INTRODUCTION TO CROSS

CULTURAL PSYCHOLOGY
Lecture I
Introduction
◻ Culture can be defined as all the ways of life
including arts, beliefs and institutions of a
population that are passed down from generation
to generation.
◻ Culture has been called "the way of life for an
entire society."
◻ As such, it includes codes of manners, dress,
language, religion, rituals, art.
◻ In many ways, people from different cultures live
their lives differently; they speak different
languages, have different customs, eat different
foods, have different religious beliefs, have
different child-rearing practices, and so on.
◻ Much about a person’s lifestyle can be predicted
just by knowing his or her culture.
◻ The unique contribution of cultural psychology, is
that people from different cultures also differ in
their psychology.
◻ One theme that will be returned to throughout this
book is the notion that psychological processes are
shaped by experiences.
◻ Because people in different cultures have many
different experiences, we should then expect to find
differences in many ways that they think.
◻ Psychological processes are constrained and
afforded by the neurological structures that underlie
them.
◻ And because the brains that people are born with
are virtually identical around the world, people
from all cultures share the same constraints and
affordances of the universal human brain.
◻ Providing an answer to this question is not always
straightforward, because some ways of thinking do
appear to be highly similar around the world
whereas others appear strikingly different.
 Cross-cultural Psychology
◻ The field of cross-cultural psychology can be
defined by thinking about, and then carrying out,
activities suggested by the three terms in its name:
1.Culture- the examination of cultural contexts in which
behaviour develops and is displayed.
2. Psychology- the assessment of behavior using tools
that are appropriate to the cultural context
3. Cross- the making of comparisons of cultures, of
behaviours, and of culture-behavior relationships
across different societies.
What Is Culture?
◻ The question of what culture is has been debated
among anthropologists, sociologists, and
psychologists for decades, and there is no single
consensual answer that applies to all fields.
◻ Some people have focused on the symbolic aspects
of culture, some have attended to the physical
artifacts of culture, and some have emphasized the
habits that are contained in culture.
◻ Culture was defined earlier as the symbols, language,
beliefs, values, and artifacts that are part of any society.
◻ As this definition suggests, there are two basic
components of culture:
1. Artifacts (material objects) on the other
2. Ideas and symbols on the one hand and
◻ The first type, called material culture, includes all the
society’s physical objects, such as its tools and
technology, clothing, eating utensils, and means of
transportation.
◻ The second type, called nonmaterial culture also
known as symbolic culture, includes the values,
beliefs, symbols, and language that define a society.
 Culture Diversity
◻ Another name for cultural diversity is multiculturalism.
Multiculturalism is a cluster of diverse persons from
dissimilar cultures or civilizations.
◻ Cultural diversity contains varied persons due to ethnicity,
race, and gender.
◻ The characteristics of cultural diversity
New ideas
Wisdom
Flexibility
Conflict
◻ Cross-cultural psychology is the critical and comparative
study of cultural effects on human psychology.
◻ In contrast to cultural psychology, which seeks to discover
meaningful links between a culture and the
psychology of individuals living in that culture whereas
cross-cultural psychology examines psychological
diversity and the underlying reasons for such diversity.
◻ Psychological diversity refers to differences in underlying
attributes of members, which include human features like
skills, abilities, personality characteristics, and
attitudes (Landy and Conte, 2004).
◻ Using a comparative approach, cross-cultural psychology
examines the links between cultural norms and
behavior and the ways in which particular human
activities are influenced by various cultural forces
 Where does a cross-cultural
psychologist work?
◻ No society is culturally homogeneous, and within
the same cultural cluster, there can be significant
