The research team, led by Ekaterina Grigorievna Tikhomirova of MEPhI’s Department of Philosophy, Ontology and Theory of Cognition, together with Roman Viktorovich Dushkin, Aleksey Alekseevich Kuzmin and Pavel Alexandrovich Cherepkov, set out to detect what they call civilisational profiles in the responses of six current models: YandexGPT and GigaChat, positioned as Russian developments; ChatGPT, a leading American model; Grok, an American open-architecture model; and DeepSeek and Qwen, two Chinese systems. The selection was deliberate. The authors chose models on the principle of civilisational representativeness, so that each of three broad cultural traditions would be represented by at least one system. Their initial hypothesis was that a model’s origin would correlate with the value profile it reproduces when confronted with questions about family, career, faith, beauty, labour, power and the nature of the human being.

That hypothesis mapped three distinct profiles onto the model landscape. A Western profile was expected to be individualist, grounded in personal autonomy and rational-contractual ethics. A Russian or Eurasian profile was expected to be collectivist, foregrounding duty, service and rootedness in community. A Chinese or Confucian profile was expected to be hierarchically collectivist, centred on family harmony and social stability. These categories draw on a long tradition in cross-cultural psychology, including Geert Hofstede’s comparative work on cultural dimensions and Shalom Schwartz’s theory of basic values, both of which appear in the study’s theoretical scaffolding. The question was whether the training pipelines behind modern chatbots preserve such differences or erase them.

To find out, the team developed an original methodological instrument: a civilisational profile detection method based on the coding of lexical markers of value systems. Rather than asking models abstract survey questions, which earlier work has shown can be unreliable, the researchers probed the systems in ways that force value commitments to surface in natural language. Each model was tested in two language modes, Russian and English, across three prompt types. The first was a request for advice in a situation of moral choice. The second was a request to conceptualise a value-laden term, such as justice or freedom. The third was a normative evaluation of a described action. The design meant that every model produced twelve distinct response sets, and the vocabulary of those responses could be systematically coded for the markers of individualist, collectivist and hierarchically collectivist value orientations.

The principal finding is stark. All six models, regardless of their country of origin or the language of the conversation, reproduced the Western civilisational profile as the dominant response strategy. The Russian models did not answer like Russian collectivists when asked in Russian. The Chinese models did not foreground Confucian family harmony when prompted in their developers’ cultural idiom. Instead, the same emphasis on individual choice, personal rights and contractual reasoning appeared across the board. For the authors, this is evidence of what they term worldview sovereignty being surrendered: the value hierarchy a model encodes is not determined by the culture of its developers but by something deeper in the data and training process that all major labs share.

That something is captured in the study’s central theoretical contribution, a concept the authors call worldview data annotation. The idea is that a hierarchy of values, norms and cultural orientations is encoded in the training corpus itself and then reproduced by the model as if it were neutral and self-evident. In other words, the moral framing of a chatbot’s answers is not an explicit design decision anyone made; it is an annotation layer written invisibly into billions of documents, most of which, in the corpora used to train frontier models, carry the assumptions of Western liberal individualism. Because the annotation is implicit, neither developers nor users notice it, and the model presents its inherited worldview as the natural, universal way to think about truth, honesty, justice, freedom, courage and valour.

The result fits into a rapidly growing body of research on cultural bias in language models. Earlier studies have probed pre-trained models for cross-cultural differences in values, measured cultural alignment against Hofstede’s dimensions, and documented how prompt language and explicit cultural framing affect model outputs. The Moral Machine experiment, published in Nature in 2018, showed long before the chatbot era that moral preferences vary dramatically across cultures, and subsequent work has asked whether large language models inherit or flatten those differences. Recent studies on collectivism and individualism in model judgments, on cultural bias measured through everyday scenarios, and on the homogenising effect of AI on culture have all pointed in a similar direction. The new study adds a cross-lingual, cross-civilisational experiment with a reproducible coding method, and its answer is that the flattening wins.

