Global consciousness and James H. Liu's legacy

Bibliographic Data

ID15087626
AuthorsDarrin Hodgetts (0000-0001-8726-5965, School of Psychology Massey University Auckland New Zealand), Wendy W Li (0000-0002-0056-6130, Department of Psychology James Cook University Townsville Queensland Australia, corresponding author), Sarah Choi (0000-0003-3459-716X, School of Psychology Massey University Auckland New Zealand), Sarah Y Choi (0000-0002-0498-9106, Massey University), Moh Abdul Hakim (0000-0002-2606-143X, Department of Psychology Sebelas Maret University Surakarta Indonesia)
Year2026
Volume29
Issue1
Publication date2026-03-01
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessYes
TypeARTICLE
VenueAsian Journal Of Social Psychology (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 1367-2223 • E-ISSN: 1467-839X
PublisherWiley (PUBLISHER • GB)
DOI10.1111/ajsp.70033
OpenAlexW4416733567
LanguageEN
References cited12

Consciousness is at once known to us all and perplexing. It remains a polysemic concept, the complexities of which we could never hope to do justice to in this brief editorial. For the purposes of expediency, we propose that in social psychology, consciousness is thought to encompass various complex and dynamic biological and social processes spanning our senses, cognition, personal and collective memory, language and narration. Consciousness is often taken to refer to relationships between human minds, subjectivities and the cultural and physical worlds we create and inhabit together. Human sentience extends to the reflexive knowing that one is alive, daydreaming, ruminating on a perplexing issue, the sense of relief when stretching a tight back, that tingling feeling that tells us that we are in love and troubling thoughts when we realise our actions adversely impact others. In reading this very editorial, you are capable of meta consciousness or self-awareness in the sense of being conscious of your own consciousness and how it relates to what we have written. Ultimately, consciousness is a key characteristic of what it means to be a sentient person whose self-awareness, sense of place in the world and reflections on human actions are shaped relationally with others through shared language, social representations, group narratives, cultural norms, faiths, ethics and values. The social psychology of global consciousness increasingly peers out beyond personal awareness of one's own place in the world and into community, organisational and nation state settings, to collective awareness of the needs of humanity and our willingness to work towards addressing these needs. As noted throughout this special issue, growing scholarship into global consciousness in social psychology has been influenced substantively by the seminal scholarship of Professor James H. Liu and colleagues. James was particularly interested in how human consciousness extends on a global scale to collective affiliations and a sense of relational ethics (Liu & Macdonald, 2016; Liu & Xie, 2023). Global consciousness can be conceptualised as the orientation of human beings towards knowing, making sense of and acting ethically in response to global issues. Psychologically, this requires the personal capacity to recognise oneself as a global citizen in the context of historical and the global events, and as a person who shares this increasingly interconnected world with other human beings. This understanding can feature a sense of differences, but is also about seeking and finding connections, mutualities and unities in being and belonging to the human condition. Professor Liu also saw power and utility in cultivating such a self-understanding as a way of bringing a fragmented and at times violent world together into harmony and increased cooperation. Relevant here is the cultivation of global consciousness as a basis for growing the willingness of people to take responsibility and to work collaboratively to improve the human condition. This is where James' emphasis on relational ethics came to the fore in his scholarship on global consciousness. James' scholarly efforts in this regard embody the realisation that despite our cultural and political differences, we are all interconnected or entangled at a metaphysical level as human beings on a planet with finite resources and which currently encompasses considerable inequities. Much of James' scholarship involved finding common ground across our cultural and political diversities, upon which a sense of familiarity and shared belonging to something bigger than ourselves could be cultivated as a basis for collective action for the common good. As Liu and Xie (2023) proposed, global consciousness is not just limited to the level of sentient and globally aware individuals who carry human rights. It is also informed by collectivist notions of national sovereignty and equity between nations and, as such, offers the foundations for developing what we often discussed as human flourishing. Relatedly, James' scholarship is invaluable for efforts to bring humanity together to address the global health, geopolitical and climate crises of our age, and to ensure human security for all into the future (Hodgetts et al., 2022). That is, we can build on research demonstrating robust links between global consciousness and prosocial behaviour, through an awareness of our entanglements within a finite biosphere, and a sense of shared responsibility to develop effective responses to the ‘global’ dilemmas of our age (Chen et al., 2022; Liu et al., 2023). In setting the stage for such efforts, Liu and Macdonald (2016) initially conceptualised global consciousness in response to the growing impacts of globalisation, the interdependence