Dominant Culture
What is Dominant Culture?
Dominant culture refers to the collective norms, values, and practices upheld by the prevailing social group, influencing societal standards and expectations.
The Basic Idea
Take a minute to consider the social fabric of your environment. How would you describe it? Perhaps you would focus on the people you encounter and consider diversity – different ethnicities, religious beliefs, or political affiliations. What if you were asked to describe the “average” person? Your answer may vary depending on your experiences and how you define “average”.
Specifically, your answer is likely to reflect the dominant culture, which is the group that holds more power relative to other groups in society. Dominance can come in the form of religion, language, ethnicity, socioeconomic status, or a combination of such factors. The dominant culture will have a strong presence in institutions such as education, governance, business, law, and communication. Importantly, the dominant culture can change in response to the social landscape, and can sometimes result in the oppression of minority cultures.
In the animal kingdom, the rule is, eat or be eaten; in the human kingdom, define or be defined.
– Thomas Szasz, author of The Second Sin
About the Authors
Dan Pilat
Dan is a Co-Founder and Managing Director at The Decision Lab. He is a bestselling author of Intention - a book he wrote with Wiley on the mindful application of behavioral science in organizations. Dan has a background in organizational decision making, with a BComm in Decision & Information Systems from McGill University. He has worked on enterprise-level behavioral architecture at TD Securities and BMO Capital Markets, where he advised management on the implementation of systems processing billions of dollars per week. Driven by an appetite for the latest in technology, Dan created a course on business intelligence and lectured at McGill University, and has applied behavioral science to topics such as augmented and virtual reality.
Dr. Sekoul Krastev
Dr. Sekoul Krastev is a decision scientist and Co-Founder of The Decision Lab, one of the world's leading behavioral science consultancies. His team works with large organizations—Fortune 500 companies, governments, foundations and supernationals—to apply behavioral science and decision theory for social good. He holds a PhD in neuroscience from McGill University and is currently a visiting scholar at NYU. His work has been featured in academic journals as well as in The New York Times, Forbes, and Bloomberg. He is also the author of Intention (Wiley, 2024), a bestselling book on the science of human agency. Before founding The Decision Lab, he worked at the Boston Consulting Group and Google.