Why does the training pipeline override the culture of the developer? The authors’ framework suggests several converging mechanisms. The dominant pretraining corpora for large language models are heavily weighted toward English-language internet text, much of it produced in or shaped by Western contexts. Alignment and fine-tuning procedures, including the human feedback that teaches models to be helpful and harmless, tend to be carried out by teams and annotator pools whose own ethical assumptions reflect the same individualist baseline. And the technical vocabulary of AI ethics itself, with its emphasis on autonomy, transparency and individual rights, is largely a Western philosophical product, as surveys of global AI ethics guidelines have documented. A model built in Moscow or Hangzhou is therefore trained, aligned and evaluated inside an infrastructure whose moral defaults were set elsewhere.

The practical implications reach developers and regulators alike. For developers, the study offers a reproducible methodology for worldview auditing: a way to test, systematically and before deployment, which value profile a system actually reproduces when users ask it about moral dilemmas, contested concepts and normative judgments. Auditing for bias has so far focused largely on demographic fairness; the authors argue that cultural and civilisational alignment deserves the same scrutiny. For regulators, the findings complicate the notion that AI sovereignty can be achieved simply by building national models. If a domestically developed chatbot answers moral questions with an imported value system, then technical independence does not amount to cultural independence. Policy frameworks such as UNESCO’s Recommendation on the Ethics of Artificial Intelligence, which explicitly calls for pluralism and respect for cultural diversity, may require instruments like worldview audits to be enforceable in practice.

There is also a message for everyday users, and it is perhaps the most viral implication of the research: the chatbot on your phone is not a neutral oracle. When it advises you on a family conflict, a career decision or an ethical dilemma, it is not drawing on the accumulated wisdom of your own tradition. It is reproducing a specific, identifiable moral framework, one that prizes individual autonomy above duty, service and community rootedness, and it does so in whichever language you happen to speak. The study’s authors frame this as a problem of sovereign morality: the question of who holds the authority to define right and wrong when a machine answers on humanity’s behalf. Their experiment shows that, for now, that authority is concentrated in one civilisational tradition, and that neither geography nor language has been enough to change it. Making artificial intelligence genuinely plural, the study suggests, will require not just new models in new countries, but a deliberate re-examination of the data, the annotation practices and the ethical assumptions baked into the entire pipeline.

Subject of Research: Cultural and moral value bias in large language models across languages and countries of origin

Article Title: Worldview sovereignty and sovereign morality in LLMs: a cross-lingual experiment

Article References: Tikhomirova, E. G., Viktorovich, D. R., Alekseevich, K. A., & Cherepkov, P. A. (2026). Worldview sovereignty and sovereign morality in LLMs: a cross-lingual experiment. SN Social Sciences, 6(10), Article 515. https://doi.org/10.1007/s43545-026-01803-z

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1007/s43545-026-01803-z

Keywords: large language models, cultural bias, AI ethics, worldview auditing, civilisational profile, cross-lingual evaluation, individualism, collectivism, moral judgment, training data, AI sovereignty, ChatGPT

The team used a descriptive phenomenological approach, a method designed to capture the essence of lived experience as participants themselves describe it. Between October 2024 and May 2025, the researchers conducted in-depth, semi-structured interviews with twelve adults, six women and six men aged 22 to 41, recruited from six specialized mental health clinics in Kerman. Every participant met DSM-5 criteria for bipolar disorder, had experienced at least two mood episodes requiring treatment, and was in remission at the time of the study. The interviews were analyzed using Colaizzi’s seven-step method, a rigorous qualitative framework that moves from reading raw transcripts to extracting significant statements, formulating meanings, clustering themes, and finally describing the fundamental structure of the phenomenon. Saturation, the point at which no new information emerges, was assessed through team discussions based on code repetition across consecutive interviews.

Four major themes emerged from the analysis. The first describes the psychosocial process of adaptation, a trajectory that begins with denial of the diagnosis, passes through a difficult period of acceptance, and can end in what the authors call legitimation, the point at which a person comes to see their condition as a legitimate part of their identity rather than a shameful secret. This progression is not automatic or linear. Participants described oscillating between acknowledging their illness and pushing it out of awareness, a dynamic that directly affected whether they sought care, stayed on medication, and disclosed their diagnosis to others.

