Cultural psychology
Chapter 1
What is cultural psychology?

A psychology for a cultural species

Humans are a cultural species. People from different cultures live their lives differently.Psychological processes are shaped by experiences, and because people from different cultures have different experiences, we should expect to find differences in ways that they think.

Experiences do not determine psychological processes. These processes are constrained and afforded by the neurological structures that underlie them.

What is culture?

Culture means two different things: 1) a particular kind of information, any kind of information that is acquired from other members of one’s species through social learning that is capable of affecting an individual’s behaviours. 2) A particular group of individuals, individuals who are existing within some kind of shared context.

There are a few challenges with thinking about groups of people as constituting cultures. 1) The boundaries of cultures are not always clear-cut. There are other kinds of groups aside from countries that can be argued to have cultures. Their membership exists within a shared context, communicate with each other, have some norms that distinguish them from other groups, and have some common practice and ideas. 2) Cultures change over time. 3) There exists variability among individuals who belong to the same culture

Psychological processes can vary across cultures

Many basic psychological processes can emerge in starkly different ways across cultures.

Is the mind independent from, or intertwined with, culture?

Richard Shweder argues that much of the field of psychology inherently assumes that the mind operates under a set of natural and universal laws that are independent from context. But, in many important ways people are not the same wherever you go. General psychologists tend to be more captivated by arguments about human universality than about cultural variability. This interest arises because they tend to conceive the mind as a highly abstract central processing unit that operates independently from context.

An assumption that tends to be embraced by cultural psychologists is that in many ways, the mind does not operate independently of what it is thinking about. Thinking also involves interacting with the content that one is thinking about and participation in the context within which one is doing the thinking. The ways that people think about behaviours are influenced by the very specific and particular ways that human cultural knowledge shapes their understanding of those behaviours. Because humans are cultural beings, their actions, thoughts, and feelings are immersed in cultural information. This information renders these actions, thoughts, and feelings to be meaningful.
 
Humans seek meaning in their actions, and the shared ideas that make up cultures provide the kinds of meanings that people can derive from their experiences. Cultural meanings are thus entangled with the ways that the mind operates, so we cannot consider the mind separate from its culture.

The mind is shaped by experiences, and cultures differ in the kinds of experiences they provide. Brains continue to change, grow, and rewire themselves in response to their experiences, they are highly plastic.

Cultural psychologists tend to explain cultural differences in psychological processes as follows: to the extent that people in one culture are faced with a particular cultural idea, they will think a great deal about that idea, creating a rich network of thoughts, behaviours and feelings that surround it. These networks of information will be activated whenever people encounter something that reminds them of this idea. If people consider these networks of information often enough, the networks become chronically activated, such that they come to mind and become prioritized ahead of other networks. In this way, culture comes to shape the ways people think.

Psychological universals and levels of analysis

When we consider culture and psychology we have two contrasting views: 1) psychological processes are essentially the same everywhere 2) psychological processes emerge differently across cultural contexts

It is difficult to agree upon what kinds of evidence would be best suited to test a question of universality. One eternal source of controversy is whether the phenomena under question are posed in particular, concrete terms or in more general, abstract terms. The level of abstraction one entails influences the success one has in identifying evidence for universality. At more abstract levels there is often more evidence for universals, but at more abstract levels the phenomena under question are often to abstract to be of much utility.

There are a number of different levels by which we can consider evidence for universality. A hierarchical framework has been proposed. 1) Non-universal, cultural invention 2) Existential universal, the psychological phenomenon exist in multiple cultures, but it is not necessarily used to solve the same problem, nor it is equally accessible across cultures 3) Functional universalism, variation in accessibility 4) Accessibility universal, no variation.

The psychological database is largely WEIRD

At this point, we know very little about the extent to which many psychological processes are universal. This is largely due to the inescapable fact that in many cases we don’t yet have the data that would allow us to test the question of whether a phenomenon is universal. The vast majority of psychological studies have thus far been largely limited to explorations of the minds of people living in Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, and Democratic (WEIRD) societies.

Most of the psychology study participants are undergraduate.

The cost of this sampling method for psychology has become more and more evident as cross-cultural studies have been conducted. It’s not just that the typical psychological database represents a very narrow slice of the world’s population, it also represents a very unusual slice. The findings that come from WEIRD samples appear to be different from those obtained in other samples.

The available cross-cultural data reveal that, for many key findings in psychology 1) People from industrialized societies respond differently than those from small-scale societies 2) People from Western industrialized societies demonstrate more pronounced responses 3) Americans show yet more extreme responses than other Westerners 4) The responses of contemporary American college students are even further different

One key goal of cultural psychology is to gather findings from a broad enough array of cultures to be able to more confidently explore questions about human universals and human diversity.

Why should we study cultural psychology?

It’s important to understand the role cultural experiences play in terms of how people come to think and feel. Gaining knowledge in this field is important for developing one’s understanding about related topics.

A color-blind approach means that people are the same wherever you go. The multi-cultural approach means that people identify strongly with their groups. People are especially likely to identify with their groups if their groups are smaller or dis-advantaged in some way. People will fade better when the distinctive characteristics of their groups are attended to and appreciated. Research points in this direction.

You are a product of your own culture

For the most part, our culture remain invisible to us.

Ethnocentrism: judging people from other cultures by the standards of one’s own culture.

Where does cultural psychology come from?

Wundt became famous for introducing experimental methods into the study of psychology and launching the field as a science. He was also a cultural psychologists.

The Russian cultural-historical school argued that people interact with their environments through the ‘tools’ or human-made ideas that have been passed to them across history.