Cultural psychology is the study of how cultures reflect and shape the psychological processes of their members.
The main tenet of cultural psychology is that mind and culture are inseparable and mutually constitutive, meaning that people are shaped by their culture and their culture is also shaped by them. As Richard Shweder, one of the major proponents of the field, writes, "Cultural psychology is the study of the way cultural traditions and social practices regulate, express, and transform the human psyche, resulting less in psychic unity for humankind than in ethnic divergences in mind, self, and emotion."
The main tenet of cultural psychology is that mind and culture are inseparable and mutually constitutive, meaning that people are shaped by their culture and their culture is also shaped by them. As Richard Shweder, one of the major proponents of the field, writes, "Cultural psychology is the study of the way cultural traditions and social practices regulate, express, and transform the human psyche, resulting less in psychic unity for humankind than in ethnic divergences in mind, self, and emotion."
Relationships with other branches of psychology
Cultural psychology is often confused with cross-cultural psychology.
However, cultural psychology is distinct from cross-cultural psychology
in that the cross-cultural psychologists generally use culture as a
means of testing the universality of psychological processes rather than
determining how local cultural practices shape psychological processes. So whereas a cross-cultural psychologist might ask whether Jean Piaget's
stages of development are universal across a variety of cultures, a
cultural psychologist would be interested in how the social practices of
a particular set of cultures shape the development of cognitive
processes in different ways.
Cultural psychology research informs several fields within psychology, including social psychology, cultural-historical psychology, developmental psychology, and cognitive psychology.
However, the relativist perspective of cultural psychology, through
which cultural psychologists compare thought patterns and behaviors
within and across cultures, tends to clash with the universal
perspectives common in most fields in psychology, which seek to qualify
fundamental psychological truths that are consistent across all of
humanity.
Importance
Need for expanded cultural research
According to Richard Shweder, there has been repeated failure to replicate Western psychology laboratory findings in non-Western settings. Therefore, a major goal of cultural psychology is to have many and
varied cultures contribute to basic psychological theories in order to
correct these theories so that they become more relevant to the
predictions, descriptions, and explanations of all human behaviors, not
just Western ones. This goal is shared by many of the scholars who promote the indigenous psychology
approach. In an attempt to show the interrelated interests of cultural
and indigenous psychology, cultural psychologist Pradeep Chakkarath
emphasizes that international mainstream psychology, as it has been
exported to most regions of the world by the so-called West, is only one
among many indigenous psychologies and therefore may not have enough
intercultural expertise to claim, as it frequently does, that its
theories have universal validity.
The acronym W.E.I.R.D.
describes populations that are Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich,
and Democratic. Thus far, W.E.I.R.D. populations have been vastly
overrepresented in psychological research.
Findings from psychology research utilizing primarily W.E.I.R.D.
populations are often labeled as universal theories and are inaccurately
applied to other cultures.
Recent research is showing that cultures differ in many areas, such as logical reasoning and social values.
The evidence that basic cognitive and motivational processes vary
across populations has become increasingly difficult to ignore. For
example, many studies have shown that Americans, Canadians and western
Europeans rely on analytical reasoning strategies, which separate
objects from their contexts to explain and predict behavior. Social
psychologists refer to the "fundamental attribution error"
or the tendency to explain people's behavior in terms of internal,
inherent personality traits rather than external, situational
considerations (e.g. attributing an instance of angry behavior to an
angry personality). Outside W.E.I.R.D. cultures, however, this
phenomenon is less prominent, as many non-W.E.I.R.D. populations tend to
pay more attention to the context in which behavior occurs. Asians tend
to reason holistically, for example by considering people's behavior in
terms of their situation; someone's anger might be viewed as simply a
result of an irritating day. Yet many long-standing theories of how humans think rely on the prominence of analytical thought.
By studying only W.E.I.R.D. populations, psychologists fail to
account for a substantial amount of diversity of the global population.