The second theme concerns the individual meaning-making structures through which participants explained why they had become ill. The researchers identified three distinct types of attribution: moral, supernatural, and contextual. Some participants framed their disorder in moral terms, as the consequence of personal failings or wrongdoing, a framing that carried heavy self-blame. Others reached for supernatural explanations, reflecting cultural and religious frameworks in which affliction can be understood as spiritual in origin. Still others offered contextual accounts, locating the cause of their illness in life circumstances, stress, and social conditions. These explanatory models matter clinically, because what a person believes caused their disorder shapes what they think will cure it, and whether a mood stabilizer seems like a rational answer at all.

The third theme, conflict with the treatment system and society, captures the ambivalence many participants felt toward psychiatric medication and the pressure they experienced toward what the authors describe as forced normalization. Ambivalence toward medication is a well-documented phenomenon in bipolar disorder research, but here it acquired a distinctive cultural texture. Participants weighed the benefits of pharmacological stability against concerns about dependency, side effects, and the social meaning of taking psychiatric drugs in a community where mental illness is heavily stigmatized. Forced normalization refers to the societal expectation that patients should appear normal, conceal their condition, and conform to social norms, regardless of their actual wellbeing. The pressure to perform normality, the study suggests, can itself become a barrier to honest engagement with treatment.

The fourth theme maps the context of interpersonal and social relationships, and it is here that the study delivers some of its most striking findings. Family emerged as a double-edged institution, simultaneously the most important source of support and a significant source of restriction. In collectivistic settings such as southeastern Iran, the family is the primary safety net for people with chronic illness, monitoring medication, accompanying patients to clinics, and providing economic and emotional backing. Yet the same closeness enables surveillance and control. Participants described family members who restricted their autonomy, made decisions on their behalf, and treated the diagnosis as a family secret to be guarded rather than an illness to be managed openly. The paradox of support and control, the authors argue, is a defining feature of the lived experience of bipolar disorder in this context.

Gendered pressures added another layer of complexity. Women and men encountered different expectations about how their illness should be expressed, concealed, and accommodated, and these expectations shaped their social functioning and their willingness to disclose. The study also found that participants’ support networks were fragile, often limited to immediate family and vulnerable to rupture. Because stigma operates at the level of the family as well as the individual, a diagnosis could affect marriage prospects, family reputation, and social standing, giving relatives strong incentives to enforce concealment. The result is a support system that is indispensable and constraining at the same time.

Running through all four themes, the researchers identified a single fundamental structure that unifies the lived experience of their participants: a continuous dialectical tension between acceptance and concealment, the paradox of support and control, and the interplay between individual agency and social structure. Patients are constantly negotiating how much of themselves to reveal, to whom, and under what conditions. Social stigma, the authors conclude, is the central and pervasive force that binds these tensions together, shaping participants’ identities, their relationships, and their engagement with treatment. Stigma is not an external add-on to the illness experience in this setting; it is woven into every decision about medication, disclosure, marriage, work, and friendship.

The clinical implications are significant. The authors argue that interventions in this context must be culturally sensitive, targeting stigma reduction, family education, and structured support systems rather than the individual patient alone. Because families function as both caregivers and gatekeepers, educating relatives about the nature of bipolar disorder could transform them from instruments of concealment into partners in care. Because explanatory models are moral and supernatural as well as biomedical, effective treatment engagement requires clinicians to understand and work with patients’ own causal beliefs rather than dismissing them. The study’s authors call for future models of care that integrate biomedical approaches with community-based mechanisms tailored to the cultural realities of southeastern Iran, a region where specialized mental health resources are concentrated in urban clinics and where the social costs of a psychiatric label remain high.

For the international research community, the study is a reminder that bipolar disorder is never experienced in a cultural vacuum. Most of what psychiatry knows about illness perceptions and treatment adherence comes from Western, individualistic societies, where the dominant model assumes an autonomous patient making independent decisions about care. This research from Kerman shows what happens when that assumption fails: the patient is embedded in a family and community whose interests, fears, and reputations are entangled with the illness itself. Understanding recovery in such settings means understanding the dialectic the researchers describe, in which every step toward acceptance is shadowed by the pull of concealment, and every offer of support carries the possibility of control. The twelve voices captured in this study suggest that improving outcomes for people with bipolar disorder in collectivistic cultures will depend less on new medications than on changing the social conditions under which the illness is lived.

