This is a summary of Understanding Social Psychology across Cultures, chapter 1-15.
Chapter 1 – Why does social psychology need a cross-culture perspective?
Cultural differences pose challenges that are important in a globalizing world. The development of modern
technology has increased the speed and ease with which we can travel the world and has eliminated the time within
which messages can pass between two places on earth. There are three main concerns with social psychology.
• Standardized and simplified settings - Social psychology has most frequently been conducted by focusing on
standardized and simplified settings. This raises problems if we wish to apply those founding’s to more everyday
settings, especially those in different cultural contexts. They are not in line with the diversity of the world’s
population.
• WEIRD countries - 68% of the samples are from the US and 28% are from other Western countries. Henricht
(2010) states that social psychology is WEIRD, it focusses on countries that are – Western, Educated,
Industrialized, Rich and Democratic. In these countries most studies are done by young psychology students. The
other part of the world is called the Majority World, the much larger portion of humankind outside of WEIRD.
• Illusion of social stability - Research settings focus on one moment in time it can give us the illusion of social
stability. The book goes with the assumption that we are studying a stable world, even though we know most
things are in flux. Over the past ten thousand years human evolution has differentiated a series of relatively
small and relatively separate groups that we can describe as societies or cultures.
o There is a reduction in linguistic diversity, some languages disappear and others are more widely spoken.
o Mass media blasted cultural products from WEIRD countries to other parts of the world.
o People travel and migrate to other countries and people are moving to the city.
The world is not parted into thousands of cultural groups, but instead 200 states. Inside of these states people share
a nationality but they are different on a lot of other levels (skin color, ethnicity, language, etc.).
Ethnicity/ethnic group – ethnicity is a concept to identify sub-cultural groups on the basis of criteria such as
ancestry, skin color and other attributes. A persons self-identified ethnic identity does not always coincide with his or
her ethnicity as identified by others.
• Cross-culture psychology – an approach to the study of culture that focuses on comparisons between different
groups and testing theories as to why they do or do not differ from one another. This means they use
quantitative forms of measurement but are distinctive because they test their theories in different geographical
locations to see if the theories are universal. Socialization is a process during childhood but when individuals
move through different nations there is a further socialization process.
• Cultural psychology – an approach to the study of culture that emphasizes the interrelatedness of persons and
their specific contexts. This requires culturally appropriate research methods and makes no assumption that
results will be cumulative or will lead to the identification of causal relationships. Not only psychology is
important, social context is also important to determine how people behave. Vygotsky studied the development
of thought and language. He looked at the manner in which learning derives from the socio-cultural context
within which the child develops. The child learns to speak in the new ways observed from his or her socialization
models and internalizes the skills. This is a focus on cultural transmission and started the cultural psychology.
• Indigenous psychology – are against experimental methods so they use concepts that are developed locally
rather than using other existing methods. Very specific and qualitatively.
Psychologists use the experimental method because it offers the best chance for a causal relationship between
variables, which has to be done in simplified settings. Now there is more attention to the effect of social context on
behavior, in experiments the participants were exposed to various kinds of social pressures (Lwen, Sherif and Asch).
There are a few stages which give insight in the difference between outcomes in studies.
Stages in the development of cross-cultural psychology.
Stage 1 – Aristotelian, US researchers initiated collaborative work with researchers from other parts of the world to
replicate and compare US studies, by the same measures.
Stage 2 – Linnean, Large-scale studies sampling many nations to see in which ways national groups differ in terms of
psychological attributes such as values, beliefs and personality.
, Stage 3 – Newtonian, where social psychologists from different nations are increasingly collaborating on an equal
basis and drawing on theories and methods that are explicitly formulated to explain cultural differences.
Replicating research studies is a crucial element in the establishment of their validity. Meta-analysis – a statistical
technique for summarizing the results of a large group of related studies. Even though the studies may have used
different measurement scales, each can be analyzed to yield an effect size which is an estimate of the extent of
change reported on whatever measure was used, minus the change found on any control or comparison group.
Emic studies – emic studies are those that draw material from the immediate context being studies and make no
assumption about the cultural generality of what is discovered.
Etic studies – are those that make a provisional assumption that the phenomena being studied are universal and
attempt to establish their validity everywhere.
Chapter 2 – Clarifying the way forward with culture
The concept of culture is unclear. It is a concept applicable to all levels in the analysis of social systems, nations,
ethnicities, organizations, teams, families, dyadic relationships. The culture of a social system comprises similar ways
of responding to context, similar ways of responding to context, similar ways of processing information and shared
interpretations of the meanings of events. Nations are too diverse to have a unified culture, they are political
systems with other systems imbedded.
• Function features – evolutionary perspective and note ways in which behaviors are adaptive to the context
in which humans have lived in the past.
• Structural features – such as norms and roles and beliefs, values and attributes that underpin them. A
culture is a system of meanings that is shared between members.
• Culture as a process – the types of cognitive processes in which persons engage differ around the world.
Because a group can have a lot of individuals it is hard to set a standard for how much similarity there has to be for
there to be a shared culture, think of a family or a nation. Individuals have a particular cultural orientation. This
means they can interpret their surroundings in a way that is consistent with dimensions of culture, but on individual
level attributes such as self-constructural, values or believes.
Social systems – comprises the behavior of multiple individuals within a culturally organized population including
their patterns of interaction and networks of social relationships. They can be small or large. Social systems have
culture (Rohner, 1984)
Cultural systems – they do not have social systems, they make social systems comprehensible, and thereby provide
guidance for appropriate responses. There is shared meaning (Rohner, 1984).
So by this definition nations as well as the ethnic, regional and socio-economic groups that may be present within
them can be defined as having cultures to the extent that there is evidence that their members interpret the events
around them in relatively similar ways. But how can cross-cultural psychologists test for such homogeneity of outlook
within a social system?
Cross-culture psychologists cannot assume that particular behavior has the same meaning in different cultures, but a
member of a culture will assign meanings to behavior.
• The processes of socialization teach one to interpret the most likely meaning of acts. So to see if a nation is a
culture you have to survey the members and determine the extent to which there is consensus about
meanings, a typical emic study.
• Another way is not to focus on the meaning but on the more organized conceptual frameworks which are
likely to guide their interpretations. Values are abstract and general so more easy to measure than meanings.
If a social system has a certain set of values then social scientists would have a basis for defining the
existence of a culture.
Because social systems aren’t an laboratory setting, it is almost impossible to know if there is a causal effect. There
are a few studies that classify nations on values, believes and practices.
