 1.

Culture as an Ontological Universe.

This cosmos is necessarily coherent, as it is built on multiple congruences between rationality/habitus and its ancestral niche; and between an evolved proclivity (mod) for local cultural practices (preos and CCDs). The driving force behind this coherent universe is the world-opening mind (as rationality, mod, or habitus) which, taking its roots in its ancestral niche, perpetuates its evolutionary past into the present by selectively binding with congruent local norms (preos) to build a tradition (CCDs) and legacy for the next generations, while shaping our psychological traits along the way.

Loneliness reconsidered

During the COVID-19 pandemic, Parsons (2022) conducted a large-scale journaling project, in which North American participants wrote nostalgically about missing rituals and other practices, such as birthday celebrations, holidays, religious services and funerals, and everyday encounters with others including meeting strangers on the street; or missing places or social settings, such as the gym, grocery store, library, and so on. All these losses lead to a sense of loneliness, a feeling which was not detected by the standard loneliness surveys used in the study. Nor were there any correlations between the participants’ loneliness scores based on psychological measures and the loneliness entries in their journaling.

While psychology focuses on social disconnection as the defining condition of loneliness, recent studies have shown that not all loneliness entails the absence of friends or significant others. In Parsons’ (2022) study, one participant’s entry of loneliness mentioned not being able to browse stacks at the library during the pandemic; another participant’s entry included missing random encounters with strangers on the street. Pike and Crocker (2020) reported that for the Turkana pastoralists of Kenya, loss of their animals led to loneliness. A study by Hajek and König (2022) found an association between higher climate anxiety and higher loneliness.

To account for these new findings on loneliness, it is necessary to shift our focus from the horizontal social connections to the vertical linkage between upstream rationality and downstream niche with congruent cultural complements. To the weak-ties rationality of anonymous societies (North America in the scenarios cited by Parsons, 2022), frequenting public places (café, library, etc.), and random encounters with strangers constitute culturally congruent connections, whereas to the strong-ties rationality of the Turkana pastoralists of Kenya, connection with their animals is of vital importance. As Pike and Crocker (2020) point out, according to the Turkana, a man without animals (an ekebotonit) “not only loses his sense of purpose and the companionship herds offer, but . . . becomes erased—a man with no say in society” (p. 668). All these studies bring to light the importance of the niche—the local place—in people’s daily lives. In the next section, we consider how loss of place through migration, climate change, or some other cause threatens to sever the intimate connection between ontological rationality and its ecological niche.

Ecological grief

The impact of loss of place extends beyond loneliness, when the connection between rationality and niche is severely disrupted. In their investigation of three religious groups of an indigenous population in Malaysia, Thong et al. (2024) made preliminary observations of how:

The Traditional group [who resisted conversion to Islam or Christianity] managed to keep their strong-ties rationality intact, only to have an orphaned rationality, a rationality without its corresponding niche, as their preferred habitat, the forest, is continually being destroyed [by international logging companies]. (p. 9)

A term that is broader than loneliness to capture the all-encompassing consequences of this loss of place is ecological grief.

Ecological grief is a term coined by Hernandez (2022) to refer to the all-encompassing impact of a loss of environmental setting for Indigenous peoples. A case in point is loss of place due to displacement: “Displacement because of the loss of having our ancestral homelands near or the loss of being able to live on them is ecological grief” (p. 67). She goes on to say that, “displacement impacts Indigenous peoples geographically, socially, and psychoculturally. I add that it also impacts us emotionally and spiritually . . .” (p. 67).

This all-encompassing impact resulting from the loss of place is tantamount to the loss of a world or cosmos for indigenous peoples whose rationality has a cosmic connection with nature. According to Hernandez (2022), “This ecological grief is rooted in the relationships we [Indigenous peoples] hold with nature and our environments and how we manage these resources when they are under our complete stewardship and care” (p. 58). Consequently, their ecological grief is manifest in a broad range of disconnections, from the loss of bees to the loss of forest. It is their connection with nature at the intimate, cosmic level that renders the Indigenous peoples most vulnerable to climate change:

with climate change, we are experiencing more ecological grievances because, as Indigenous peoples, we experience firsthand the environmental degradation and impacts climate change has on our plants, animals, and other nonliving things that are an integral part of our ecosystems. Now imagine not just losing one pet, but multiple pets in a couple of hours. (p. 61)

But is losing pets, even if in large numbers, really so traumatic as to constitute ecological grief? To understand the all-encompassing impact of climate change on Indigenous peoples, we need to factor in their ontology. In contrast to the weak-ties rationality of modern science which posits an unbridgeable gap between humans and non-humans, strong-ties rationality of animism, prevalent among many Indigenous populations, tends to consider plants, animals, and other nonliving things as persons to form intimate connections with (Descola, 2013). Thus, to many Indigenous peoples, the traumatic impact of climate change lies not in the loss of resources due to environmental degradation so much as in witnessing large-scale destruction of their (non-human) families and relatives, in short a devastating experience of continuing loss.