Applying the findings from W.E.I.R.D. populations to other populations
can lead to a miscalculation of psychological theories and may hinder
psychologists' abilities to isolate fundamental cultural
characteristics.
Mutual constitution
Mutual
constitution is the notion that the society and the individual have an
influencing effect on one another. Because a society is composed of
individuals, the behavior and actions of the individuals directly impact
the society. In the same manner, society directly impacts the
individual living within it. The values, morals, and ways of life a
society exemplifies will have an immediate impact on the way an
individual is shaped as a person. The atmosphere that a society provides
for the individual is a determining factor for how an individual will
develop. Furthermore, mutual constitution is a cyclical model in which
the society and the individual both influence one another.
While cultural psychology is reliant on this model, societies
often fail to recognize this. Despite the overwhelming acceptance that
people affect culture and culture affects people, societal systems tend
to minimize the effect that people form on their communities. For
example, mission statements of businesses, schools, and foundations
attempt make promises regarding the environment and values that their
establishment holds. However, these promises cannot be made in
accordance with the mutually consisting theory without being upheld by
all participants. The mission statement for the employees of Southwest
Airlines, for example, makes the claim that, "...We are committed to
provide our Employees a stable work environment with equal opportunity
for learning and personal growth".
While the company can ensure the "equal opportunity for learning and
personal growth", the aforementioned message cannot be promised. The
work environment that Southwest provides includes paying consumers.
While rules can be enforced to ensure safety on their aircraft,
customers will not be removed due to attitude or a lack of courtesy.
This therefore contradicts the promise of a "stable work environment".
On the contrary, some establishments do ensure that their mission
statements agree with the mutually consisting model. For example, Yale
University promises within its mission statement that:
-
- Yale is committed to improving the world today and for future generations through outstanding research and scholarship, education, preservation, and practice. Yale educates aspiring leaders worldwide who serve all sectors of society. We carry out this mission through the free exchange of ideas in an ethical, interdependent, and diverse community of faculty, staff, students, and alumni.
This
image is a representation derived from ideas found in the journal
article "Cultures and Selves: A Cycle of Mutual Constitution" by Hazel
Rose Markus and Shinoba Kitayama.
Instead of making promises that depend on all of their students and
faculty, they make statements that can refer to only a part of their
student/ faculty body. The statement focuses more on what they offer,
and how they uphold these promises. By providing evidence they provide
readers with an example as to how their school community members
participate in the environment they promise, accepting the community's
role in their school culture.
Past research has been conducted by middle-class North Americans
analyzing culturally different societies by means of comparison mostly
involving middle-class North Americans and/or aforementioned W.E.I.R.D.
societies. What has been characterized as Euro-American centrism,
resulted in a great volume of research for this specific selection of
humans. It has also allowed us to divert from the idea that certain
psychological processes can be considered basic or universal, and
recognize humans' remarkable capacity to create cultures and then be
shaped by them.
Although cultural psychology has internalized the mutually constituting
model, further implementation in our society is necessary. Being aware
of this model promotes taking responsibility for one's actions and the
effect that their actions have on their community. Through acceptance of
ones responsibilities and conscious application, communities have
opportunity for improvement which in turn supports the individuals
within the community. These ideas can be found in the journal article
"Cultures and Selves: A Cycle of Mutual Constitution" by Hazel Rose
Markus and Shinobu Kitayama which are also represented in the graphic provided.
Criticisms
Stereotyping
One of the most significant themes in recent years has been cultural differences between East Asians and North Americans in attention, perception, cognition, and social psychological phenomena such as the self. Some psychologists, such as Turiel, have argued that this research is based on cultural stereotyping.
Psychologist Per Gjerde states that cultural psychology tends to
"generalize about human development across nations and continents" and
assigning characteristics to a culture promotes a disregard for
heterogeneity and minimizes the role of the individual.
Gjerde argues that individuals develop multiple perspectives about
their culture, sometimes act in accord with their culture without
sharing the cultural beliefs, and sometimes outright oppose their
culture. Stereotyping thus views individuals as homogeneous products of
culture.
