My mentor Jerome Bruner used to say that every current situation triggers different memories and a different autobiography. This autobiography was triggered by the focus of this book on developmental psychology and the foundational idea in psychology since Freud (although Freud is generally not given credit for this idea), namely, that early development is the emotional foundation for what follows in later life. It also is grounded in Piaget’s parallel idea that each cognitive stage builds on preceding stages of development.

Earliest Influences and Family

I have unusually early memories. When my brother was born and came home from the hospital, I wanted to kiss him. My mother, fearful of germs, would not let me. I was traumatized. I think that emotional trauma was my earliest inspiration to understand positive parenting and family relations. But also, the fact that I remember something much earlier in life than others (no childhood amnesia for me!) was an indication of my proclivity for understanding human development from its earliest roots.

My family had African American household help. As my parents preferred to be out with their friends, playing golf or cards, partying, or traveling, these people took care of us and often showed affection lacking from my parents. Growing up, we always had a housekeeper/cook or a couple living in our house. On one occasion, a housekeeper took me to her African American church in Newark, New Jersey. I was overwhelmed by the emotion shown during the service and also touched by the warmth of her friends toward me. This was my first experience of the strength of unappreciated minority cultures. This theme animates the research and interventions that have characterized my collaborative Bridging Cultures Project from the 1990s to the present. (The first decade of the Bridging Cultures Project is summarized in “Applying developmental psychology to bridge cultures in the classroom,” listed in the Suggested Reading.) And this experience is one influence that led to my teaching courses on culture and human development with an emphasis on understanding and respect for nondominant cultures, cultures that are represented by so many of my UCLA students from immigrant, minority, and international families.

Circling back to the African Americans in my childhood world – I was subsequently shocked and embarrassed when a couple working and living in our house took me and my brother to a local amusement park, and we were refused admittance because they were Black. This was the beginning of my deep feelings about the evils of racism and led to other formative experiences. My mother was very active and eventually became board president of a social service agency serving a low-income, entirely Black housing project in Newark, formerly a Jewish neighborhood. During my first summer at home during college, she secured a job for me at the agency’s day camp. I made friends with the other counselors, who were all Black and who invited me to their parties. When I wanted to reciprocate, my parents would not permit me to invite my Black co-workers to our house. I was shocked at their hypocrisy. My shock turned into a resolution to walk the walk of social justice – in both life and work – not just talk the talk.

Nonetheless, I never had a normal social relationship with a Black American until I was in Senegal for my dissertation research and got to know a Peace Corps volunteer, Roosevelt Weaver. For the first time for me, as a racial minority in an African country, there were no social barriers to our friendship. And I became very aware of how society’s racial barriers could distort relationships. I think the main manifestation of that realization in my current work is the creation in my undergraduate culture and human development class of multiethnic student groups who collect data on intergenerational change (usually in their own families) and integrate their data in group presentations. They often come away from these projects with a sense of commonality with other ethnic groups from whom they have generally been insulated or about whom they may even have been exposed to negative stereotypes.

In elementary school, my antipathy towards racism coalesced with an appreciation of the value of a culture disrespected by the dominant group when my mother told me I could not attend a dancing class with some of my friends because Jews were not allowed. I already knew that we could not join the Orange Lawn Tennis Club, literally across the street from our house in South Orange, New Jersey, because of being Jewish. That WASP (White Anglo-Saxon Protestant) club allowed Jews to come as guests once each year. I can still feel the loneliness and exclusion I felt as I saw my friends trudging past our house in their bathing suits to go in the club pool on a sweltering day, while I felt abandoned by our parents who were playing golf in an all-Jewish country club that did not have a swimming pool. (Because they too were excluded from WASP clubs.)

For much of elementary school, I was the only Jewish kid in my class. However, I did not know I was Jewish until I asked my parents why we were not going to church like my classmates and their families; and they answered that we were Jewish, not Christian. The religious mix changed in junior high school when one of the feeder schools had many Jewish kids. South Orange Junior High School did academic tracking, and I found myself in the top group, where I had many Jewish classmates. I was socially accepted and made good friends. But my parents, whose parents were born in the United States, were horrified that most of my Jewish friends were from Eastern European immigrant families. They considered Jews from Western Europe, who had immigrated to the USA one generation earlier, to be socially superior. These were most of my great-grandparents, mainly from Alsace (an area that was sometimes French, sometimes German), Germany, and Belgium. To get me away from kids who were from Eastern European Jewish backgrounds, my parents forbade me to go to the teen dances at the local Jewish Y with my friends and took me out of public school – a return to the WASPS in an all-girls school – where I again met anti-Semitic social exclusion.