Subject of Research: Illness perceptions, treatment attitudes, and social relationships among adults with bipolar disorder in southeastern Iran

Article Title: Illness perceptions, treatment attitudes, and social relationships among clinic-attending adults with bipolar disorder in Kerman, Iran: a qualitative study

Article References: Garrusi, B., Garousi, S., & Raaii, F. (2026). Illness perceptions, treatment attitudes, and social relationships among clinic-attending adults with bipolar disorder in Kerman, Iran: a qualitative study. BMC Psychiatry. https://doi.org/10.1186/s12888-026-08722-6

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1186/s12888-026-08722-6

Keywords: bipolar disorder, qualitative research, illness perceptions, social stigma, cultural psychiatry, Iran, family relationships, treatment attitudes, phenomenology, mental health, collectivism, medication adherence

The study arrives at a moment when developmental psychology is expanding its map of the lifespan. Established adulthood, a concept formalized by researchers including Carolyn Mehta and Jeffrey Arnett in 2020, describes the decades when people carry peak responsibilities on multiple fronts at once: careers, young children, aging parents, and mortgages. Yet most purpose research has focused either on adolescents, where the field originated with William Damon’s work on youth purpose, or on older adults. How purpose forms and reforms during the pressured middle decades, and how it does so in a collectivist, rapidly modernizing society, has remained largely uncharted territory.

Bhushan and Kulkarni approached the question with a social constructivist qualitative design, interviewing women from urban India about how their sense of purpose had evolved since marriage and through midlife. The interviews were analyzed using reflexive thematic analysis, the widely used method developed by Virginia Braun and Victoria Clarke, in which researchers systematically code interview material and distill recurring patterns while remaining attentive to their own interpretive role. The choice of a qualitative approach is not incidental. Purpose, in this framing, is not a fixed score on a questionnaire but a narrative that people construct, defend, and revise in dialogue with the cultural worlds they inhabit.

The central finding is that marriage, a seemingly universal transition, split the women into three distinct pathways. The first group internalized traditional roles: they absorbed the expectations that came with being a wife and daughter-in-law in an Indian household and made those roles the core of their purpose, finding genuine fulfillment in family stewardship. The second group experienced conflict. For them, the collision between cultural expectations and personal or professional aspirations produced a period of reappraisal, in which they questioned inherited scripts and negotiated, sometimes painstakingly, for space to pursue their own goals. The third group sustained strong professional identities throughout, balancing work and family while actively redefining what purpose meant to them on their own terms.

That three-way split matters because it dismantles the assumption that women in collectivist settings respond to traditional norms in a single, predictable way. The same cultural script, delivered in the same city and the same social class, produced conformity in one woman, rebellion in another, and creative synthesis in a third. The authors frame this as evidence of a bidirectional exchange between person and context: culture shapes what women believe is possible, but women, through their choices and resistance, also reshape how those cultural expectations operate within their families. Purpose, in this view, is constructed at the seam between individual agency and social structure, not inside either one alone.

Beneath the three pathways, the analysis identified common factors that enabled purposeful adaptation. Competence, the felt sense of being capable in the domains that mattered to them, gave women the confidence to claim new ground. Social support, from spouses, extended family, friends, or colleagues, provided the practical and emotional scaffolding without which renegotiation of roles often collapses. And perhaps most strikingly, strategic reappraisal of roles emerged as a key adaptive tool: rather than simply rejecting traditional duties or submitting to them wholesale, many women reframed those roles, redefining what a good wife, mother, or daughter-in-law could be in ways that left room for personal ambition. The strategy bridges tradition and agency rather than choosing between them.

Midlife emerged from the data as a pivotal turning point. Women in the older cohort described a noticeable increase in autonomy as children grew and household demands eased, and they used that freedom deliberately: reclaiming interests deferred decades earlier, investing in their own health and learning, and redirecting energy toward contributions that extended beyond the family to community wellbeing. This pattern echoes classic accounts of midlife as a period of generativity, but it adds a culturally specific texture. For these women, midlife was not a crisis but a reclamation window, a developmental opening in which purpose could be reassembled on terms they had not enjoyed at thirty.

