It’s 11:00 pm in Berlin. Not a single car is in sight, yet a pedestrian waits patiently at the crosswalk until the light turns green. Meanwhile, 4,000 miles away in Boston, at rush hour, commuters flout the “Do Not Cross” sign as they dart in front of cabs. To the south, where it’s 8:00 pm in Sao Paulo, locals are frolicking in string bikinis in public parks. Up in Silicon Velley, it’s mid-afternoon and T-shirted employees at Google are playing a game of ping pong. And in Geneva, Switzerland, at the Swiss bank UBS, which for years mandated a 44-page dress code, executives burning the midnight oil have barely loosened their ties.

               We may tease Germans for being excessively orderly or Brazilians for showing too much skin, but we rarely consider how these differences came about. Far beyond dress codes and pedestrian patterns, people’s social differences run deep and broad—from politics to parenting, management to worship, and vocations to vacations. In the past several thousand years humanity has evolved to the point where there now exists 195 countries, and more than 7,000 languages and many thousands of religions. Even within a single nation, such as the United States, there are countless differences in fashion, dialect, morals, and political orientation—sometimes among those who live in close proximity. The diversity of human behavior is astonishing, especially since 96% of the human genome is identical to that of chimpanzees whose lifestyles, unlike humans, are far more similar across communities.

               We rightly celebrate diversity and condemn division, yet we’re shockingly ignorant of what underlies both of these things: culture. Culture is a stubborn mystery of our experience and one of the last uncharted frontiers. We’ve used our big brains to accomplish unbelievable technical feats. We’ve discovered the laws of gravity, split the atom, wired the Earth, eradicated fatal diseases, mapped the human genome, invented the iPhone, and even trained dogs to ride skateboards. But somehow, despite all of our technical prowess, we’ve made surprisingly little progress in understanding something equally as important: our own cultural differences. 

               Why are we so divided, despite the fact that we’re more technologically connected than ever? Culture is at the heart of our divisions, and we need to know more about it. For years, policy experts and lay people alike have struggled to find a deep underlying factor to explain our sprawling, complex cultural traits and distinctions. Many times we focus on superficial characteristics that are the "symptoms of culture." We try to explain our cultural divides in terms of geography, thinking that people behave the way they do because they live in blue states or red states, in rural or urban areas, in Western or Eastern nations, in the developing or developed world. We wonder if culture can be explained by differences in religion or our different “civilizations.” These distinctions have typically left us with more questions than answers because they miss the deeper basis of our differences—they don’t get at the underlying primal template of culture.

               A more compelling answer has been hiding in plain sight. Just as simple principles can explain a whole lot in fields such as physics, biology, and mathematics, many cultural differences and divides can be explained through a simple shift in perspective.