At the same time, my parents were not interested in practicing Judaism, but my junior high friends’ families had Jewish rituals both at home and at their synagogue. That was when and where I decided that if you could not be accepted by a dominant group in society and were experiencing social exclusion, it was very helpful to have your own cultural or religious practices, so you would have a sense of belonging somewhere. This is, in fact, the main origin of my cultural strengths (and even anthropological) approach to minority development in cultural psychology, a theme that animates so much of my teaching and research.

But there were positive family influences as well. My mother was a very positive educational influence. She had graduated from Smith College and was one of the very few college-educated women of her generation. She was a Francophile and sent me for French lessons near my elementary school with Mme. Bennet, a French lady from Brittany married to an American. I loved eating the raspberries Mme. Bennett grew in her yard while I was waiting for my lessons. I loved Mme. Bennett and French language and culture. And it was my knowledge of French that enabled Jerome Bruner to send me to Senegal to do research on culture and cognitive development almost two decades later. With that research, I found my place in psychology: culture and human development.

When asked to do an autobiographical presentation many years ago at the International Society for Cross-Cultural Psychology (IACCP) I realized that almost all cross-cultural psychologists have had the outsider experience, even if, as in my case, it is not obvious based on appearances or social class. It is the outsider perspective that makes you aware of culture and cultural differences. For the insider, culture is like the air you breathe, taken for granted. I think the reader can see that I had the experience of being an outsider early in life; and this experience is one of the sources of my sensitivity to cultural features and cultural differences. Jerry Bruner once wrote in a letter of recommendation for me that I had a “witchy” sense of culture. I think he meant that I had a deep sensitivity to and understanding of different cultures. If this is true, I think my early experience is its source.

Academic and Intellectual Influences

The summer before I started at Radcliffe College, excited both about receiving a Harvard education and about being able to hang out in Harvard Square, I read the whole Harvard course catalogue. One department had courses that excited me: the Department of Social Relations (affectionately called Soc Rel). This interdisciplinary department encompassed and aimed to integrate sociology, social anthropology, and social and clinical psychology. So in my freshman year I enrolled in Soc Rel 10, which lasted a whole year and showcased Harvard stars from all these disciplines. One of our readings, assigned by sociology professor Alex Inkeles, was The Passing of Traditional Society, written by another sociologist, Daniel Lerner; the book was about the modernization of Turkey. In “Social change and human development: An autobiographical journey” (see Suggested Reading), I wrote that “I was captivated by the idea that macro-level social change can change individual psychologies.” And I was fascinated by Lerner’s discovery that, in rural Turkish villages with low levels of formal schooling and low media exposure, people did not have individual opinions, and therefore opinion polls were meaningless; whereas with influences such as modern technology (media), higher levels of formal education, wealth, and urbanization, implicit shared norms gave way to verbalized personal opinions.

At that time, I never dreamed that I would be able to contribute research that was relevant to this theme. It seemed so large, and an original contribution seemed impossible for a mere freshman in the first semester of her college career. But I was mistaken. In fact, although I did not realize it at the time, my contribution started with my dissertation. For that research, I systematically studied the impact of formal schooling and urbanization on cognitive development and found that formal education led to the rise of personal opinions in children (see Greenfield and Bruner’s 1966 article, “Culture and cognitive growth,” in the International Journal of Psychology).

Perhaps a lack of historical perspective in the disciplines of psychology and anthropology at that time was the reason I did not make the connection between the sociodemographic factor of formal education and historical change. To me, sociodemographic circumstances were simply independent variables rather than indicators of historical change. I did not think about the fact that the influence of schooling had been overlaid on earlier Wolof culture in Senegal by later French colonization.

