Social change, cultural evolution, and human development

•Social change is all-pervasive in the world, usually toward the following:•Urbanization, formal education, wealth, commerce, interconnectedness, and technology.•These global trends shift cultural values, socialization, and development/behavior,•Leading to increased individualism/independence, abstraction, and innovation.•Data from around the world reveal cultural losses as well as gains.

Social change has accelerated globally. Greenfield's interdisciplinary and multilevel theory of social change and human development provides a unified framework for exploring implications of these changes for cultural values, learning environments/socialization processes, and human development/behavior. Data from societies where social change has occurred in place (US, China, and Mexico) and a community where it has occurred through international migration (Mexican immigrants in the US) elucidate these implications. Globally dominant sociodemographic trends are: rural to urban, agriculture to commerce, isolation to interconnectedness, less to more education, less to more technology, lesser to greater wealth, and larger to smaller families/households. These trends lead to both cultural losses (e.g., interdependence/collectivism, respect, tradition, contextualized thinking) and cultural gains (e.g., independence/individualism, equality, innovation, abstraction).