of economies, mass migration and the resulting intensification of contact between groups. This was also in the context of increased opportunities for mutual understanding that accompanied the promulgation of digital technologies. Liu and Macdonald (2016) conceptualised global consciousness as the cognizance of human diversities and interrelatedness that is accompanied by the awareness of self in relation to others. This self-awareness was also associated with the need for a relational ethics that encouraged us to work together as moral agents for the common good. Several factors were identified as central to this conceptualisation of global consciousness. First was the recognition that human beings and communities are interconnected in ways that transcend our cultural differences. Second, the need to cultivate an ethics of interdependence as global citizens. Third, the need to leverage global consciousness to prompt cooperative efforts to make the world a better and more habitable place for humanity. In reaching this important conceptualisation, Liu and Macdonald (2016) moved the theoretical perspective out beyond the limitations of early scholarship on cosmopolitanism that originated with the Ancient Greeks, which is associated with individualistic Western notions of human rights (Liu et al., 2023). What is offered by James and his various colleagues is a more overtly collectivist vision of global consciousness that is also informed by Eastern philosophies to emphasise relational principles of ethics that can span personal, community, societal and intercultural levels of mutual awareness and cooperation. Subsequent scholarship on global consciousness spans personal, cognitive, affective and behavioural factors that influence its development (see Chao et al., 2025), as well as collective storying and historical, social, institutional and national elements that underpin a mutual awareness of our place on this planet. This work extends through ethical necessity to investigate how persons, groups, institutions, societies and humanity can cultivate and act upon our shared moral awareness to address pressing issues of equity, inclusion, justice and wellbeing. Moving beyond academic theorising, global consciousness is applied by research teams led by James, to extending our knowledge of how global consciousness and related psychologies influence responses to global issues, such as the COVID-19 pandemic (Chen et al., 2022). Such work bears implications and important insights for the multinational and inter-institutional efforts of institutions like the World Health Organisation and United Nations to co-ordinate multifaceted responses to such issues (Mathieu et al., 2020). Moving forward, there is a need to further incorporate global consciousness into our inquiries into global agreements such as the Paris Accord, which aim to address the globally entwined challenges of climate change (Shue, 1999). Also informed by the seminal work of Liu and Macdonald (2016), there have been substantive theoretical and empirical developments regarding the social psychology of global consciousness in recent years, insights from which feature in this memorial collection. Below, we offer a memorial special issue featuring cutting-edge thinking and research on global consciousness at multiple levels of analysis and across multiple domains of inquiry. The collection encompasses four empirical studies (Choi et al., 2025; Dai, 2025; Okvitawanli et al., 2025; Tang & Xie, 2025), one theoretical paper (Fraser, 2025) and one scoping review (Chao et al., 2025). First, Choi et al. (2025) investigated the effects of individual privilege, group identification and societal perceptions on distinct components of global consciousness through a large-scale survey. This contribution is a product of a Global Consciousness grant that Professor Liu led. The lead author Choi is one of James' final PhD students and a co-editor of this special issue. The large-scale survey included participants from various Asian societies and the United States, allowing for cross-cultural comparisons. The research found that there was high cross-cultural consistency in the positive effects of ingroup identification on the identity and morality components of global consciousness. In contrast, there was cross-cultural variation found in the positive effects of individual privilege on global consciousness. This finding calls for us to revisit the argument that people of higher status are afforded the cultural opportunities and experiences that cultivate higher global consciousness, as this effective may not occur universally. Finally, there opposing results were found regarding the effects of societal perceptions on global consciousness between the United States and China. These findings highlight how geopolitical dynamics as well as contextual factors may significantly inform the cultivation of global consciousness and its underlying components. Dai (2025) examined whether attachment to one's home culture is a key factor that determines the cultivation of cosmopolitan orientation from multicultural experiences. In other words, multicultural experiences were expected to afford a stronger cosmopolitan orientation, especially for people holding a secure attachment to their home culture. The findings demonstrated that secure cultural attachment moderated the positive effects of multicultural experience on individuals' cosmopolitan orientation. This suggests that secure and positive identification at the local level provides a positive resource for collective self-esteem, which facilitates identification at the wider, global level through a broaden-and-build process. These results support calls for future