H1 | A psychology for a cultural species
Humans have culture. We rely on culture more than any other species, and it is this reliance that
has enabled us to succeed in such diverse environments. Our reliance on culture has important
and profound implications for our thoughts and behaviors. Cultural psychology is the field that
studies those implications.
The main theme of this book, is that people from different cultures also differ in the ways they
think and behave. One idea we’ll return to throughout is the notion that psychological processes
are shaped by experiences. Although experiences shape psychological processes, they don’t
determine them. Psychological processes are made possible and limited by the brain structures
that underlie them. And because the brains people are born with are virtually identical in regions
around the world, people from all cultures share the same abilities and limitations of the universal
human brain.
- This leads to the following question —> to what extent should ways of thinking look similar
around the world because people share a universal brain, and to what extent should they
look different because people have divergent experiences? (Universal vs culturally
variable).
§ What is culture?
To define culture, this book uses the term “culture” to mean two different things.
- Firstly, to indicate a particular kind of information —> culture is any kind of information that is
acquired from other members of one’s species through social learning that can influence an
individual’s behaviors.
• In other words: culture is any kind of idea, belief, technology, habit, or practice that is
acquired through learning from others.
- Secondly, to indicate a particular group of individuals —> a culture is a group of people who are
existing within some shared context.
• People within a given culture are exposed to many of the same cultural ideas.
• At the most global level, Heine sometimes uses the term culture to refer to broad
expanses of population around the world, which may even include people from a large
number of different countries.
- Thirdly, culture refers to —> a dynamic group of people who share a similar context, are
exposed to many similar cultural messages, and contain a broad range of different individuals
who are affected by those cultural messages in various ways
Challenges with thinking about a group of people as constituting a culture:
1 - Boundaries are not always clear cut
Cultural boundaries are thus not distinct
Although we can never be sure we have identified a clear cultural boundary that
separates two or more groups, a shorthand practice used in many research studies is to
look at nationality as a rough indicator of culture.
2 - There are other kinds of groups aside from countries that we might say have cultures
What makes these groups arguably qualify as cultures is that their members exist within
a shared context, communicate with each other, have some norms that distinguish them
from other groups, and have some common practices and ideas.
However, there are no clear distinguishing boundaries due to the fluid nature of cultural
boundaries. Though this weakens the ability of researchers to differentiatie between
cultural groups, but when differences are found, they provide powerful evidence that
cultures do vary in their psychological tendencies.
3 - Cultures change over time
Some shared cultural information disappears as new habits replace the old, although
much cultural information persists across time as well.
Culture as not static entities: they are dynamic and ever changing
4 - There is a lot of variability among individuals who belong to the same culture
Each person inherits a distinct temperament (a predisposition toward certain personality
traits, abilities, and attitudes)
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, Each person belongs to a unique collection of various social groups, each with its own
distinctive culture
Each person has a unique history of individual experiences that has shaped his or her
views
People are nothing if not variable, and the research findings from the studies reported in this book
do not apply equally to all member of a culture. Instead, they reflect average tendencies within
cultural groups.
§ Psychological processes can vary across cultures
In various cultures around the world, psychological processes emerge in quite different ways. This
fact raises a difficult question: how can we understand the workings of the human mind when it
apparently works in different ways in different contexts?
# Is the mind independent from, or intertwined with, culture?
- Shweder, considered by many to be the father of modern cultural psychology, argues that —>
much of the field of psychology —what he calls general psychology — assumes that the mind
operates according to a set of natural and universal laws that are independent from context or
content.
This is true in many ways, however, in many important ways people are not the same wherever
you go.
• Studying universals is a highly interesting, yet enormously challenging, enterprise that
tells us a great deal about human nature. We can learn much about how the minds works
by identifying the unchanging ways it operates.
• The study of human variability is also a very interesting and challenging enterprise that
greatly informs our understanding of human nature and the ways the mind operate.
The underlying goal of general psychology, as Shweder sees it, is to provide gilmpses of the mind
as a highly abstract central processing unit (CPU) operating in the raw so we can understand the
set of universal and natural laws that govern human thought. Context and content are viewed as
unwanted noise that clouds our ability to perceive the functioning of the CPU.
According to this perspective, important cultural variations in ways of thinking cannot exist
because cultures merely provide variations in context and content that lie outside the operations
of the underlying CPU.
- If cultural differences do appear in psychological studies, this universalist perspective
would suggest that they must reflect the contamination of various sources of noice.
- They could not reflect differences in the CPU because it is universally the same across all
contexts. General psychology would argue, then, that virtually all of human psychology is
universally experienced in similar ways.
Cultural psychologist, in contrast, do not embrace these assumptions. According to their views,
thinking is not merely the operation of the universal CPU; thinking also involves participation in the
context within which one is doing the thinking and interacting with the content one is thinking
about. Furthermore, the ways that people think about these kinds of behaviors influenced by the
very specific and particular ways that cultural knowledge shapes their understanding of those
behaviors. Humans seek meaning in their actions, and the shared ideas that make up cultures
provide the kinds of meanings people can get from their experiences. Cultural meanings are thus
entangled with the ways the mind operates, and we cannot consider the mind separate from its
culture.