Intervention for cultural loss in the globalizing era

As illustrated by loneliness and ecological grief, the disconnection between rationality and its congruent cultural complements contributes to cultural loss and attrition which is growing apace in this globalizing era. Globalization entails trans-territorial movement of goods as well as populations (Prilleltensky, 2012), resulting in widespread disruption of the linkage between ontological rationalities and their congruent cultural complements. In the following section, we consider some possible interventions to alleviate suffering from cultural loss and attrition.

Concluding observations

The foregoing analysis of culture has practical implications for environmental and social studies, practitioners, and policy-makers. First, cultural loss in the globalizing era is pervasive, and not just confined to immigrants who relocate themselves in a foreign environment. All the examples cited above involved home-bodies who found their familiar grounds disappearing from right under their feet—when their congruent cultural practices became inaccessible during the COVID-19 pandemic; when their environment was ravaged by the effects of climate change; or when their traditional ways of life were eroded by foreign rationality in the market economy. Second, cultural loss may differ from one community to another, depending on the cultural group’s ontology. For instance, some Indigenous populations would mourn climate change’s damage to nature as a cultural loss (ecological grief) rather than simply as a natural disaster, because their ontology, fostered by a strong-ties relationship with nature, has blurred the fine line between culture and nature: “the forest is our supermarket” (cited in Sundararajan, 2023, p. 127), as one member of a hunter-gatherer tribe in Malaysia put it. Lastly, when our ecological niches are constantly being shuffled in the globalizing era, reconstruction of a coherent ontological universe is likely to play an increasingly important role as a stabilizing factor in our lives.

What is culture?

Culture is defined differently depending on whether the phenomena are analyzed upstream or downstream. Downstream analysis focuses on social facticity such as institutions, customs, and conventions; upstream analysis focuses on ontologies and cosmologies, which are mental constructs fostered by the uniquely world-opening capacity of the human mind. In particular, the upstream approach of Lévi-Strauss and his students suggests that cultures are so many possible worlds that can be derived from a small set of principles (or logics) that govern human thought. As an antidote to some of the excesses of cultural essentialism and cultural determinism, the structuralist approach calls for reflexivity—the awareness that we are responsible for the particular cultural universe we have chosen (albeit unconsciously) out of a matrix of possible world orders or cosmoses (Descola, 2013). This has implications for the quest for culture coherence in the globalizing era.

All the programs of “culture as treatment” have a common theme, namely they harken back to the pre-perturbation state of an ideal culture before the ravagings of colonization. Will such emphasis on recapturing purity lead to a resurgence of cultural fundamentalism? Not necessarily, if it is processed appropriately, namely upstream. In upstream processing, ontologies and cosmologies are possible worlds, not concrete facts. For instance, when Y. Yang (2009) claimed (mistakenly) that Western psychology exemplifies a pure and perfect IP, he was using the romanticized version of Euro-American psychology as a parable to suggest that such possible worlds as the ideal IP are beyond the reach of the colonized. In general, the vision that drives “culture as treatment” is that no matter how fragmented a culture is in reality, it is possible to restore it to its coherence by reimagining its cosmology, and/or by reconstructing its niche symbolically through rituals. The overall success of such programs (Gone & Calf Looking, 2011) suggests that used properly with reflexive awareness (i.e., knowing that one is engaged in symbolic enactments of cultural regeneration), cultural imaginations have the potential to heal the trauma of cultural disruptions in the globalizing era.

Beyond acculturation

The cultural disruption caused by large-scale migration in the globalizing era has received some attention in psychology (Greenfield, 2018), but mostly through downstream analysis of the individual’s adaptation to environmental change. A case in point is the model of person–environment fit (Kandler et al., 2024). Person–environment fit is a theoretical approach used to predict individual outcomes by examining the interplay between personal characteristics and environmental factors. Scholars have extended the framework into the cross-cultural domain through the notion of person–culture fit, such as the “person–culture match” hypothesis (Fulmer et al., 2010). Several studies have shown that when individuals’ traits (e.g., extraversion, promotion focus, locomotion) closely match the average trait levels of the surrounding society, they experience stronger benefits in life satisfaction, positive affect, and self-esteem (e.g., Bond et al., 2020). This emphasis on adaptation to environmental demands aligns well with acculturation theory (Berry, 1980; Sam & Berry, 2010), which proposes a solution to the person–environment mismatch by assimilation to the environment. That is, cultural migrants, including expatriates and immigrants, who often face acute experiences of fit or misfit, need to adapt by acquiring certain traits (e.g., openness, extraversion, conscientiousness) to fit situational demands.

