Hillary Clinton and her supporters have been talking about the 18 million cracks in the glass ceiling. It is wonderful to see opportunities open up around the country for women to take part in every facet of life that was traditionally dominated by men. Yet, we still find that women are under-represented in math and science fields.

We know that girls are less likely to go into math and "hard science" careers than boys. There are lots of reactions people have to this news. Some, like Lawrence Summers (who became the former president of Harvard in large part because this remark in 2005) suggested that women may not have the same innate abilities in math as men. Others suggest that the school system is somehow failing girls in school. Still others are concerned about social pressure that girls might feel to shy away from looking smart when there are boys around.

In elementary school, boys and girls are about even in their performance in math and science. By middle school, girls start to lag behind, and few women go on to pursue math in college. What is going on?

Last post, I talked about how doing things to save the environment is often difficult for people. Often, environmentally sustainable actions require some sacrifice in the short-term in order to achieve a long-term benefit. People find these short-term/long-term tradeoffs difficult.

That said, when we look around the world, there are people who eat only foods grown locally. They use low-water washing machines. They take the bus to work. They do make sacrifices for the environment. What is up with these people?

Suddenly, the Prius is everywhere. You turn on the news, and there is another story of the long waiting lists at local Toyota dealers to buy a new Prius. One dealer holds a drawing every time a new batch of cars comes in to give someone the opportunity to buy one of the handful of hybrids that arrives.

So, why the sudden rush? The Prius has been out for years now. Al Gore's An Inconvenient Truth is old news. So why aren't we all doing our part?

Psychological research on motivation has proposed a lot of strange theories. Perhaps the strangest (to my mind) is Terror Management Theory. I realize that this sounds like a psychological theory that ought to be part of the Department of Homeland Security, but actually, it proposes that people have specific motivational mechanisms that permit them to deal with the fact that they can contemplate their own mortality.

So, when I got this week's New Yorker magazine, they printed a series of letters about the infamous Obama cover. In one way or another, the letters were about outrage. Some people were legitimately outraged by the cover. Some were trying to figure out whether they should have been outraged. Some were skeptical of the outrage generated by the cover. (If you have been hiding under a rock for the past few weeks, here's a copy of that cover.)

There are two issues I from the psychology perspective that are worth addressing. First, what sorts of things in our psychological world lead to this kind of outrage. Second, there were clearly more people who expressed outrage at this magazine cover than actually felt it. What psychological purpose is served by expressing this sort of outrage?

Is Obama a flip-flopper? The asymmetry between the information people use to make judgments about themselves and others has an impact on the way people assess candidates who change their opinion on issues over time.

So far, we have talked about some differences in the way people think across cultures. Then, we took a look at reasons why it is important to study cultural differences. In this post, we'll consider some factors that might lead to differences in thinking across cultures.

In the first post in this series, I talked about some basic cultural differences in thinking that have been uncovered over the past 20 years. Before we start a discussion about why these differences might occur, there is another why question to ask. Why bother studying cultural differences in the first place? After all, this work is hard to do, and it is often expensive as well. Besides, we're still learning a lot just by doing research with Western University students.