Introduction to cultural psychology

Cultural psychology is a field of psychology which contains the idea that culture and mind are inseparable, thus there are no universal laws for how the mind works and that psychological theories grounded in one culture are likely to be limited in applicability when applied to a different culture. As Richard Shweder, one of the major proponents of the field, writes, "Cultural psychology is the study of the way cultural traditions and social practices regulate, express, and transform the human psyche, resulting less in psychic unity for humankind than in ethnic divergences in mind, self, and emotion" (1991, p. 72).

Cultural psychology has its roots in the 1960s and 1970s but became more prominent in the 1980's and 1990's. Some of the classic texts promoting cultural psychology include Shweder and Levine (1984), Triandis (1989), Bruner (1990) Shweder (1991), Markus and Kitayama (1991), Cole (1996), Nisbett & Cohen (1996), Shore (1996), Fiske, et al. (1998), Nisbett, et al. (2001) and Nisbett (2003). Cultural psychologists generally use either ethnographic or experimental methods (or a combination of both) for collecting data

Cultural psychology is distinct from cross-cultural psychology in that the cross-cultural psychologists generally use culture as a means of testing the universality of psychological processes rather than determining how local cultural practices shape psychological processes. So whereas a cross-cultural psychologist might ask whether Piaget's stages of development are universal across a variety of cultures, a cultural psychologist would be interested in how the social practices of a particular set of cultures shape the development of cognitive processes in different ways.

Cultural psychology research informs several fields within psychology, including social psychology, developmental psychology, and cognitive psychology. However, the relativist perspective of cultural psychology tends to clash with the universalist perspectives common in most fields in psychology.

One of the most significant themes in recent years has been cultural differences between East Asians and North Americans in attention (Masuda & Nisbett, 2001) perception (Kitayama, et al., 2003), cognition (Nisbett, et al. 2001) and social psychological phenomena such as the self (Markus & Kitayama, 1991). However, some (Turiel) have argued that this research is based on cultural stereotyping and faulty methodology (Matsumoto).