But, adaptation to the environment does not necessarily contribute to a coherent universe for the adapting cultural actor. For instance, when farmers become migrant workers in cities, their rationality and competencies, honed by a lifetime of living in the villages, may become deficits. If these individuals manage to upgrade their skills in order to get and maintain a job in the cities, it would increase the fitness of their person–environment match. But the coherence of their ontological universes may decrease if the cultural actor’s already-acquired rationality and competencies are suppressed, no longer valued, or become illegitimate in the new world order. For instance, Chinese researchers are indeed capable of assimilation and fitting in with the research environment of westernized psychology, but it is their repressed rationality that makes them feel as if they are doing “soulless psychology” (K.-S. Yang, 1997, p. 65).

From our point of view, there are two problems with the downstream solution to the problems of migrants. First, only one world order or cosmos—that of the host society—is acknowledged. No question is ever asked about “how peoples who do not share our cosmology came to invent for themselves realities that are distinct from our own, thereby manifesting a creativity that cannot be judged according to the criteria of our own accomplishments” (Descola, 2013, p. 81). Second, the cosmos of the culturally different other is reduced to a fragmentary list of traits, values, and beliefs that can be modified at will to suit the demands of the host society. The world of the culturally different other has conveniently disappeared, for otherwise it would be quite cumbersome to tweak cosmologies, rationalities, dispositions (habitus), social axioms (Leung et al., 2012), and primals (Clifton et al., 2019) along with the panoply of other psychological constructs constituting the ontological universe. To showcase an alternative upstream approach to the assimilation problems of the culturally different other, we turn to Bourdieu’s (2000) analysis of the postcolonial condition.

Bourdieu’s (2000) analysis starts with two world orders or cosmoses, not just one (the modern economy). According to him, the rationality-and-niche mismatch is “[a] mismatch between economic dispositions fashioned in a precapitalist economy and the economic cosmos imported and imposed, often times in the most brutal way, by colonization” (p. 18). Thus, the colonized are forced to move between their traditional dispositions and the foreign cosmos of modern economy. This contradiction can lead to economic “misfits” (p. 28), who are “economic agents devoid of the dispositions tacitly demanded by an economic order” (p. 18). According to Bourdieu, economic “misfits” are the product under the dominance of a particular world order (cosmos) that measures everything by the yardstick of economic logic. Thus, he locates the problem not in the “misfit” so much as in the complacency of those who fit in well but fail to question reflexively the rationality behind the dominant economic order. What Bourdieu (2000) says about economics is equally applicable to the acculturation approach in psychology:

Economics treats the prospective and calculating disposition towards the world and time . . . as a universal “given,” a gift of nature. In doing so, it tacitly condemns in moral terms those who have already been condemned in reality to the fate of economic “misfits” by the economic system. (p. 28)

Culture as subjective reality

The shift from downstream to upstream analysis is simultaneously a shift of emphasis from objectivity to subjectivity (Misra et al., in press). The scientist as outsider/observer tends to approach culture as an objective reality replete with social institutions, technologies, and social practices. By contrast, our upstream analysis has been tuning in to the subjective, intangible realities of rationalities, ontologies, and cosmologies. This distinction has profound ramifications for our analysis of cultural loss and attrition. The disintegration of social institutions can be documented as cold facts, but it is hard not to notice the mental anguish behind the disintegrating ontologies of cultural insiders, when for instance some hunter-gather tribes in Malaysia lose the forest they can call home due to international logging (Sundararajan, 2023).

Try this thought experiment: Image that your culture makes an ontological discrimination between animals for food and animals as pets, such that you tend to consider your dog as a member of the family. Imagine further that due to certain unfavorable circumstances you have become a migrant in a society that uses dogs for food, and that every morning on your way to work you have to pass by a meat market with dismembered dogs hanging in the window. Even without the pressure of acculturation, the stress you feel would be quite acute. This (dramatized) scenario of the rationality and niche mismatch serves to illustrate the following points: (a) to the extent that ontologies define the relations that unite us with others and with the world that we envision and inhabit (Descola, 2013), an intact ontology is necessary for our well-being; (b) it can be difficult, if not painful, to compromise our ontological frontiers (changing the ontological status of dogs from pet to food, for instance) in order to assimilate to the majority culture; (c) reflexive subjectivity (Misra et al., in press) that deepens awareness of our own culture can lead to compassion for the culturally different other who are minorities under the pressure of acculturation.