research into the factors that may contribute to more secure attachments with one's home or local culture. Such insights would help to inform the ways in which we can better harness the benefits of multicultural exposure in an increasingly diverse, globalised world. Okvitawanli et al. (2025) investigated the relationship between global consciousness and benevolent acts in everyday life, across two Asian contexts – China and Indonesia. Across both cultural contexts, these authors found that global consciousness-related measures (cosmopolitan orientation and identification with all humanity) positively predicted benevolent behaviours in the daily campus life of university students. By incorporating a behavioural, scenario-based measure of benevolent acts in everyday life, this investigation aligns with the objectives of action-oriented research. Importantly, this endeavour opens up several avenues for future research to explore the varied and nuanced implications of global consciousness for action, within Asian contexts and beyond. Tang and Xie (2025) examined the potential of global consciousness to reduce people's biases of selective exposure. Here, selective exposure refers to the tendency of individuals to selectively expose themselves to information that align with their existing ingroup biases, especially in conditions of intergroup conflict. This typically leads individuals to favour negative information about relevant outgroups, while deliberately or unconsciously ignoring positive information. This research investigated whether global consciousness functions to buffer against such effects. The findings demonstrated that priming participants with high global consciousness did indeed reduce selective exposure biases in participants, leading to greater openness to positive outgroup information. However, these protective effects of global consciousness were not strong enough to buffer against the increase in selective exposure biases that came from perceiving high intergroup conflict. This suggests that the negative implications of conflict on intergroup relations may override the positive potential of global consciousness. This speaks to the need for future research to continue studying not only the conditions that mobilise but also the conditions that constrain the potential of global consciousness. Fraser (2025) considered the use of music as a means of cultivating global consciousness and reflected on the potential for intercultural music engagement (IME) in offering pathways for cultivating global consciousness. IME refers to the processes of contact that occur between people and cultures through their participation in musical acts of mutual encounter (Crooke et al., 2024). Offering an overview of interdisciplinary research, Fraser identified interconnected and nuanced melodies related to the capacity of IME to emotionally and empathically prime a sense of shared identification with humanity and to develop practices of reflexivity in issues of cultural diversity, power and difference. This nuanced overview renders visible the importance of sites like IME, which offer interdisciplinary engagement with global consciousness as an evolving, dynamic and reflexive experience. Contributing a scoping review, Chao et al. (2025) systematically identified and charted the existing literature to unpack the psychological dimensions of global consciousness. Six interconnected dimensions underpinning the operation of global consciousness were identified: mental processes, core beliefs and values, social-relational dynamics, affective states, actions and motivational drives. These dimensions can further be mapped on to cognitive, emotional and behavioural modes which inform a psychologically integrated and multidimensional framework for understanding global consciousness. This holistic framework allows us to unpack further how people engage with global interconnectedness across different levels of psychological experience and across contexts ranging from large-scale initiatives to everyday actions. By identifying the interconnected nature of the different psychological dimensions of global consciousness and the contextual factors influencing them, this review provides a foundation for studying how global consciousness may be cultivated through the domains of education, policy and practice. Finally, this special issue is dedicated to the memory and seminal contributions of Professor James H. Liu and honours his enduring legacy in advancing global consciousness research. The collection deepens our understanding of global consciousness by examining its conceptual foundations and showcasing the application of this construct within contemporary psychological inquiry. Professor Liu was at pains to remind us that global consciousness reflects an awareness of cultural diversity, global interdependence and our collective responsibilities to address the pressing challenges of our time. As the world grapples with climate change, growing socioeconomic inequalities and exclusions and geopolitical conflicts, this issue serves as both a tribute to Professor Liu's visionary scholarship and as a call to continue the work he so passionately championed—towards a more just, inclusive and interconnected world. Darrin Hodgetts, Wendy Wen Li and Sarah Choi substantially contributed to the writing of the article. All authors critically reviewed the article. The authors declare that there is no conflict of interest. None. None. None. None

Consciousness · Critical consciousness · Feeling · Humanity · Reflexivity · Sentience · Social consciousness · Cultural Differences and Values · International Student and Expatriate Challenges · Social Representations and Identity