variations, inconsistencies, and dissimilarities.
◻ A cross-cultural psychologist must be good at
communicating with people from a variety of
cultures.
◻ Most cross-cultural psychologists work
at research labs, colleges and universities,
businesses and organizations, social service
agencies, government organizations, private
practices, or mental health facilities.
◻
◻ Cross-cultural psychology seeks to understand how
culture influences many different aspects of
human thought and behavior.
◻ Cross-cultural psychologists often study
development, personality, and social
relationships.
◻ Cross-cultural psychologists rely on science, social
sciences, and the humanities to establish and
conceptualize the main features of culture
Psychological Processes Can Vary
Across Cultures
◻ Numerous psychological processes that emerge in
quite different ways across cultures.
◻ Some kinds of cultural variation in psychology may
already be familiar to you, as you can observe the
differences directly yourself.
◻ For example, one striking way that people’s
psychology differs between cultures is their sense of
humor.
◻ What is funny in some cultures might not be seen as
that funny in others.
◻ The observation that people’s sense of humor differs is something
you may have noticed yourself if you’ve watched foreign
comedies or have friends from other countries.
◻ People from other cultures are different because they like different
kinds of jokes, prefer different kinds of food, wear different
clothes, worship different gods, vote for political parties with
different concerns, and so on.
◻ Such differences in preferences are familiar to us because we see
similar kinds of differences in preferences among people from our
own culture.
◻ Cultural variation in psychological processes can extend much
deeper than just preferences.
◻ Many basic psychological processes, such as the ways people
perceive the world, their sense of right and wrong, and the things
that motivate them, can emerge in starkly different ways across
cultures.
 Is the Mind Independent from, or
Intertwined with, Culture?
◻ The mind operates under a set of natural and universal laws
that are independent from content or context (Shweder,
1990)
◻ People are the same wherever you go.
◻ Surely, in many ways people really are the same wherever
you go, and some researchers have attempted to document
the many ways that people’s thinking can be said to be the
same across all cultures.
◻ For example, in all cultures people speak a language using
between 10 and 70 phonemes, they all smile when they are
happy, they all have a word for the color black, they are all
disgusted at the idea of incest between parents and children,
and they all understand the number 2.
◻ However, in many important ways people are not the same
wherever you go.
◻ For example, people in some cultures bite their tongues when they
are embarrassed whereas people in other cultures do not, some
languages do not have a word for blue, people in some cultures
are disgusted at the idea of incest between cousins whereas
people in other cultures are not etc
◻ The study of human variability is also a very interesting and
challenging enterprise that greatly informs our understanding of
human nature and of the ways that the mind operates.
◻ Regularly encountered experiences can thus ultimately come to
change the structure of the brain.
◻ The nature of the brain is not fixed from birth, but rather changes
in the response to certain experiences.
 Some ways of thinking do appear to be highly similar
around the world whereas others appear strikingly
different.
◻The tension between cultural universals and cultural
variable has been in cross cultural psychology.
◻ Cultural universals are best described as concepts, social
constructs, or patterns of behavior that are common to ALL
human cultures; Some examples of other cultural universals
include: gift-giving, marriage, and rules of hygiene
◻ Cultural variable are Human nature, religion, time, action,
communication which are not common to ALL human cultures.
Approaches of Cross Cultural
Psychology
◻ Cross-cultural psychologists use several approaches to
examine human activities and experiences in various
cultural settings.
These include the
◻ natural science approach (disciplines of astronomy,