The study also draws a conceptual line that has grown increasingly important in positive psychology: the distinction between purpose and meaning. Following work by Frank Martela and Michael Steger, the authors treat meaning in life as a broader construct encompassing coherence, the sense that life makes sense, and significance, the sense that life matters, while purpose is narrower and more directional: a self-organized, long-term aim that organizes behavior and effort. A woman may find her life deeply meaningful through family and faith without holding an articulated purpose, and conversely, a strong purpose can coexist with periods of confusion about what life means. Keeping the two apart, the authors argue, allows researchers and clinicians to see more precisely where women struggle and where they flourish.

The cultural setting is not a backdrop to these findings but part of their mechanism. India combines strong collectivist family structures, in which marriage often merges households and expectations, with one of the fastest economic and social transformations in the world. Urban, educated, middle-class women stand at the sharpest edge of that collision: they are often the first generation in their families with sustained careers, negotiating with in-laws and spouses whose own scripts were formed in a more traditional era. The authors position their findings within relational-developmental-systems theory, the tradition associated with Urie Bronfenbrenner and Richard Lerner, in which development is the product of continuous, reciprocal exchanges between a person and their nested contexts, from the household to the culture at large.

The practical implications reach into mental health policy and workplace design. If purpose is fluid and culturally negotiated, then interventions that assume a single model of a purposeful life, typically an individualistic, career-centered one, will misfire for many women. The authors advocate a culturally sensitive framework of purpose navigation and reorientation: supportive environments, in families, workplaces, and counseling settings, that honor the diversity of purposeful engagement and expect it to change across adulthood. In a society where women’s roles are being renegotiated generation by generation, the study suggests that wellbeing depends less on choosing between tradition and self-fulfillment than on having the competence, support, and space to keep rewriting the bargain as life unfolds.

Subject of Research: Purpose in life development among urban Indian married women across established and middle adulthood

Article Title: Framing a Sense of Purpose During Adulthood: A Study of Urban-Indian Married Women

Article References: Bhushan, O., & Kulkarni, M. (2026). Framing a Sense of Purpose During Adulthood: A Study of Urban-Indian Married Women. Journal of Adult Development. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10804-026-09577-7

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1007/s10804-026-09577-7

Keywords: purpose in life, urban Indian women, established adulthood, middle adulthood, qualitative research, gender roles, thematic analysis, collectivism, marriage, midlife, wellbeing, developmental psychology

The distinction may sound semantic, but its consequences are empirical and measurable. When the research team operationalized collectivism as relationship-based duty—expectations that a person should prioritize family obligations, honor role responsibilities toward kin, community members, and colleagues, and fulfill normative commitments even at personal cost—the resulting measures predicted cultural differences across an extraordinary range of outcomes with markedly greater accuracy than the traditional warmth-based conceptualization. The improvement in predictive validity held across domains including trust behavior, cooperation in economic games, family structure, religious practice, and even broad societal indicators, suggesting that the duty-based definition captures something the older framework systematically missed.

The methodological logic behind the study reflects a growing movement in the social sciences toward construct validation as a first-order concern rather than an afterthought. A psychological construct, the argument goes, earns its keep only insofar as it predicts real-world variation. If two definitions of the same concept yield different levels of predictive power across the same data, the better-performing definition is the one that should be retained. The researchers applied this principle with unusual rigor, comparing the warmth-based and duty-based operationalizations head-to-head across dozens of outcome variables and a battery of statistical specifications designed to ensure that the result was not an artifact of a particular model, sample, or measurement technique.

What emerged was a consistent pattern. Generalized warmth—affection, positivity, and goodwill extended broadly to other people—turned out to be a surprisingly weak predictor of the behaviors and institutions that collectivism was originally invented to explain. Duties within relationships, by contrast, were robustly informative. Societies scoring high on relational duty differed systematically from those scoring low in exactly the ways classical theory anticipated for collectivist cultures: tighter family bonds, stronger norm enforcement, greater willingness to sacrifice individual interests for the group, and distinctive patterns of social organization. The warmth-based measures, in many cases, failed to reproduce these associations at all.

This finding carries an important corrective for a field that has sometimes relied on broad attitudinal survey items as proxies for deep cultural structure. A statement such as people in my society are generally warm and caring, the study suggests, does not travel well across cultures. Its meaning shifts depending on local norms about emotional expression, politeness, and social distance, making it a noisy and potentially biased indicator. A statement about whether one owes specific obligations to one’s parents, in-laws, or neighbors is anchored to concrete, culturally recognizable relationships. Duties are normatively loaded and socially enforced in ways that diffuse goodwill is not, and that normative load is precisely what gives the construct its traction across an enormous diversity of human societies.

