Cross-cultural psychology is the scientific study of human behavior and mental processes, including both their variability and invariance, under diverse cultural conditions.Ho, D. Y. F., & Wu, M. (2001). Introduction to cross-cultural psychology. In L. L. Adler & U. P. Gielen (Eds.), Cross-cultural topics in psychology (pp. 3–13). Westport, CT: Praeger. Through expanding research methodologies to recognize cultural variance in behavior, language, and meaning it seeks to extend and develop psychology.Gielen, U. P., & Roopnarine, J. L. (Eds.). (2016). Childhood and adolescence: Cross-cultural perspectives and applications (2nd ed.). Santa Barbara, CA: Praeger. Since psychology as an academic discipline was developed largely in North America and Europe, some psychologists became concerned that constructs and phenomena accepted as universal were not as invariant as previously assumed, especially since many attempts to replicate notable experiments in other cultures had varying success.Smith, Peter B., Fischer, R., Vignoles, V. L. & Bond, M. H. (Eds.). (2013). Understanding Social Psychology Across Cultures: Engaging with others in a changing world (2nd ed.). Thousand Oaks, California: Sage. 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. It does so using methodologies designed to factor in cultural differences so as to account for cultural variance.Vijver, Fons van de, and Kwok Leung. Methods and Data Analysis for Cross-Cultural Research. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage, 1997 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 for 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 (but influences and is influenced by), 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 [of] research methodology, rather than an entirely separate field within psychology". In addition, cross-cultural psychology can be distinguished from international psychology, with the latter centering 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.
Definitions and early work 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"Berry, J. W., & Poortinga, Y. H. (2011). Cross-cultural psychology: Research and applications (3rd ed.). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. and "the empirical study of members of various cultural groups who have had different experiences that lead to predictable and significant differences in behavior".Brislin, Lonner, & Thorndike, 1973 as cited in Berry, J. W., Poortinga, Y. H., Segall, M. H., & Dasen, P. R. (1992). Cross-cultural psychology: Research and applications. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 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 [Journal of Folk Psychology and Language Science], 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.Jahoda, G. (1993). Crossroads between culture and mind. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. 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, W. (1900-1920). Völkerpsychologie (Comparative Psychology of Peoples), vols.1-10. Leipzig, Germany: Engelmann. 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.
Etic v. emic perspectives
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.
Research and applications
Self-concept on bi-culture
Research on how the self is construed (whether, for example, in individualistic or collectivistic terms) has been a major topic of research in cross-cultural psychology for decades. Some psychologist employed cultural priming to understand how people living with multiple cultures interpret events. For example, Hung and his associates displayed a different set of culture related images to study participants, such as the U.S. White House and a Chinese temple, and then watched a clip of an individual fish swimming ahead of a group of fishes. When exposed to the latter, Hong Kong participants were more likely to reason in a collectivistic way. In contrast, participants who viewed Western images were more likely to give a reverse response and focus more on individual fish. People from bi-culture society when primed with different cultural icons, they are inclined to make cultural activated attribution. 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.
Geert Hofstede and the dimensions of culture
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.Hofstede, G. (2001). Culture's consequences: Comparing values, behaviors, institutions, and organizations across nations (2nd ed.). Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage. 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.Minkov, Michael (2007). What makes us different and similar: A new interpretation of the World Values Survey and other cross-cultural data. Sofia, Bulgaria: Klasika y Stil Publishing House. Hofstede, Geert, Hofstede, Gert Jan, and Minkov, Michael. (2010). Cultures and organizations: Software of the Mind (3rd ed.). New York: McGraw-Hill.
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).Kim, U., Triandis, H. C., Choi, S. C., Kağitçibaşi, Ç., & Yoon, G. (Eds.). (1994). Individualism and collectivism: Theory, method, and applications. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage. 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.
Counseling and clinical psychology