Cross-cultural psychology

Cross-cultural psychology is the scientific study of human behavior and mental processes, including both their variability and invariance, under diverse cultural conditions. Through expanding research methodologies to recognize cultural variance in behavior, language, and meaning it seeks to extend and develop psychology. Since psychology as an academic discipline was developed largely in North America and Europe, some psychologists became concerned that constructs accepted as universal were not as invariant as previously assumed, especially since many attempts to replicate notable experiments in other cultures had varying success. Since there are questions as to whether theories dealing with central themes, such as affect, cognition, conceptions of the self, and issues such as psychopathology, anxiety, and depression, may lack external validity when 'exported' to other cultural contexts, cross-cultural psychology re-examines them using methodologies designed to factor in cultural differences so as to account for cultural variance. Although some critics have pointed to methodological flaws in cross-cultural psychological research and claim that serious shortcomings in the theoretical and methodological bases used impede rather than help the scientific search for universal principles in psychology, cross-cultural psychologists are turning more to the study of how differences (variance) occur, rather than searching for universals in the style of physics or chemistry. Cross-cultural psychology is the scientific study of human behavior and mental processes, including both their variability and invariance, under diverse cultural conditions. Through expanding research methodologies to recognize cultural variance in behavior, language, and meaning it seeks to extend and develop psychology. Since psychology as an academic discipline was developed largely in North America and Europe, some psychologists became concerned that constructs accepted as universal were not as invariant as previously assumed, especially since many attempts to replicate notable experiments in other cultures had varying success. Since there are questions as to whether theories dealing with central themes, such as affect, cognition, conceptions of the self, and issues such as psychopathology, anxiety, and depression, may lack external validity when 'exported' to other cultural contexts, cross-cultural psychology re-examines them using methodologies designed to factor in cultural differences so as to account for cultural variance. Although some critics have pointed to methodological flaws in cross-cultural psychological research and claim that serious shortcomings in the theoretical and methodological bases used impede rather than help the scientific search for universal principles in psychology, cross-cultural psychologists are turning more to the study of how differences (variance) occur, rather than searching for universals in the style of physics or chemistry. While cross-cultural psychology represented only a minor area of psychology prior to WWII, it began to grow in importance during the 1960s. In 1971, the interdisciplinary Society for Cross-Cultural Research (SCCR) was founded, and in 1972 the International Association of Cross-Cultural Psychology (IACCP) was established. Since then, this branch of psychology has continued to expand as there has been an increasing popularity of incorporating culture and diversity into studies of numerous psychological phenomena. Cross-cultural psychology is differentiated from cultural psychology, which refers to the branch of psychology that holds that human behavior is strongly influenced by cultural differences, meaning that psychological phenomena can only be compared with each other across cultures to a limited extent. In contrast, cross-cultural psychology includes a search for possible universals in behavior and mental processes. Cross-cultural psychology 'can be thought of as a type research methodology, rather than an entirely separate field within psychology'. In addition, cross-cultural psychology can be distinguished from international psychology which centers around the global expansion of psychology especially during recent decades. Nevertheless, cross-cultural psychology, cultural psychology, and international psychology are united by a common concern for expanding psychology into a universal discipline capable of understanding psychological phenomena across cultures and in a global context. Two definitions of the field include: 'the scientific study of human behavior and its transmission, taking into account the ways in which behaviors are shaped and influenced by social and cultural forces' and 'the empirical study of members of various cultural groups who have had different experiences that lead to predictable and significant differences in behavior'. Culture, as a whole, may also be defined as 'the shared way of life of a group of people.' In contrast to sociologists, most cross-cultural psychologists do not draw a clear dividing line between social structure and cultural belief systems. Early work in cross-cultural psychology was suggested in Lazarus and Steinthal's journal Zeitschrift für Völkerpsychologie und Sprachwissenschaft , which began to be published in 1860. More empirically oriented research was subsequently conducted by Williams H. R. Rivers (1864–1922) who attempted to measure the intelligence and sensory acuity of indigenous people residing in the Torres Straits area, located between Australia and New Guinea. The father of modern psychology, Wilhelm Wundt, published ten volumes on Völkerpsychologie (a kind of historically oriented cultural psychology), but these volumes have had only limited influence in the English-speaking world. Wundt's student Franz Boas, an anthropologist at Columbia University, challenged several of his students such as Ruth Benedict and Margaret Mead to study psychological phenomena in nonwestern cultures such as Japan, Samoa, and New Guinea. They emphasized the enormous cultural variability of many psychological phenomena thereby challenging psychologists to prove the cross-cultural validity of their favorite theories. Other fields of psychology focus on how personal relationships impact human behavior; however, they fail to take into account the significant impact that culture may have on human behavior. The Malinowskian dictum focuses on the idea that there is a necessity to understand the culture of a society in its own terms instead of the common search for finding universal laws that apply to all human behavior. Cross-culture psychologists have used the emic/etic distinction for some time. The emic approach studies behavior from within the culture, and mostly is based on one culture; the etic approach studies behavior from outside the culture system, and is based on many cultures. Currently, many psychologists conducting cross-cultural research are said to use what is called a pseudoetic approach. This pseudoetic approach is actually an emic based approach developed in a Western culture while being designed to work as an etic approach. Irvine and Carroll brought an intelligence test to another culture without checking whether the test was measuring what it was intended to measure. This can be considered pseudoetic work because various cultures have their own concepts for intelligence. Some psychologist employed cultural priming to understand how people living with multiple culture interpret events. For example, Hung and his associate display participants a different set of culture related images, like U.S. Capitol building vs Chinese temple, and then watch a clip of an individual fish swimming ahead of a group of fishes. When exposed to the latter one, Hong Kong participants are more likely to reason in a collectivistic way.:187 In contrast, their counterparts who view western images are more likely to give a reverse response and focus more on that individual fish.:787 People from bi-culture society when primed with different cultural icons, they are inclined to make cultural activated attribution.:327 Pronoun circling task, is also another cultural priming task, by asking participant consciously circling the pronoun, like 'We', 'us', 'I', and 'me', during paragraph reading.:381 The Dutch psychologist Geert Hofstede revolutionized the field doing worldwide research on values for IBM in the 1970s. Hofstede's cultural dimensions theory is not only the springboard for one of the most active research traditions in cross-cultural psychology, but is also cited extensively in the management literature. His initial work found that cultures differ on four dimensions: power distance, uncertainty avoidance, masculinity-femininity, and individualism-collectivism. Later, after The Chinese Culture Connection extended his research using indigenous Chinese materials, he added a fifth dimension - long-term orientation (originally called Confucian dynamism) - which can be found in other cultures besides China. Still later, after work with Michael Minkov using data from the World Values Survey, he added a sixth dimension - indulgence versus restraint. Despite its popularity, Hofstede's work has been seriously questioned by McSweeney (2002). Furthermore, Berry et al. challenge some of the work of Hofstede, proposing alternative measures to assess individualism and collectivism. Indeed, the individualism-collectivism debate has itself proven to be problematic, with Sinha and Tripathi (1994) arguing that strong individualistic and collectivistic orientations may coexist in the same culture (they discuss India in this connection). This has proven to be a problem with many of the various linear dimensions that are, by nature, dichotomous. Cultures are much more complex and contextually based than represent in these inflexible dimensional representations.