biology, chemistry, geology, and physics),

◻ the social sciences approach (field surveys, case
research),
◻ the humanities approach (historical and social
phenomena),
◻ the ecocultural approach (the study of the
relationships between living organisms, including
humans, and their physical environment; it seeks
to understand the vital connections between plants
and animals and the world around them.),
◻ the integrative approach (the idea of integrating or
combining aspects of several different schools of
thought to promote wellness.)
Cultural factors affecting human
behavior
◻ Attitude and Behaviours Influenced by Ones
Culture:
◻ Personality i.e. sense of self and society.
◻ Language i.e. communication.
◻ Dress.
◻ Food habits.
◻ Religion and religious faiths that is beliefs. ...
◻ Customs of marriages and religions and special
social customs.
 Psychological Universals and Levels of
Analysis
◻ For example, consider the question of marriage. Is it culturally universal?
◻ The answer depends on what you mean by marriage. If you mean the
kind of marriage that is common in Western cultures in which a man and
a woman fall in love and agree to share their lives exclusively with each
other until either one of them dies or they get divorced, then marriage is
not universal, as there are many cultures in which people do not form
such relationships (Ford & Beach, 1951).
◻ On the other hand, you could instead consider marriage in a more
abstract sense, as some kind of formal arrangement in which men and
women stay together in an enduring relationship (whether there be
multiple women per man or multiple men per woman, and whether or
not there were feelings of love prior to the marriage), with public
recognition of exclusive sexual access among those who are married,
and centered on the rearing of children
 The decision tree for determining the degree of
universality in a psychological process
◻ Nonuniversals
◻ If we find that a particular cognitive tool can be said to not exist in all
cultures, this reflects an absence of universality and is termed, appropriately
enough, a nonuniversal.
◻ Nonuniversals are cultural inventions. An example is abacus reasoning. An
abacus is a calculation tool that is used in some parts of the Middle East and
in Asia. People from cultures where they are trained to use the abacus think
about numbers differently than those who are from cultures that do not use
the abacus.
◻ The cognitive tools associated with abacus reasoning can be said to be
nonexistent in people who have not been trained in them.
◻ Much of numerical reasoning appears to be a nonuniversal (Carey, 2004;
Gordon, 2004), in that some of the cognitive tools involved seem to be
present only among those who have been raised in cultures that use them.
Existential universal
◻ At this step we must decide whether the phenomenon is used in
the same way across cultures.
◻ If the answer is “no,” the phenomenon qualifies as an
existential universal.
◻ Here, a psychological phenomenon is said to exist in multiple
cultures, although the phenomenon is not necessarily used to
solve the same problem, nor is it equally accessible across
cultures.
◻ That is, the psychological phenomenon is latently present,
although it might be used to achieve different ends across
cultures.
◻ For example, Westerners tend to find experiences with success
to be motivating and experiences with failure to be
demotivating (e.g., Feather, 1966). In contrast, East Asians tend
to show the opposite pattern, whereby they work harder after
failures than after successes (Heine et al., 2001b; Oishi &
Diener, 2003).
Functional universals
◻ Functional universals are psychological phenomena that exist
in multiple cultures, are used to solve the same problems
across cultures, yet are more accessible to people from some
cultures than others.
◻ In the case of functional universals, the cognitive tool serves
the same function everywhere, although it may not be used
that much in some cultures.
◻ For example, one large-scale investigation explored whether
people from a variety of societies around the world tended
to punish those who acted unfairly, even if that punishment
was costly for the individual to mete out (Henrich et al.,
2006; Such costly punishment was evident in all 15 societies
that were investigated: apparently, costly punishment is
meted out in response to unfair behavior universally—such
punishment thus serves a similar function.
Accessibility universal
◻ Last, if we conclude that a psychological phenomenon is equally accessible
in all cultures then we conclude that it is an accessibility universal.
◻ This is the strongest case for universality and indicates that a given
psychological phenomenon exists in all cultures, is used to solve the same
problem across cultures, and is accessible to the same degree across
cultures. (By accessibility we mean the likelihood of a person using the
particular psychological phenomenon.)
◻ There are likely many accessibility universals, although few have been
documented thus far in psychological research.
◻ The best candidates would be those psychological phenomena that
emerge very early in infancy or are shared across species.
◻ For example, social facilitation—the tendency for individuals to do better
at well-learned tasks and worse at poorly learned ones when in the
presence of others. It would be surprising if this tendency varied
significantly across cultures, and indeed, there is thus far no evidence for
any cultural variability.
Culture and Behaviour: Perspectives

◻ Absolutism: According to Berry, Poortinga, Segall,

and Dasen (1992), cultural absolutism is the idea
that psychological phenomena, such as honesty, do
not differ from culture to culture: They are the same
among cultures.
◻ Phenomena are believed to have a fixed reality;
thus, what is regarded as true in one circumstance
will be regarded as true in all others as well.
Relativism
◻ Cultural Relativism is the claim that ethical practices differ
among cultures, and what is considered right in one culture
may be considered wrong in another.
◻ Cultural relativism refers to not judging a culture to our own
standards of what is right or wrong, strange or normal.
◻ Instead, we should try to understand cultural practices of
other groups in its own cultural context.
◻ For example, traditionally, breakfast in the United States is
markedly different from breakfast in Japan or Colombia.
While one may consist of scrambled eggs and pancakes and
the other rice and soup or white cheese on a corn arepa,
cultural relativists seek to understand these differences not in
terms of any perceived superiority or inferiority, but in
description (Bian & Markman, 2020).
 WEIRD Psychology

