Climate, Affluence, and Culture

Everyone, everyday, everywhere has to cope with climatic cold or heat to satisfy survival needs, using money. This point of departure led to a decade of innovative research on the basis of the tenet that climate and affluence influence each other's impact on culture. Evert Van de Vliert discovered survival cultures in poor countries with demanding cold or hot climates, self-expression cultures in rich countries with demanding cold or hot climates, and easygoing cultures in poor and rich countries with temperate climates. These findings have implications for the cultural consequences of global warming and local poverty. Climate protection and poverty reduction are used in combination to sketch four scenarios for shaping cultures, from which the world community has to make a principal and principled choice soon.

Evert Van de Vliert is an organizational psychologist with experience as internal (1967–1971) and external organization consultant (1977–1983). After receiving his PhD from the Free University in Amsterdam in 1973, he held teacher and researcher positions at the same university, at the University of St. Andrews in Scotland, and at the Royal Military Academy in The Netherlands. He served as member of many editorial boards, as chairman of the Dutch Research Association of Social and Organizational Psychologists (1984–1989), as research director of the Kurt Lewin Institute (1993–1996), and as member of the international advisory board of the Center for Social and Economic Behavior of the Chinese Academy of Sciences (2001–2006). Professor Van de Vliert has published more than 200 journal articles, chapters, and books including Complex Interpersonal Conflict Behaviour: Theoretical Frontiers (Psychology Press, 1997) and Climate, Affluence, and Culture (Cambridge University Press, 2009). He was appointed as Companion in the Order of Orange-Nassau in 2004, and received the Lifetime Achievement Award of the International Association for Conflict Management in 2005. At present, he is Professor Emeritus of Organizational and Applied Social Psychology at the University of Groningen in The Netherlands, and Research Professor of Work and Organizational Psychology at the University of Bergen in Norway.