Culture Initiative of Stanford Leadership Institute

Culture pervades how people think, feel, connect, and act — shaping everything from how children learn language to how leaders manage conflict, from how scientists innovate to how organizations adapt.

The Culture Initiative is an intellectual hub and collaborative community dedicated to advancing fundamental research on culture and translating it into real-world impact.

Leading Culture Research

With faculty affiliates spanning more than a dozen departments and schools across Stanford, the initiative brings together anthropologists, psychologists, neuroscientists, economists, sociologists, linguists, political scientists, biologists and computer scientists who combine a diverse toolkit of methods at the forefront of culture research – including years-long ethnographic immersion, AI-powered analyses of internet-scale language data, cross-cultural network experiments, brain imaging, and more. The initiative fosters the cross-pollination of perspectives and insights through thematic workshops, seminar series, graduate affiliates, and micro-grants for exploratory research.

You can learn more about the research of our affiliated faculty through the links below.

Journal ArticleMigration and the Making of the English Middle Class

Vasiliki Fouka & Theo Serlin

National Bureau of Economic Research. January 2026.

Working Paper | Emergent Directedness in Social Contagion

Fabian Tschofenig and Douglas Guilbeault

October 2025.

Journal Article | Cultural Defaults in the Time of COVID: Lessons for the Future

Markus, H. R., Tsai, J. L., Uchida, Y., Yang, A. M., & Maitreyi, A

Psychological Science in the Public Interest. 2024

Journal Article | Half a century of quantitative cultural evolution

Marcus W. Feldman

Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. U.S.A. November 2024

Journal Article | From Partners to Populations: A Hierarchical Bayesian Account of Coordination and Convention

Hawkins, Robert D., Franke, Michael, Frank, Michael C., Goldberg, Adele E., Smith, Kenny, Griffiths, Thomas L., Goodman, Noah D.

Psychological Review. July 2023.

Explore Culture Events

Our event calendar is in development. Check back soon.

Faculty Co-Directors and Affiliates

The John H. Scully Professor in Cross-Cultural Management and Professor of Organizational Behavior
Professor
Organizational Behavior
Professor of Organizational Behavior
Professor
Organizational Behavior
Assistant Professor of Organizational Behavior
Assistant Professor
Organizational Behavior
Assistant Professor of Organizational Behavior
Assistant Professor
Organizational Behavior

News from the Institute

School Stories & News Opensearch
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