Future research directions

Neither true nor false, a theoretical model has only heuristic value, which may be evaluated by its explanatory power or by its predictive efficacy. Haig (2025) argues persuasively that theory evaluation “should embrace an explanationist perspective on the theory evaluation process to complement its [conventional] focus on hypothetico-deductive theory testing” (p. 340). Following this advice, we have focused on demonstrating the explanatory power of our model without immediate concern for measurement. For future research directions, we may complement the current explanatory focus with hypothetico-deductive theory testing. Relevant to future research are the following empirical studies we conducted to test the predictions that can be derived from our model.

First, to measure strong-ties and weak-ties rationalities, a quantitative measure called the strong-ties and weak-ties rationality scale (STWTRS) was developed. Since kinship-based rationality is an implicit and embodied reasoning, it cannot be measured directly but can instead be activated by culturally congruent items. Given that COVID-19 has become a global experience since 2020, Sundararajan and Yeh (2022) used the pandemic scenario as a context to anchor scale construction. The 20 items of the STWTRS were evaluative statements concerning the COVID-19 pandemic, with 10 items each deemed by the authors to be congruent with strong-ties or weak-ties rationalities, respectively. In one study (n = 961) by Yeh et al. (2023) across four samples—Taiwanese, Yi Chinese, Asian American, and non-Asian American—the hypothetical compatibility of the respective items with strong-ties and weak-ties rationalities was supported by factor analyses which showed that STWTRS items loaded well in their predicted cultural groupings. In another study, Ting et al. (2024) conducted a cross-indigenous study (n = 2173) during the COVID-19 pandemic in two Asian countries (China and Malaysia) and two Western countries (Australia and the United States). Results consistently revealed across these four countries a two-factor structure of strong-ties rationality—ST-C (Communal sharing/caring) and ST-A (Authoritarian)—and also of weak-ties rationality—WT-A (Analytic) and WT-I (Independent). Within-country comparisons revealed that both Asian countries had significantly higher strong-ties scores than weak-ties scores, whereas the reverse was true in both Western countries.

The hypothetical connection between rationalities upstream and cultural practices downstream also found empirical support. Two large-scale, cross-cultural studies found support for the hypothesis that measures of STWTRS predicted culture-specific values and beliefs (Yeh et al., 2024) and COVID-19-related perceptions and behaviors (Ting et al., 2024). In Yeh et al. (2024), results from 1,291 participants across four societies—China, India, Taiwan, and the United States—found that as predicted, strong-ties rationality was positively related to strong-ties values and beliefs in reciprocal filial piety, authoritarian filial piety, Dharma (purity + authority), and belief in a just world, and that weak-ties rationality was positively related to weak-ties values and belief in an unjust world. Results from the Ting et al. (2024) study across four societies (Han-Chinese, Chinese-Malaysians, Malay-Malaysians, and White-Australians, n = 918) indicated that strong-ties rationality, compared to weak-ties rationality, is more positively related to public stigma, strong-ties forms of help-seeking, and personal care behaviors. In contrast, weak-ties rationality, compared to strong-ties rationality, was more positively related to public health behaviors. Of particular interest in future research would be to compare the predictive power of two competing approaches to strong-ties and weak-ties—STWTRS (Sundararajan & Yeh, 2022), a measure of upstream rationality; and the kinship intensity scale (Curtin et al., 2020), a measure of downstream social-ecological niche—in a head-to-head comparison.

Lastly, as an explanatory framework, the theory of strong-ties and weak-ties rationalities has been applied to analyses of Chinese emotions (Sundararajan, 2015), Chinese notions of harmony (Sundararajan, 2020a, 2020b), and the Daoist preference of ignorance over knowledge (Sundararajan, 2021). In qualitative and mixed-methods studies of ethnic minority groups that cannot be validly accessed through survey methods, the explanatory framework of strong-ties and weak-ties rationalities is particularly useful (Sundararajan et al., 2022; Ting & Sundararajan, 2018). Lastly, the hypothesis of rationality-and-niche-mismatch has been used as an explanatory framework in one quantitative cross-cultural study of globalization and well-being (Wu et al., 2018), and more importantly in multiple qualitative studies of ethnic minority groups: one study on the impact of religious conversion among a group of hunter-gatherers in Malaysia (Thong et al., 2024); and two studies of the Yi in Liangshan China—one on their perceptions of HIV/AIDS (Ting et al., 2025) and another on their narratives of stigma (Sundararajan et al., 2025). To the extent that it is the marginalized groups that tend to pay the price for the success of the global market (Standing, 2011), we encourage more future studies to apply the rationality-and-niche-mismatch framework to an analysis of the modernization process of marginalized, under-researched populations.