“Hence, my consideration of social change was implicit rather than explicit in that dissertation research. As my journey unfolds, I think the reader will see that the evolution of my cross-cultural research went from implicit to explicit consideration of the role of social change in human development. It also moved from foreign cultures to the United States, where I became aware not only of immigrant cultures experiencing social and cultural change, but also of the largest sociodemographic shift our society was experiencing, that is, the growth of new communication technologies. I became interested in how both technology and the immigration experience were affecting the trajectory of human development.” (See Mind and Media: The Effects of Television, Video Games, and Computers and “Applying developmental psychology to bridge cultures in the classroom” in my Suggested Reading list. Here I am quoting my “Autobiographical Journey,” also in my Suggested Reading list.)

The especially unanticipated development is how my research has returned full force to the theme introduced by Lerner’s book. This year (2023), with an international group of collaborators, I published an article in PLOS1 demonstrating that the fall of Communism in Romania, and its subsequent effect of developing a robust media environment, led to the growth of personal opinions in that country. A similar theme animates my collaborative research on social change experienced by Bedouins in Israel (see collaborative articles in International Journal of Psychology and Journal of Cross-Cultural Psychology).

Returning to my freshman year in college: I took another class that had lasting influence – Tom Pettigrew’s course on race and intergroup relations. There I learned that my parents were self-hating Jews, a concept that explained why they had removed me from the social world of immigrant Jewish families with strong religious practices. Although I now had a label for my parents’ behavior, the fact remained that I could not be accepted in a world that had socially segregated them, and was continuing to do that to their children. This situation reinforced my belief that in-group cohesion, identity, and culture are crucial to psychological well-being, especially when one is experiencing exclusion in the surrounding social milieu. This theme is still alive in my research. Graduate student Rocio Burgos-Calvillo and I are exploring the effects of various types of living/learning communities – some sociodemographically or ethnically homogenous, some sociodemographically or ethnically heterogeneous – on students’ peer relations and sense of belonging in the university. (At UCLA, living/learning communities are residential groupings organized around ethnicity, social class, common interests, or religion.)

In his class Tom Pettigrew also introduced me to Gordon Allport’s book, The Nature of Prejudice. There Allport, who later became one of my graduate school teachers, proposed his contact hypothesis: that equal status contact in the service of a common goal leads to improved intergroup relations. Extending that idea was foundational, many decades later, to studying intergroup relations on multiethnic high school teams in Los Angeles County (see, for example, Suzuki, Davis, & Greenfield, Reference Suzuki, Davis and Greenfield2008, in my Suggested Reading list). The goal of that research was to show that equal status contact might be necessary but was not sufficient for good peer relations; cultural values and value differences – notably the difference between more collectivistic and more individualistic values – also play a role in shaping such relations.

In my freshman year I also took Natural Sciences 8, a general education introduction to biology in which E. O. Wilson taught the second semester. I was both stunned and entranced by Wilson’s proposition and evidence that natural selection operated on behavior because behavior has a genetic basis. In other words, behavior could be more or less adaptive in a given environment; more adaptive behavior leading to evolutionary fitness and survival of individuals and genes. That idea eventually led to a long-term collaboration with Sue Savage-Rumbaugh and Heidi Lynn on the development of communication and cognition in our closest living relatives, the chimpanzees and bonobos.

But the direct inspiration that led to my ape language and cognition research came from observations of my own children as they started to communicate with gestures and words. I was initially struck by the fact that my daughter’s early language and communication behavior looked nothing like what Noam Chomsky was positing in the 1960s: the child as a little grammar machine. Her communications were loaded with semantic meaning rather than structured word order; and they clearly integrated gestural, lexical, and all sorts of other nonverbal information.

When Alan and Beatrice Gardner gave a presentation about chimpanzee Washoe’s sign language communication during my year (1973–74) as an assistant professor at the University of California, Santa Cruz, I was finishing a book based on observing two children’s early language and communication, one of whom was my son, my second child. I was struck by the similarities in communication between Washoe and my own children at that point in development. I had hoped to start some cross-species comparative research with the Gardners, but they were not interested.