The scope of the evidence base is central to the study’s persuasive force. Cross-cultural psychology has long been criticized for building grand theories on comparisons of a handful of nations, most often wealthy Western countries contrasted with a small set of East Asian societies. By extending the analysis to roughly 100 cultures, the researchers subjected their competing definitions to a far more demanding test. A measure that performs well in ten societies may simply have captured a regional quirk. A measure that performs well across a hundred—from large industrialized states to small-scale communities with very different kinship systems, economies, and religious traditions—is far more likely to have latched onto a genuine organizing principle of human social life.

The theoretical implications reach well beyond measurement hygiene. If collectivism is fundamentally about duties in relationships, then the classic individualism-collectivism dimension, one of the most cited constructs in all of psychology, may need to be reconceived as a dimension of relational obligation rather than social affect. This reframing connects the construct more directly to influential contemporary theories of kinship intensity, family ties, and the historical forces—such as the medieval Western Church’s marriage rules—that scholars argue reshaped European societies toward looser family bonds and greater individualism. It also suggests why collectivism has proven so stubbornly multidimensional in previous research: warmth and duty are correlated in many societies, but they are not the same thing, and bundling them has blurred the signal that decades of studies have tried to extract.

There are practical stakes as well. Measures of cultural orientation feed into research on international negotiation, migration, public health, organizational behavior, and economic development. Instruments built on the warmth-based definition may systematically miscalibrate when applied across societies, leading researchers and policymakers astray about which communities will respond to which interventions. A duty-based framework, by showing stronger and more consistent associations with behavior across a global sample, offers those fields a more reliable instrument—and a reminder that the words used in survey questions are not neutral containers but active ingredients in what science is able to detect.

The study is also likely to intensify ongoing debates about measurement validity in psychology, a discipline that has confronted a replication and validity crisis with growing methodological self-awareness. Rather than simply re-running existing studies with larger samples, this work interrogates the conceptual foundations of one of the field’s most widely used constructs and shows that the choice of definition is itself an empirical question with an empirical answer. That approach—treating conceptual definitions as hypotheses to be tested against predictive performance—offers a template that could be applied to other aging constructs in social science, many of which were formalized before modern computational tools made large-scale, multi-society comparison feasible.

None of this means that warmth and goodwill are irrelevant to understanding culture, or that the generations of research built on the classical framework were wasted. Warmth-based and duty-based orientations are related phenomena, and in many contexts both matter. What the new evidence shows is that when scientists want a single construct to carry the explanatory weight that collectivism has been asked to bear—explaining cooperation, family structure, trust, and social organization across the astonishing diversity of a hundred human cultures—the construct that delivers is not generalized warmth but the specific, binding, culturally embedded duties that people owe to the particular others with whom their lives are intertwined. In redefining collectivism that way, the study does more than sharpen a scale; it redirects attention to relationships themselves as the fundamental unit through which culture organizes human behavior.

Subject of Research: Redefining collectivism as relationship-based duties rather than generalized warmth to improve cross-cultural predictive validity

Article Title: Defining collectivism as duties in relationships rather than generalized warmth improves predictive validity in 100 cultures

Article References: Talhelm, T., Wei, L., Sun, R., Medvedev, D., San Martin, Á., Helmy, M., Samekin, A., Zaragoza Scherman, A., English, A. S., The Responsibilism Collaboration Team, Ursu, A., Power, S. A., Chen, C.-W., Zhang, Q., Al-Hoorie, A. H., Osei-Tutu, A., Vuillier, L., Khan, K., Atwood, A., … von Oertzen, T. (2026). Defining collectivism as duties in relationships rather than generalized warmth improves predictive validity in 100 cultures. Nature Human Behaviour. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41562-026-02525-1

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1038/s41562-026-02525-1

Keywords: collectivism, cross-cultural psychology, cultural measurement, relational duties, individualism, predictive validity, social norms, kinship, Nature Human Behaviour, construct validation, family ties, global survey