Cultural Judgment: Toward an Intellectual Foundation

Cultural Judgment is developed as a conceptual framework for understanding how people judge and act in culturally complex situations. The paper begins from a problem in intercultural practice: cultural knowledge can enlarge the range of possible interpretations of behavior, but it cannot by itself determine which interpretation deserves the greatest weight in a particular case. The paper develops Cultural Judgment as the capacity to make sufficiently warranted and revisable judgments in culturally complex situations despite incomplete certainty. It introduces CuPS — Culture × Person × Situation as an explanatory framework for examining behavior without prematurely reducing it to cultural explanations. Particular attention is given to the distinction between observation, interpretation, evaluation, explanation, judgment, and action, and to the culturally situated background from which judgments themselves are made. The argument draws on practical wisdom, judgment and decision making, reflective judgment, sensemaking, and intercultural theory while distinguishing Cultural Judgment from cultural knowledge and intercultural competence alone. It also introduces Connecting Contradictions as a way of examining situations in which apparently contradictory but interdependent logics of action remain simultaneously relevant. The working paper provides the theoretical foundation for a broader research and practice agenda concerned with the quality of judgment in intercultural situations.