Faulty methodology
Self-reporting
data is one of the easiest and most accessible methods of mass data
collection, especially in cultural psychology.
However, over-emphasizing cross-cultural comparisons of self-reported
attitudes and values can lead to relatively unstable and ultimately
misleading data.
Methods
Cultural psychologist, Richard Shweder argues that the psyche and culture are mutually constructed and inseparable.
The failure of replicating many psychology findings in other regions of
the world supported the idea that mind and environment are
interdependent, and different throughout the world. Some criticisms
state that using self-report may be a relatively unreliable method, and
could be misleading especially in different cultural context. Regardless
that self-report is an important way to obtain mass data, it is not the
only way.
In fact, cultural psychologists utilized multiple measurements
and resources no different from other scientific researches –
observation, experiment, data analysis etc. For example, Nisbett &
Cohen (1996) investigated the relation between historical cultural
background and regional aggression difference in the U.S.A. In this
study, researchers designed laboratory experiment to observe
participants' aggression, and crime rate, demographic statistics were
analyzed. The experiment results supported the culture of honor theory that the aggression is a defense mechanism which is rooted in the herding cultural origin for most the southerners.
In laboratory observations, Heine and his colleagues found that
Japanese students spend more time than American students on tasks that
they did poorly on, and the finding presents a self-improvement
motivation often seen in East Asian that failure and success is
interconvertible with effort. In terms of cognition styles, Chinese tend to perceive image using a holistic view compared to American.
Quantitative statistics of cultural products revealed that public
media in western countries promote more individualistic components than
East-Asian countries.
These statistics are objective because it does not involve having
people fill out questionnaire, instead, psychologists use physical
measurements to quantitatively collect data about culture products, such
as painting and photos. These statistics data can also be national
records, for example, Chiao & Blizinsky (2010) revealed that
cultures of high collectivism is associated with lower prevalence of
mood/anxiety disorders in study involving 29 countries.
In addition to the experimental and statistics data, evidence from
neuro-imaging studies, also help strengthen the reliability of cultural
psychology research. For example, when thinking of mother, the brain
region related to self-concept showed significant activation in Chinese,
whereas no activation observed in Westerners.
Cultural models
"One
way we organize and understand our social world is through the use of
cultural models or culturally shaped mental maps. These consist of
culturally derived ideas and practices that are embodied, enacted, or
instituted in everyday life." Cultural psychologists develop models to
categorize cultural phenomena.
The 4 I's culture cycle
The 4 I's cultural model was developed by Hazel Rose Markus and Alana Conner in their book Clash! 8 Cultural Conflicts That Make Us Who We Are.
In it, they refer to the mutually constitutive nature of culture and
individual as a "culture cycle." The culture cycle consists of four
layers (Individuals, Interactions, Institutions, Ideas) of cultural
influence that help to explain the interaction between self and culture.
Individuals
The
first "I" concerns how an individual thinks about and expresses itself.
Studies show that in the United States, individuals are more likely
think of him or herself as "independent", "equal", and
"individualistic". Individuals have characteristics that are consistent
across time and situation. When asked to describe themselves, Americans
are likely to use adjectives to describe their personalities, such as
"energetic", "friendly", or "hard-working". In Japan, studies show that
individuals are more likely to think of themselves as "obligated to
society", "interdependent", and "considerate". The self is adaptable to
the situation. Japanese individuals are therefore more likely to
describe themselves in relation to others, such as "I try not to upset
anyone," or "I am a father, a son, and a brother."
Interactions
Interactions
with other people and products reinforce cultural behaviors on a daily
basis. Stories, songs, architecture, and advertisements are all methods
of interaction that guide individuals in a culture to promote certain
values and teach them how to behave.
For example, in Japan, no-smoking signs emphasize the impact that smoke
has on others by illustrating the path of smoke as it affects
surrounding people. In the US, no-smoking signs focus on individual
action by simply saying "No Smoking". These signs reflect underlying
cultural norms and values, and when people see them they are encouraged
to behave in accordance with the greater cultural values.
