Years ago I came across a memorable passage in a book titled Metaframeworks (2002) by Douglas Breunlin and Betty MacKune-Karrer.

There is chicken cacciatore, chicken cordon bleu, Southern fried chicken, chicken in mole, chicken with cashews, chicken tandoori, chicken shish-kabob, chicken soup, and so on. What seems to connect us all is the chicken, a universal common denominator that we share.

This post is about the chicken.

As a cross-cultural psychologist, I’m interested in the ways that individuals who grow up in different societies think and behave differently, but I’m also interested in what researchers call psychological universals. These aspects of individual psychological functioning are the same everywhere, no matter where you grow up and no matter who raises you.

Here are six strong candidates for the status of “psychological universal.”

People everywhere perceive colors the same way. With normal vision, everyone can see the entire range of colors and detect the small differences that exist between similar colors like greenish blue and bluish green.[1]

What varies across cultures is not the perception of color but the number of color terms available in the native language. Some languages have only a few color terms—light, dark, and red, for example—while others have dozens.

People everywhere can quickly and accurately read certain facial expressions of........

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