Cultural psychology is the study of how cultures reflect and shape their members' psychological processes.Heine, S. J. (2011). Cultural Psychology. New York: W. W. Norton & Company.
It is based on the premise that mind and culture are inseparable and mutually constitutive. The concept rests on two key propositions: first, that individuals are shaped by their culture, and second, that culture is shaped by the individuals within it.Fiske, A.; Kitayama, S.; Markus, H.R.; & Nisbett, R.E. (1998). The cultural matrix of social psychology. In D. Gilbert & S. Fiske & G. Lindzey (Eds.), The Handbook of Social Psychology (4th ed., pp. 915–81). San Francisco: McGraw-Hill.
Cultural psychology aims to define culture, its nature, and its function concerning psychological phenomena. Gerd Baumann argues: "Culture is not a real thing, but an abstract analytical notion. In itself, it does not cause behavior but abstracts from it. It is thus neither normative nor predictive but a heuristic means towards explaining how people understand and act upon the world."Baumann, Gerd (1997). Dominant and demiotic discourses of culture. Their Relevance to Multi-Ethnic Alliances. In: P. Werbner & T. Modood (Eds.), Debating cultural hybridity. Multicultural Identities and the Politics of Anti-Racism. London & New Jersey: Zed Books.
As Richard Shweder, one of the major proponents of the field, writes, "Cultural psychology is the study of how cultural traditions and social practices regulate, express, and transform the human psyche. This results less in psychic unity for humankind than in ethnic divergences in mind, self, and emotion."Shweder, Richard (1991). Thinking Through Cultures. Harvard University Press. .
History Yoshihisa Kashima talks about cultural psychology in two senses, as a tradition and as a movement that emerged in the late 20th century. Cultural psychology as a tradition is traced back to Western Romanticism in the 19th century. Giambatista Vico and Herder are seen as important early inspirations in thinking about the influence of culture on people.
Its institutional origin started with the publication of the Zeitschrift für Völkerpsychologie und Sprachwissenschaft (Journal of Folk Psychology and Language Science, scholarly journal founded by Moritz Lazarus and Heymann Steinthal), first published in 1860. Wilhelm Wundt expanded on this concept, and his volumes on Völkerpsychologie are among the earliest accounts of a cultural perspective within the discipline of psychology. He saw Völkerpsychologie as a cultural-developmental discipline that studied higher psychological processes in their social context. The proposed methods were comparative and historical analyses.
Another early cultural framework is cultural-historical psychology which emerged in the 1920s. It is mostly associated with the Russian psychologists Vygotsky, Luria and Leont'ev. They claimed that human activity is always embedded in a specific social and historical context and should therefore not be isolated.
While in psychological research interest in culture had declined, in part due to the popularity of behaviorism in the US, some researchers in anthropology, like Margaret Mead, started to explore the interaction between culture and personality. In the 1970s-1980s, there was an increasing call for an interpretive turn in anthropology and psychology. Researchers were influenced by constructivist and relativist accounts of knowledge and argued that cultural differences should be understood within their contexts. This influence was an important factor in the emergence of the cultural psychology movement. Leading scholars of this movement were, among others, Richard Shweder and Clifford Richards. The launch of a new journal and the publication of multiple major works, like Shweder's Cultural Psychology and Cole's Cultural Psychology: A Once and Future Discipline helped to shape the direction of the movement.
Relationships with other branches of psychology Cultural psychology is often confused with cross-cultural psychology. Even though both fields influence each other, cultural psychology is distinct from cross-cultural psychology in that 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 and is informed by several fields within psychology, including cross-cultural psychology, social psychology, cultural-historical psychology, developmental psychology, and cognitive psychology. In addition to drawing from several other fields of psychology, cultural psychology in particular utilizes anthropologists, linguists, and philosophers to help in the pursuit of understanding a wide variety of cultural facets in a society. However, the constructivist perspective of cultural psychology, through which cultural psychologists study thought patterns and behaviors within and across cultures, tends to clash with the universal perspectives common in most fields of psychology, which seek to qualify fundamental psychological truths that are consistent across all of humanity.
Cultural psychology is closely related to the emerging field of historical psychology, which investigates the dynamic relationship between history and psychology. This field seeks to understand how collective behaviors, emotions, and cognitions change over historical periods, and how contemporary psychological processes are shaped by long-standing cultural and historical influences.
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. Accordingly, cultural groups have diverse ways of defining emotional problems, as well as distinguishing between physical and mental distress. For example, Arthur Kleinman has shown how the notion of depression in Chinese culture has been associated with physiological problems, before becoming acknowledged more recently as an emotional concern. Furthermore, the type of therapy people pursue is influenced by cultural conceptions of privacy and shame, as well as the stigmas associated with specific problems.
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. In an analysis of top journals in the psychology discipline, it was found that 96% of subjects who participated in those studies came from Western Industrialized countries, with 68% of them coming from the United States. This is largely because 99% of the authors of these journals were at Western Universities with 73% of them at American Universities. With this information, it is concluded that 96% of psychological findings come from W.E.I.R.D. countries. 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 as W.E.I.R.D. countries only represent 12% of the world's 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 concept that individuals and society mutually influence one another. Since societies are composed of individuals, the behaviors and actions of individuals affect the broader society. Conversely, societal values, norms, and ways of life shape the development of individuals. The social environment plays a key role in determining individual growth and behavior. Mutual constitution is often described as a cyclical model in which individuals and society continuously influence each other.
While cultural psychology is reliant on this model, societies often fail to recognize this. Despite the overwhelming acceptance that people affect culture and that 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 to 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, claims 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 consistent model. For example, Yale University promises within its mission statement that: