Cross-Cultural Environment-Behavior Research from a Holistic, Developmental, Systems-Oriented Perspective

In a recent article in American Psychologist, Segall, Lonner, and Berry (1998) have emphatically stated that “… ‘`culture’ and all that it implies with respect to human development, thought, and behavior should be central, not peripheral, in psychological theory and research. To keep culture peripheral, or worse, to avoid it altogether lest it challenge one’s own view of reality is myopic and a disservice to psychological inquiry” (p. 1108). In line with this, our own holistic, developmental, systems-oriented approach–which utilizes the person-in-environment as the unit of analysis so that environmental context is built into and an essential part of every analysis (see Wapner & Demick, this volume, for a more general description)–has suggested a variety of problems, reviewed below, relevant to the relatively new subfield of cross-cultural psychology.