• Mind and culture cannot be disentangles: the mind is shaped by its experiences, and
cultures differ in the kinds of experiences that they provide.
But how could the mind be shaped by cultural experiences?
The human brain continues to change, grow, and rewire itself in response to experience. Our brain
is highly plastic throughout our life. Many studies have found evidence that physical aspects of
the brain change in response to experience. Regularly encountered experiences can thus
ultimately come to change the structures of the brain.
- Although people around the world are all born with relatively the same brains, with time,
they come to have different brains by way of their different cultural experiences.
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,Because cultures differ in the ideas their members frequently encounter, they will also differ in the
networks of thoughts, action, and feelings that are most accessible to the members. It’s logical to
see, then, how culture comes to shape the way people think. Humans are so embedded in their
cultural worlds that they are always behaving as cultural actors, and their mental habits are
continuously supported by the interpretations they get from their culture.
• In other words: people are forever bound up in their own system of cultural meanings, and
they never start to think instead like a universal human.
Many cultural psychologists would argue that culture cannot be separated from the mind because
culture and mind make each other up. Cultures emerge from the interaction of the various minds
of the people that live within them, and culture, in turn, shape how those minds operate.
# Psychological universals and levels of analysis
One eternal source of controversy in discussing human universals is whether we present the
phenomenon we’re investigating in specific, concrete terms or in more general, abstract terms.
The level of abstraction we use influences the success we’ll have in identifying evidence for
universality. At more abstract levels, there is often more evidence for universals; however, at more
abstract levels the phenomena, or processes, under question are often too abstract to be of much
use. This tension between universal and culturally specific psychologies will be evident in many of
the topics we discuss in this book.
There is another reason why it’s not easy to settle controversies about whether certain
psychological processes are universal. There are a number of different levels by which we can
consider evidence for universality, and a hierarchical framework has been proposed:
This existence of this hierarchy
underscores the complexity of
discussions of whether a
psychological process can be said
to be universal.
There are four levels, from lowest
to highest:
- Nonuniversal
- Existential universal
- Functional universal
- Accessibility universal
Nonuniversal
• If we find that a particular psychological process can be said to not exist in all cultures, this
reflects an absence of universality and is called: a nonuniversal
• Nonuniversals are cultural inventions
Existential universal
• If we conclude that a particular psychological process is available in all cultures, then we
move up the decision tree to the next level. Now we must decide whether the process occurs
in the same way across cultures. If the answer is no, it qualifies as an existential universal.
• A psychological process is said to exist in all cultures, although the process is not
necessarily used to solve the same problems, nor is it equally accessible across cultures.
• The psychological process is latently present, although it might be used to achieve different
ends across cultures.
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, Functional universal
• If we conclude that a psychological process is used to solve the same problems across
cultures, then we move up to the next level in the decision tree. Here we must decide
whether the process is equally accessible to people in all cultures. If the answer is no, we
can call it a functional universal.
• Functional universals are psychological processes that exist in all cultures, are used to solve
the same problems across cultures, yet are more accessible to people from some cultures
than others.
• The psychological process serves the same function everywhere, although it may not be
used that much in some cultures.
Accessibility universal
• If we conclude that a psychological process is equally accessible in all cultures, it is an
accessibility universal, the top level of the decision tree.
• It indicates that a given psychological process exists in all cultures, is used to solve the same
problems across cultures, and is accessible to the same degree across cultures.
• [by accessibility they mean: the likelihood of a person using the particular psychological
process)
# The psychological database is largely WEIRD
We currently know very little about the extent to which many psychological processes are
universal. This is largely due to the fact that in many cases we don’t yet have the data that would
enable us to test the question of whether or not a process is universal. The vast majority of
psychological studies have thus far been limited to exploration of the minds of people living in
so-called WEIRD societies.
WEIRD being an acronym for:
• Western
• Educated
• Industrialized
• Rich
• Democratic
Thus, perhaps the strongest evidence for Shweder’s contention that general psychology does not
concern itself with context or content is the fact that psychology has adopted a sampling
methodology that largely ignores questions about the generalizability of its findings. The extremely
narrow samples most psychologist use make good sense if the mind really does operate
exclusively according to universal laws.
- For many of the ways of thinking discussed in this book, the findings that come from WEIRD
samples appear to be different from those obtained in other samples.
The available cross-cultural data reveal the following:
1. People from industrialized societies respond differently than those from small-scale societies
2. People from Western industrialized societies demonstrate more pronounced responses than
those from non-Western societies.
3. Americans show yet more extreme responses than other Westerners
4. The responses of contemporary American college students are even more different than those
of non-college-educated American adults
Research participants from WEIRD societies are clearly quite weird in their ways of thinking, and
building theories about the human mind exclusively from these samples is problematic.
Psychology has largely relied on narrow and unrepresentative samples, which weakens its ability
to dress questions about how well findings from any particular study generalize to other human
samples.
- One key goal of cultural psychology is to collect results from a broad enough array of
cultures to be able to more confidently explore questions about human universals and human
diversity. This goal is challenging because of accessibility barriers to a wide range of
cultures.
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