Critiques of cosmopolitanism theory argue that the concept is premised on implicit assumptions of a masculine global citizen, replete with privileged access to various mobile and symbolic forms of social advantage. In response, empirical accounts of cosmopolitanism have explored the impact of class, education, and ethnicity on cosmopolitan practices. Yet, little direct empirical attention is given to whether and how men and women might differently understand and frame cultural diversity. We argue that to the extent that cosmopolitanism is constituted by social practices, scripts and repertoires of discursive narrativization, it is likely to be navigated and applied through gender-ideologies. Applying the methodological concept of cognitive schema to a set of qualitative data, and focusing on expressions of hospitality towards others within local communities, we inductively assemble evidence to show that men and women have differently articulated cosmopolitan imaginations. In conclusion, we consider what our empirical attention to gender might mean for how we advance critical theories of cosmopolitanism.

This article empirically explores the types and limits of ethical varieties of cosmopolitan openness by analysing in-depth interviews with a sample of professionals and volunteers ( N = 20) in culturally heterogeneous workplaces that are characterised by interpersonal interactions requiring intercultural competencies. It analyses the way people relax and harden the borders of openness around people, objects and practices they see as unfamiliar and different. Within the context of two primary schemes for deliberating the principles and schemas for acting in ways that are open to valuing difference, the article finds that the interviewees use flexible and contextually shifting categorisations of otherness and sameness that serve apparently conflicting agendas of ethical openness, self-protection, instrumentalism and parochialism. Exploring the schemas associated with these forms of everyday ethical understandings, the results show their cosmopolitan ethical practice to be performative and contextual, entangled with a variety of potentially conflicting schemas of evaluation and judgement.

Applying theories from sociology and social psychology concerned with the intersection of culture and cognition to in-depth interviews, this paper empirically explores the Norwegian majority population’s perceptions of cultural diversities using a dual-process (DP) methodological and analytic approach. Globalization has produced a mix of new anxieties, opportunities, and curiosities, leaving most people juggling conflicting objectives of self-preservation and self-realization, and making cognitive self-regulation and behavioural flexibility valorized skills of contemporary life. Instead of identifying xenophobic and cosmopolitan attitudes at opposite ends of a spectrum, the current paper argues in line with current research and theory in studies of DP cognition that they commonly co-exist, albeit in separate automatic and discursive cognitive systems, within the same individual. As a result, people’s perceptions of cultural and ethnic diversities tend to be ambivalent and contextually malleable – for example, in cases where their deep dispositions appear incompatible with their own self-concept or dominant cultural expectations. Most centrally, the current research proposes concrete strategies to elicit responses from both cognitive systems in the context of interpretive interviews. Secondly, the paper proposes clues that help to identify from which cognitive system interviewees’ conflicting cosmopolitan and xenophobic attitudes originate, thereby enabling researchers to further delineate the specific characteristics of these attitudes, including the mode of cultural learning through which they form, their flexibility or robustness to change, their role in behaviour motivation, and the extent to which they are conscious and controllable.

Applying a dual-process framework to in-depth interviews and survey data, this article explores behavioural manifestations of intercultural attitudes for white majority Norwegians. The article builds upon established literatures on social cognition showing that humans operate with two separate cognitive systems. Affective ‘automatic’ heuristics often generate negative stereotypes, aversive emotions and behavioural responses to ethnic diversities. In contrast, the ‘discursive’ cognitive system, which stores cultural scripts, motivates predominantly egalitarian aspirations and performances. As people balance their behaviours according to contextual evaluations of costs and benefits, the article’s findings indicate a tendency to practise openness and civility in public and spatio-temporally bounded encounters, and to reject or exclude the Other in half or more of privately made selection decisions.