I love watching baseball.

I especially love watching baseball across and within different cultures. Despite the sport’s universality—the game itself is played the same way globally—there are notable differences in the behaviors of the players and the fans that illuminate cultural variations.

For this reason, whenever I spend time in my motherland of South Korea, I enjoy attending baseball games and soaking up the experience. And it’s not just me; my American students who study abroad in South Korea consistently rate attending baseball games as one of their favorite activities in Seoul.

In my recently published book, Cultural Diversity and Psychology: A Christian Engagement (Baker Academic), I reflected on different types of individualism and collectivism that are evident in American (MLB) and Korean baseball games. I used this comparison to support the argument that the broad collectivism-individualism framework that we often default to when explaining cultural differences is not as compelling as more precise discussions of collectivism or individualism (e.g., vertical aspects; see Triandis & Gelfand, 1998).

Here is an excerpt from the book:

Returning to baseball, one of my favorite leisure activities when spending time in South Korea is to attend a professional baseball game. The rules of the sport itself are pretty much the same around the........

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