Institutions
The
next layer of culture is made up of the institutions in which everyday
interactions take place. These determine and enforce the rules for a
society and include legal, government, economic, scientific,
philosophical, and religious bodies. Institutions encourage certain
practices and products while discouraging others. In Japanese
kindergartens, children learn about important cultural values such as
teamwork, group harmony, and cooperation. During "birthday month
celebration," for example, the class celebrates all the children who
have birthdays that month. This institutional practice underscores the
importance of a group over an individual. In US kindergartens, children
learn their personal value when they celebrate their birthdays one by
one, enforcing the cultural value of uniqueness and individualism.
Everyday institutional practices such as classroom birthday celebrations
propagate prominent cultural themes.
Whiting model
John and Beatrice Whiting, along with their research students at Harvard University,
developed the "Whiting model" for child development during the 1970s
and 1980s, which specifically focused on how culture influences
development.
The Whitings coined the term "cultural learning environment", to
describe the surroundings that influence a child during development.
Beatrice Whiting defined a child's environmental contexts as being
"characterized by an activity in progress, a physically defined space, a
characteristic group of people, and norms of behavior".
This environment is composed of several layers. A child's geographical
context influences the history/anthropology of their greater community.
This results in maintenance systems (i.e., sociological characteristics)
that form a cultural learning environment. These factors inform learned
behavior, or progressive expressive systems that take the form of
religion, magic beliefs, ritual and ceremony, art, recreation, games and
play, or crime rates.
Many researchers have expanded upon the Whiting model,
and the Whiting model's influence is clear in both modern psychology
and anthropology. According to an article by Thomas Weisner in the Journal of Cross-Cultural Psychology,
"All these [more recent] approaches share a common intellectual
project: to take culture and context deeply and seriously into account
in studies of human development."
Culture and motivation
Self-enhancement vs. self-improvement
While
self-enhancement is a person's motivation to view themselves
positively, self-improvement is a person's motivation to have others
view themselves positively. The distinction between the two modes of
life is most evident between independent and collectivistic cultures.
Cultures with independent self-views (the premise that people see
themselves as self-contained entities) often emphasize self-esteem,
confidence in one's own worth and abilities. With self-esteem seen as a main source of happiness in Western cultures,
the motivation to self-enhance generally follows as a way to maintain
one's positive view about oneself. Some strategies employed when
self-enhancing often include downward social comparison, compensatory self-enhancement, discounting, external attributions and basking in reflected glory.
In contrast, collectivistic cultures often emphasize self-improvement
as a leading motivating factor in their lives. This motivation is often
derived from a desire to not lose face and to appear positively among
social groups.
Culture and empathy
Cultural orientation: collectivistic and individualistic
A main distinction to understand when looking at psychology and culture is the difference between individualistic and collectivistic
cultures. People from an individualistic culture typically demonstrate
an independent view of the self; the focus is usually on personal
achievement.
Members of a collectivistic society have more of a focus on the group
(interdependent view of self), usually focusing on things that will
benefit the group. Research has shown such differences of the self when comparing collectivistic and individualistic cultures: The Fundamental Attribution Error has been shown to be more common in America (individualistic) as compared to in India (collectivistic). Along these same lines, the self-serving bias was again shown as more common among Americans than Japanese individuals.
This can be seen in a study involving an animation of fish, wherein
Western viewers interpreted the scene of a fish swimming away from a
school as an expression of individualism and independence, while Eastern
individuals wondered what was wrong with the singular fish and
concluded that the school had kicked it out.
Another study showed that in coverage of the same instance of violent
crime, Western news focused on innate character flaws and the failings
of the individual while Chinese news pointed out the lack of
relationships of the perpetrator in a foreign environment and the
failings of society.
This is not to imply that collectivism and individualism are completely
dichotomous, but these two cultural orientations are to be understood
more so as a spectrum. Each representation is at either end; thus, some
members of individualistic cultures may hold collectivistic values, and
some collectivistic individual may hold some individualist values. The
concepts of collectivism and individualism show a general idea of the
values of a specific ethnic culture but should not be juxtaposed in
competition.
