Matthew R. Sanderson Martha E. Mather Melinda D. Daniels Jason S. Bergtold Joseph Aistrup Jessica L. Heier Stamm David A. Haukos Kyle R. Douglas-Mankin Aleksey Y. Sheshukov David Lopez-Carr Marcellus M. Caldas 2015 <p id="p-2" class="flushleft">Integrating the analysis of natural and social systems to achieve sustainability has been an international scientific goal for years (<span class="xref-bibr">1</span>,<span>&nbsp;</span><span class="xref-bibr">2</span>). However, full integration has proven challenging, especially in regard to the role of culture (<span class="xref-bibr">3</span>), which is often missing from the complex sustainability equation. To enact policies and practices that can achieve sustainability, researchers and policymakers must do a better job of accounting for culture, difficult though this task may be.</p><p id="p-3">The concept of culture is complex, with hundreds of definitions that for years have generated disagreement among social scientists (<span class="xref-bibr">4</span>). Understood at the most basic level, culture constitutes shared values, beliefs, and norms through which people “see,” interpret, or give meaning to ideas, actions, and environments. Culture is often used synonymously with “worldviews” or “cosmologies” (<span class="xref-bibr">5</span>,<span>&nbsp;</span><span class="xref-bibr">6</span>) to explain the patterned ways of assigning meanings and interpretations among individuals within groups. Used in this way, culture has been found to have only limited empirical support as an explanation of human risk perception (<span class="xref-bibr">7</span>,<span>&nbsp;</span><span class="xref-bibr">8</span>) and environmentalism (<span class="xref-bibr">9</span>).</p> application/pdf 10.1073/pnas.1510010112 en National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America Opinion: Endogenizing culture in sustainability science research and policy article