Western psychology has traditionally focused on processes considered to be internal or private to the individual, with the social world generally regarded as an aspect of "the environment." Recent cross-cultural psychological research reveals fundamental differences in the way cognition operates in people from different cultures, demonstrating that the social environment not only affects thought, but helps create it. These discoveries are mirrored in the field of computational intelligence; researchers identifying methods for eliciting intelligent behavior from machines are looking more and more into models that consider the individual inextricably integrated with the social milieu. These new models are radically different from traditional AI, which treats cognition as a set of processes taking place inside an isolated brain. In this lecture I will discuss these dichotomies in terms of the particle swarm algorithm, which is a model of collectively integrated intelligences; developments in the particle swarm paradigm will be framed in terms of the interplay of culture and cognition.