Culture And Psychology

[Rosham Rosebure]

WhatIs Cultural Psychology?

Cultural psychology is an interdisciplinary field that unites psychologists, anthropologists, linguists, and philosophers for a common pursuit: the study of how cultural meanings, practices, and institutions influence and reflect individual human psychologies. It is not a freestanding area within psychology, and most cultural psychologists would like to keep it that way. Rather than cordoning it off as its own subfield, cultural psychologists want to benefit from the breadth of expertise of its sundry practitioners, and to have a broader impact on all areas within psychology and across the social sciences.

Cultural psychology differs from other areas not only organizationally, but also philosophically. In contrast to psychologists who tend to assume that their findings and theories are universal until proven otherwise, cultural psychologists tend to assume that their findings and theories are culturally variable.

The Nature of Culture

The presence of cultural differences and of a field called cultural psychology encourages the questions: What is culture? And what does it have to do with you and your psyche?

The Exotic Other

One good reason to care about cultural psychology is the empirical evidence that many psychological processes once deemed universal seem instead to be culturally variable. Another is the mounting empirical evidence for the role of culture in human evolution and development.

A fourth reason is that, just as the world outside our labs is becoming smaller, the worlds within our lecture halls are becoming larger. Fifty years ago, diversity in higher education ran the gamut from tweed to gabardine. As immigration laws have changed and access to higher education has increased, the student bodies to which psychologists offer their science have changed from lily white to varicolored. Increasingly, the psychology that European American researchers produce does not resonate with the experiences of these multicultural consumers.

Social psychologist Fathali Moghaddam, Georgetown University, has speculated that non-student populations would reveal a more striking cultural difference than purely academic groups, even though many studies have already documented cultural differences among college students.

Cultural psychologists differ in their opinions of how deep the cultural immersion has to be before it imparts its wisdom. Psychological anthropologist Alan Fiske, University of California, Los Angeles, often recommends a lengthy stint of fieldwork, replete with language learning and participant-observation.

Psychologists often have to settle for less than ideal immersion, however, because psychological training often does not include time for such fieldwork. Many draw initial insights from their own cultural backgrounds and then supplement these insights by reading texts from anthropology, history, and sociology. Sanchez-Burks, for example, recommends reading Weber and de Tocqueville to understand European-American culture.

Oh, the Places You Might Not Go!

While cultural psychologists may find it easier to cross the globe in search of deep psychological insights than their mainstream counterparts, they may also find it harder to ascend the academic hierarchy.

Despite these logistic and professional hurdles, a growing number of psychologists are pursuing cultural psychology. For them, its perils are outweighed by its powerful attractions, such as contributing to psychological functioning, engaging with ideas from other social sciences, hobnobbing with international colleagues, and having a good excuse for extensive travel.

Your paper is not only informative but also inspiring. I would like to pursue PhD in cultural psychology, and carry out research in an African community. The greatest challenges are I do know universities in Africa that are offering the discipline, lack of supervision and lack of schorlaships for PhD in cultural psychology. Please contact me if you have information.

Gheirat exemplifies a complex, culture-specific experience that requires using culturally sensitive research practices to investigate. Explore these case-specific ideas and solutions for researching phenomena from little-understood and/or studied phenomena.

It is based on the premise that the mind and culture are inseparable and mutually constitutive. The concept involves two propositions: firstly, that people are shaped by their culture, and secondly, that culture is shaped by its people.[2]

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."[3]

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."[4]

Yoshihisa Kashima talks about cultural psychology in two senses, as a tradition and as a movement that emerged in the late 20th century.[5][6] Cultural psychology as a tradition is traced back to Western Romanticism in the 19th century.[5] Giambatista Vico and Herder are seen as important early inspirations in thinking about the influence of culture on people.[5][7]

Its institutional origin started with the publication of the Zeitschrift fr Vlkerpsychologie und Sprachwissenschaft, first published in 1860. Wilhelm Wundt took this concept and his volume on Vlkerpsychologie is one of the earliest accounts of a cultural perspective within the discipline of psychology.[6] He saw Vlkerpsychologie as a cultural-developmental discipline that studied higher psychological processes in their social context. The proposed methods were comparative and historical analyses.[8][9][10]

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.[6] They claimed that human activity is always embedded in a specific social and historical context and should therefore not be isolated.[6][10]

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.[5][6] 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.[5][11] 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.[11] 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.[6]

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.[12] 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.[13]

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.[14] 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 also tightly related to the new field of "Historical Psychology" which aims to investigate how history and psychology build each other up in a dynamic way, seeking to better understand how collective behaviors, emotions, and cognitions vary over historical time periods and how the roots of our current psychology are buried in deep cultural and historical processes.[15]

According to Richard Shweder, there has been repeated failure to replicate Western psychology laboratory findings in non-Western settings.[4]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.[16] 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.[17] 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.[18] 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.[19]

3a8082e126