Hello!

My name is Alexander Kirchner-Häusler, and since October 2024 I have started my new position as Program-Specific Assistant Professor at the Institute for the Future of Human Society, Kyoto University.

I am a cultural psychologist by training and my work primarily focuses on the many connections between culture, relationships, and wellbeing, exploring how cultural contexts shape our psychological tendencies, social dynamics, and health. A central idea throughout my work is that the socio-cultural contexts we inhabit are fundamental to understanding how we live (e.g., our thoughts, feelings, actions) and how we live well: We all do not just exist “in a general way”, but are embedded in a complex web of “cultures” (e.g., our family, gender, social class, country) that shape our psyche and social worlds. These cultural differences are not random, but systematic and meaningful – they reflect the central values, goals, and concerns of our environment and aligning ourselves with these ideas can help us navigate the demands and tasks of our culture.

At the moment, I am particularly interested in following up my earlier work along three different branches of research:

1. Exploring the role of person-culture (mis)fit for positive psychological outcomes (e.g., happiness, health, satisfied relationships)
2. Understanding cultural differences and dynamics at the meso-level of analysis (e.g., small communities, social networks, groups)
3. Transferring insights from cultural psychology to improve science communication and solve real world problems

To this end, I employ a variety of methodological (e.g., standardized experiments, large-scale surveys) and statistical (e.g., multilevel structural equation modeling, congruence analysis, longitudinal dyadic data) approaches and draw upon diverse cultural contexts (e.g., Anglo-West, Mediterranean, and East-Asia), with the explicit intent to move psychology beyond a universalist, Western-dominated perspective towards a globally representative and fair science.

Personal page: https://ifohs.kyoto-u.ac.jp/en/archives/member/alexander-kirchner-hausler