Empathy across cultures
These
differences in values across cultures suggests that understanding and
expressing empathy may be manifested differently throughout varying
cultures. Duan and Hill
first discussed empathy in subcategories of intellectual empathy:
taking on someone's thoughts/perspective, also known as cognitive
empathy and emotional empathy: taking on someone's feeling/experience. Duan, Wei, and Wang
furthered this idea to include empathy in terms of being either
dispositional (capacity for noticing/understanding empathy) or
experiential (specific to a certain context or situation, observing the
person and empathizing). This created four types of empathy to further
examine: 1) dispositional intellectual empathy; 2) dispositional
empathic emotion; 3) experienced intellectual empathy; and 4)
experienced empathic emotion. These four branches allowed researchers to
examine empathic proclivities among individuals of different cultures.
While individualism was not shown to correlate with either types of
dispositional empathy, collectivism was shown to have a direct
correlation with both types of dispositional empathy, possibly
suggesting that by having less focus on the self, there is more capacity
towards noticing the needs of others. More so, individualism predicted
experienced intellectual empathy, and collectivism predicted experienced
empathic emotion. These results are congruent with the values of
collectivistic and individualistic societies. The self-centered identity
and egoistic motives prevalent in individualistic cultures, perhaps
acts as a hindrance in being open to (fully) experiencing empathy.
Intercultural and ethnocultural empathy
Cultural empathy became broadly understood as concurrent understanding and acceptance of a culture different from one's own. This idea has been further developed with the concept of ethnocultural empathy.
This moves beyond merely accepting and understanding another culture,
and also includes acknowledging how the values of a culture may affect
empathy. This idea is meant to foster cultural empathy as well as
engender cultural competence.
One of the greatest barriers of empathy between cultures is people's
tendency to operate from an ethnocentric point of view. Eysenck
conceptualized ethnocentrism as using one's own culture to understand
the rest of the world, while holding one's own values as correct.
Concomitant with this barrier to intercultural empathy, Rasoal, Eklund,
and Hansen posit five hindrances of intercultural empathy; these include:
Paucity of:
- (general) knowledge outside one's own culture
- (general) experience with other cultures outside one's own
- (specific) knowledge regarding other people's cultures
- (specific) experiences regarding other people's cultures
and:
- inability to bridge different cultures by understanding the commonalities and dissimilarities
These five points elucidate lack of both depth and breadth as hindrances in developing and practicing intercultural empathy.
Another barrier to intercultural empathy is that there is often a
power dynamic between different cultures. Bridging an oppressed culture
with their (upper-echelon) oppressor is a goal of intercultural
empathy. One approach to this barrier is to attempt to acknowledge
one's personal oppression.
While this may be minimal in comparison to other people's oppression,
it will still help with realizing that other people have been oppressed.
The goal of bridging the gap should focus on building an alliance by
finding the core commonalities of the human experience; this shows
empathy to be a relational experience, not an independent one. Through
this, the goal is that intercultural empathy can lend toward broader
intercultural understanding across cultures and societies.
Four important facets of cultural empathy are:
- Taking the perspective of someone from a different culture
- Understanding the verbal/behavioral expression that occurs during ethnocultural empathy
- Being cognizant of how different cultures are treated by larger entities such as the job market and the media
- Accepting differences in cultural choices regarding language, clothing preference, food choice, etc.
These four aspects may be especially helpful for practicing cultural
competence in a clinical setting. Given that most psychological
practices were founded on the parochial ideals of Euro-American
psychologists, cultural competence was not considered much of a
necessity until said psychologists increasingly began seeing clients
with different ethnic backgrounds.
Many of the problems that contribute to therapy not being beneficial
for people of color include: therapy having an individual focus, an
emphasis on expressiveness, and an emphasis on openness. For more on intercultural competence, see intercultural competence.