◻ Claims about human psychology and behaviour in

top international journals are largely based on the
WEIRDest people in the world.
◻ People from Western Educated Industrialised Rich
Democratic - or WEIRD - societies are widely used
as research subjects, but the assumption that they
represent a universal human population may be
vastly wrong, and skew psychological research.
◻ These include social behavior, MORAL reasoning,
VISUAL PERCEPTION, sense of FAIRNESS,
COOPERATION, SPATIAL reasoning (the capacity to
think about objects in three dimensions and to draw
conclusions about those objects from limited information)
as well as performance on IQ tests and ANALYTICAL
abilities.
◻ Research suggests that members of WEIRD societies,
including young children, are some of the least
representative populations that could be found for
GENERALIZING about humans. Let’s look at one
example.
◻

◻ LB KARASIK and colleagues have described how WEIRD children’s

motor-development patterns have become placed in psychology, through
testing procedures into the current understanding of UNIVERSAL ‘STAGES’ of
motor development.
◻ Meaning that even when someone did conduct CROSS-CULTURAL research, the
specific criteria came from examining WEIRD developmental pathways, and
meant that these researchers had tools that were not well-suited to study these
other children.
◻ Or, simply put, they were comparing the diverse children to WEIRD children,
but on standards that had been set by the WEIRD children.
 Ethnocentrism & Ethno-relativism
◻ W. G. Sumner coined the term ethnocentrism in 1906.
He characterized it as often leading to pride, vanity,
beliefs of one's own group's superiority, and
contempt (Disrespect) of outsiders.
◻ But this characterization was criticized by
anthropologists such as R. K. Merton, F. Boas and B.
Malinowski.
◻ Ethnocentrism is judging another culture solely by the
values and standards of one's own culture.
◻ Ethnocentric individuals judge other groups relative to
their own ethnic group or culture, especially with
concern for language, behavior, customs, and religion.
 Stages of Ethnocentrism
1. Denial
◻ This is a primitive ethnocentric stage in which there is
denial that cultural differences even exist.
◻ People refuse to accept them.
◻ Generally, those who experience cultural denial
have not had extensive contact with people different
from themselves, and thus have no experiential basis
for believing in other cultures.
1.
2. Defense
◻ Now they are able to recognize that there are
differences between cultures, but in a way, differences
are seen as threatening to self.
◻ Persons in the defense stage feel threatened by
“competing” cultures, tend to surround themselves with
member of their own culture, and avoid contact with
“them.”
3. Minimization (we are all a human, everyone its same,
like me).
◻ People in the minimization stage of ethnocentrism are
still threatened by cultural differences, but try to
minimize them by telling themselves that people are
more similar than dissimilar.
 Ethno-relativism
◻ It is a belief based on deep and heart-felt respect
for other cultures that all groups, cultures, or
subcultures are inherently equal.
◻ Other cultures have be seen neither as better or
worse, but as equally valid but different and
complex worldviews.
◻ Ethno relativism states that no one culture it is
superior to another (recognize differences between
cultures, and believe in adapted and accommodate).
◻ Ethno relativism divided in three stages:
Stages of Ethno-relativism
1. Acceptance (grasping the importance of cultural difference, a new
way of seeing the world. People accept the existence of other
cultural contexts and think this way because they have a more
tolerant and sympathetic attitude towards differences).
2. Adaptation (intercultural empathy, interpret and evaluate from
more than one cultural perspective, a new way of acting
encouraging intensive exploration and research, one expands own
worldview to accurately understand other cultures and behave in a
variety of culturally appropriate ways)
3. Integration (more desirable stage than adaptation, define as
acculturation or assimilation of culture).
(acculturation cultural modification of an individual, group, or people
by adapting to or borrowing traits from another culture.)
(Assimilation is when one completely gives up own culture and follows
the new one.)