However, a few years later, after my book, The Structure of Communication in Early Language Development, was published, the Rumbaughs contacted me with an invitation to collaborate; Sue Savage-Rumbaugh told me that my book was her bedside reading because the communication and language phenomena I had described in two human children was exactly what she was observing in Kanzi, a bonobo. Kanzi was being enculturated at the Rumbaugh’s Language Research Center for interspecies communication via a humanly devised visual symbol system.

My theoretical interest was in the communication similarities among the three species that would provide clues to communicative capacities of the common ancestor, thereby laying a foundation for the subsequent evolution of these capacities in the human species. Sue Savage-Rumbaugh and I found developmental similarities in communication among the three species up to about age two; we concluded that in these similarities lay the ontogenetic and phylogenetic foundation for the development of human language over the next five million years or so. Unfortunately, however, the field of ape research has been dominated by researchers taking the opposite strategy: searching to identify species differences that make human beings superior.

Let me now move back to other influences from my college years. In my junior year, I took Jerome Bruner’s graduate seminar where we read three books that have been my intellectual pillars, each in a different way. The more obvious pillars were Vygotsky’s Thought and Language, introducing the Zone of Proximal Development, a concept central to our three-generation study of weaving apprenticeship in a Maya community (see Maynard et al., Reference Maynard, Greenfield, Childs and Weinstock2023 in my Suggested Reading list), as well as to our cross-species research on the evolutionary foundation of human tool apprenticeship (reported in a chapter in Biology, Brains, and Behavior: The Evolution of Human Development). The second book was Inhelder and Piaget’s The Growth of Logical Thinking from Childhood to Adolescence. (Explicitly or implicitly Piaget’s basic concept of development – that later stages build on earlier ones – is everywhere in my research, theorizing, and teaching.) The less obvious pillar was Miller, Galanter, and Pribram’s Plans and the Structure of Behavior (which inspired my collaborative grammar of action research in the 1970s with students such as Barbara Goodson at Stanford and Jessica Beagles-Roos at UCLA).

Interplay between Life and Work

As noted in my abstract, I have always been interested in research that was relevant to real life and the real world. I was never interested in phenomena that were confined to behavior in a laboratory. My research ended up connecting not just with other people’s lives but with my own life. That is, my research influenced my life; and my life influenced my research. This was evident in the origins of my research on the development of language and communication described earlier. More examples of the intertwining of life and work is my closing theme.

The most innovative and groundbreaking component of my early media research was the thesis, presented in Mind and Media and confirmed subsequently, that video games promote certain types of cognitive development, such as parallel processing, spatial skills, and facility with iconic representation. Here inspiration came from my son, Matthew, a video game enthusiast. When I tried to play with him, I realized that I was really bad at the games and wondered what cognitive skills he, a young teenager, had that I, grown-up with a PhD, lacked. I think I also wanted to show that my son’s game playing was not a waste of time, a view that was the prevailing opinion at that time. The video game chapter of Mind and Media was the immediate result; and a collection of empirical studies of the cognitive effects of video games followed some years later in a special issue of the Journal of Applied Developmental Psychology.

That was another example of how my child’s behavior shaped my research. Let me now move back in time to show an influence in the opposite direction, how my research influenced my child-rearing. In one of my dissertation field sites, the Wolof village of Taiba N’diaye in Senegal, I could not help but notice that, in the typically polygynous families, mothers always had a co-wife to hand their baby to. When I had my first child, I realized that, in my self-contained nuclear family household, including a husband busy with a medical career, I had no one to hand my baby to. That situation led to my desire to raise children in a more communal setting. When we moved from Boston to California, I was able to realize that vision, and my children were raised into adolescence in a series of communal households. I saw that pattern of child-rearing as part of the liberation of professional mothers as the Women’s Movement emerged during the 1970s.

