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.Bargh & Chartrand, 1999).Although social psychologists who study the phenomenon of automaticityhave typically not considered its implications for the study of culture, wefind the mutual concern with implicit patterns to be a provocative pointof intersection.Accordingly, the first principle that we nominate as a psy-chological foundation of culture is the automaticity of everyday life.There is, however, a condition to this statement.In order to realize itspotential relevance for the study of culture, it is necessary to supplementan appreciation for the automaticity of everyday life with a correspondingappreciation for the extent to which the worlds of everyday life are culturalproducts meaning-saturated repositories of psychological activity by pre-ceding waves of human actors (Bourdieu, 1990; Cole, 1996; Shore, 1996;Vygotsky, 1978) and not culture neutral.The point of this condition is onlypartly about cultural variation in everyday worlds; instead, the more impor-tant point is to suggest how everyday worlds serve as mediators of culturalinfluence.Products of psychological tendencies at one moment, theseworlds carry meaning and force that trigger psychological outcomes in thenext.This perspective suggests that perhaps the place to look for humanagency is not the ratio of controlled to automatic processing (Bargh &Chartrand, 1999), but instead the meaningful worlds that get constructedduring fleeting moments of mindful activity.The Dynamic Construction of ExperienceThe second principle that we propose as a psychological foundation ofculture is perhaps the single, most important theme to emerge from thestudy of psychology during the past century: what one might call the dy-namic construction of human psychological experience.Psychological expe-rience is not a passive replication of an objective reality.Instead, people ac-tively construct an experience perception (Bruner & Goodman, 1947),memory (Bartlett, 1932), emotion (Schachter & Singer, 1962), self (Markus &Wurf, 1987; Mead, 1934), ethnic identity (Deaux, 1993; Sellers, Smith, Shelton,Rowley, & Chavous, 1998), and so on from indeterminate or potentially am-biguous inputs.The dynamic construction of experience serves as a foundation of cul-ture in two ways that correspond to the two sides of the mutual constitu-tion dialectic.On one side of dialectic, the dynamic construction of experi-ence opens the door for the cultural shaping of psyche.If people constructan experience based in part on personal patterns like habits or implicittheories, then cultural influence happens because rather than the inevita-ble unfolding of inborn models these personal patterns often have culturalsources.These cultural sources may be relatively explicit and direct, as inTLFeBOOK 14.TOWARD A SUITABLE CONCEPTION OF CULTURE 355the case of knowledge structures given expression in cultural ideology.Al-ternatively, these cultural sources may be more implicit and automatic, asin the case of habitual ways of being developed as a by-product of repeatedengagement with culturally patterned worlds.In either case, the dynamicconstruction of psychological experience provides an opening for culturalinfluence that would not exist if experience were completely determined byinherent dispositions or properties of stimuli.On the other side of the dialectic, the dynamic construction of experi-ence provides an engine for the reproduction, maintenance, and modifica-tion of cultural worlds.Psychological experience, like cultural transmission(cf.Strauss, 1992), is not a faxlike replication or formulaic combination of re-ceived inputs.Instead, each case of psychological activity entails the re-making of received inputs in light of present circumstances.Although psy-chologists have focused on its consequences for subjective experience, therelevance of this construction activity for the topic of culture concerns itsconsequences for objective reality.In the process of constructing personalexperience, people reconstruct cultural worlds.The case of language use provides an illustration.With regard to the firstside of the dialectic, each case of language use necessarily entails appropri-ation of the cultural tools embedded in particular languages (e.g., vocabu-lary, grammar, pragmatics, etc.; see Lau et al., chap.4, this volume).How-ever, the resulting communicative act usually does not involve roterecitation of a preexisting statement.Instead, each act of linguistic produc-tion involves an emergent creation or novel synthesis.With regard to thesecond side of the dialectic, each case of language use is the mechanism forthe reproduction, perpetuation, and extension of received cultural tools.However, this reproduction process does not result in an exact replicationof cultural inputs.Instead, each case of language use returns those toolsand inputs, modified by usage, back into the common, linguistic reservoir(McIntyre et al., chap.10, this volume).The Dynamics of Culture.The present emphasis on the dynamic con-struction of experience suggests an elaboration or extension of the dy-namic constructionist approach to culture advocated in this volume byLau and her colleagues.First, this perspective extends the notion of dy-namic beyond the limited sense of motion or change to its more funda-mental sense of active, forceful, or generative (Merriam-Webster On-Line, 2002; Markus & Wurf, 1987)
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