Universal pluralism: Appreciating and exploring both similarity and difference across people and cultures.

Authors

Tim Lomas

Published in

The American psychologist. Jul 06, 2026. Epub Jul 06, 2026.

Abstract

Are people from the world's various cultures essentially the same or fundamentally different? Answers to this perennial conundrum can sometimes be forced through habits of binary logic into either universalism or pluralism/relativism. However, this article argues that both are true, a perspective we might call universal pluralism: There really are universals experienced by people globally due to the existential condition of being human, but these universals can be expressed and experienced in meaningfully different ways depending on the cultural context. The article moreover argues that most scholars would endorse some variant of this perspective-even if they might have an academic commitment to focusing on either universal or relativistic dynamics-so it is a unifying pathway for the field in studying and conceptualizing cross-cultural phenomena. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2026 APA, all rights reserved).

PMID:
42406455
Bibliographic data and abstract were imported from PubMed on 06 Jul 2026.

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