What It Takes to Make Sense of the World: The Relationships Between Culture and Sensemaking

Societies are naturally engaged in a perpetual endeavor to construct a shared reality by making sense of socially significant information. The role of culture in this process of sensemaking, however, remains surprisingly understudied. To fill this gap, we investigated how cross-cultural differences predict overt sensemaking in the activity of the world largest encyclopedia—Wikipedia, which explicitly aims to create a shared system of meaning. Adopting a longitudinal approach, we have conducted a series of hierarchical linear models and found that across 67 countries and different conceptualizations of culture, the cultural emphasis on independence, autonomy, and self-expression (individualism), as opposed to interdependence, conformity, and self-restriction (collectivism), was positively associated with engagement in sensemaking and its increase over a 19-year period between 2007 and 2025. In addition, distinguishing between the “sense” and “making” components of sensemaking revealed that cultural emphasis on control was associated with the increase in making but the decrease in sense created over time. These findings have significant implications for cross-cultural communication and collaboration in an increasingly globalized world.