But I also realized that interdependence in Senegal was more than an isolated pattern of behavior, that collectivism was fundamental to the African worldview and manifest itself not only in child-rearing but in cognition and values. This was a major theme of my first publication, co-authored with Bruner, “Culture and cognitive growth.” Although the article was reprinted many times, the fundamental nature of my insight went largely unnoticed in the field. I knew it was an important and paradigm-changing insight, but I was too young and inexperienced to realize that I should run with it, amplifying the impact with additional research and writing. Nor did I know exactly what to do with these concepts to develop them further. Twenty years later, Harry Triandis did run with the cultural constructs of individualism and collectivism, his impact in mainstream psychology greatly amplified by Markus and Kitayama’s more behavioral concepts of independence and interdependence, in their oft-cited 1991 publication. Around that time, I returned to the theme of individualism and collectivism, in the edited book, Cross-Cultural Roots of Minority Child Development and research on the cross-cultural value conflict experienced by family-centered Latinx families who had emigrated from Mexico and Central America to the individualistic cultural surround of Southern California.

Eventually I realized that collectivistic values and practices were an adaptation to one type of ecology, the rural subsistence village where child learning takes place in the family, and that individualism was an adaptation to a different type of ecology, an urban commercial environment where education takes place mainly at school. And that was the inception of my theory of social change, cultural evolution, and human development introduced in a 2009 publication. (See Suggested Reading.)

Then an unexpected, recent set of circumstances occurred: when COVID hit and the lockdown began, I started to see seemingly automatic responses in myself and my family that moved our life toward the life I had observed and participated in my second rural village field site, a Maya village in Chiapas, Mexico. I started a vegetable garden, something that I had had no interest in earlier in life; my grandchildren started helping with cooking and cleaning at home, things they had never done before the pandemic. I started worrying about dying and about my family dying. Simultaneously, I realized that my multilevel theory of social change, cultural evolution, and human development predicted all these shifts: that under conditions of increased mortality risk and narrowing of the social world, mortality would become more psychologically salient, values would become more collectivistic, people would increase participation in subsistence activities, and children would contribute to family subsistence needs, what David Lancy calls “the chore curriculum.” So I wanted to test the generality of these responses.

We had done prior research showing that the 2008 Great Recession moved adolescent and young adult values in the collectivistic direction. Based on familiarity with this research, Genavee Brown contacted me to collaborate on testing this theory by studying the effects of COVID. We put together her facility with the online survey tool, Qualtrix, with my theoretical perspective and experience living and researching in a subsistence Maya village. In our resulting large-scale survey study, all the responses to the pandemic predicted by my theory were borne out: increasing mortality salience, increasing subsistence activities and values, and increasing family interdependence, including increasing expectations for children to help with household maintenance activities such as cooking for the family.

Perhaps most amazing was that when my oldest grandson, Noah Evers, came home from college during the lockdown, we started collaborating on further COVID research. He had the idea and researched the technical tools for an online study of behavior during COVID. We tested and confirmed the findings of the survey with a national study of Google searches, Twitter, and other social media. Our results confirmed increases in mortality salience, collectivistic values, and subsistence activities during the first seventy days of COVID-19. We carried out and published the study, with Noah’s younger brother Gabriel as the third author. Noah mentored Gabriel, still in high school, in statistical analysis; and Gabriel carried out all the analyses. With more than a billion data points, the study has had major public impact. Noah became a valued collaborator, and we have been working together ever since.

Just as I observed extended families working together across generations in the socially isolated Maya village of Nabenchauk in Chiapas, Mexico, with low life expectancy, my own life moved in that direction under the increased mortality threat and retraction of the social world produced by the coronavirus pandemic. Besides becoming a collaborator, Noah became my neighbor in Los Angeles during the lockdown – grandmother and grandson working together and living nearby was similar to families in Nabenchauk where neighbors worked together across the generations. Still under lockdown, we continued collaborating the next year. And a year later I followed Noah back to Cambridge, MA, where I became a Visiting Scholar in Human Evolutionary Biology at Harvard, and Noah eventually returned to Harvard College. The three of us have been collaborating ever since; the whole process an amazing and unexpected gift!

In conclusion, I would have to say that my life and research have gone full circle, from studying cognitive development in a rural subsistence village in West Africa, to experiencing – and empirically demonstrating – that parenting, child behavior, adult activities, and values in a rural subsistence ecology are quickly revived in modern human beings when such responses are needed to adapt to survival threat and a contraction of the social world. That, in turn, further reinforces my belief in the value of a perspective that focuses on the dynamic interaction of social change, cultural evolution, and human development, a perspective that has emerged in the course of the story I’ve had the opportunity to communicate here.