690 vI. SELF‑ AND S OCIAL P ROCESSES
Other premises in the dynamic construc -
tivist approach are that (1) individuals can 
acquire more than one such cultural mean -
ing system (i.e., be multicultural), even if 
these systems contain conflicting elements 
(Benet-Martínez & Haritatos, 2005); (2) 
individuals can switch (consciously or un -
consciously) between their different cultural 
meaning systems in response to cues in the 
social environment, a process known as 
cultural frame switching (CFS); (3) an indi -
vidual’s acquired meaning system(s) do not 
influence his or her behavior continuously 
or uniformly. With regard to the last tenet, 
for culture to influence behavior, three con -
ditions must be met: The relevant cultural 
schemas have to be cognitively available  
to the individual (relevant cultural values, 
norms, attitudes, etc., have been internalized 
through enculturation and/or acculturation 
processes), cognitively accessible  (these sche -
mas have been recently activated by explicit 
or implicit cues embedded in the micro- and 
macrosituation), and applicable  to the situ -
ation (the schemas are relevant to the situ -
ational demands perceived by the individual 
(Hong et al., 2000; Hong, Benet-  Martinez, 
Chiu, & Morris, 2003).2
The dynamic constructivist approach has 
been applied to the study of cultural influ -
ences on a wide range of personality-  relevant 
constructs, such as traits (e.g., Mok & Mor -
ris, 2009; Ramirez-  Esparza et al., 2006), 
self- construals (e.g., Brannon, Markus, & 
Taylor, 2015), motives (e.g., Briley, Morris, 
& Simonson, 2005), identity (e.g., Wiley 
& Deaux, 2010), personal memories (e.g., 
Bender & Ng, 2009), and emotion (e.g., Pe -
runovic, Heller, & Rafaeli, 2007), among 
many others (for a review, see Benet-Mar -
tínez, 2019). We return to this approach in a 
later section of this chapter, when we discuss 
findings from personality research conduct -
ed with multicultural individuals.
A recent extension of the dynamic con -
structivist approach is the polyculturalist 
framework (Morris, Chiu, & Liu, 2015). 
In many ways, the polyculturalist approach 
clarifies and articulates a paradigm shift 
that had been “fermenting” for a while with 
regard to how culture and cultural member -
ship are defined; that is, the polyculturalist 
framework brings attention to the fact that 
in today’s global and mobile society, individ -uals take influences from multiple cultures 
(through media, travel, and other forms of 
transnational exposure). Furthermore, rath -
er than being categorical and singular, indi -
viduals’ relationships to cultures are partial 
and plural instead (see Morris et al., 2015, 
Figure 2). Last, cultural traditions are not 
unique and independent entities but rather 
are interacting systems with overlapping fea -
tures.
Another theoretical addition is the evolu -
tionary perspective,  which has been taken to 
provide explanations for cultural universals 
and variations in personality. For instance, 
Shi et al. (2015) showed that two types of 
pride (authentic and hubristic) appear to 
be universal across cultures with divergent 
views of pride (e.g., Americans, Koreans, 
Mainland Chinese). Tracy, Shariff, Zhao, 
and Henrich (2013) argued that cultural 
variations in correlates of pride might arise 
from local variations in how to achieve a 
high status. Likewise, Schaller and Mur -
ray (2008) maintain that there is a universal 
reaction to a threat (e.g., fear, avoidance), 
but there are cultural variations because the 
degree of environmental threats vary across 
cultures. Specifically, they found that his -
torical pathogen prevalence was associated 
with introversion and lower levels of open -
ness, presumably because contact with an 
outgroup would be potentially dangerous in 
an ecology with lots of pathogens. Similarly, 
because infectious diseases are transmitted 
invisibly and mysteriously, people living in 
such an environment prefer a centralized, 
controlled (i.e., authoritarian) government 
and are more likely to possess authoritar -
ian personalities than those living in a low- 
pathogen environment (Murray, Schaller, & 
Suedfeld, 2013). Likewise, people living in 
a pathogen-  prevalent environment are more 
religious, presumably because a ritualized 
behavior is one way to battle infectious dis -
eases (Fincher & Thornhill, 2012).
In addition, several researchers have used 
the life- history theory  (Belsky, Steinberg, & 
Draper, 1991) to explain cultural variations 
in attachment styles and mating-  related be -
haviors. According to the life-  history theory, 
people in predictable environments (e.g., in 
which both parents are present, economi -
cally stable) are more likely to invest in long-
term relationships than those with less pre -