Because psychology as an academic discipline was developed primarily in North America and Western Europe, some psychologists became concerned that the constructs they accepted as universal were not as flexible and varied as previously thought, and did not work within other countries, cultures and civilizations. Because there are questions as to whether theories related to the main issues of psychology (theory of affect, theory of knowledge, self-concept, psychopathology, anxiety and depression, etc.) may manifest themselves differently within other cultural contexts. Cross-cultural psychology is revisiting them with methodologies designed to accommodate cultural differences in order to make psychological research more objective and universal.
Differences from cultural psychology
Cross-culturalpsychology differs from cultural psychology, which argues that human behavior is strongly influenced by cultural differences, which means that psychological phenomena can only be compared in the context of different cultures and to a very limited extent. Cross-cultural psychology, on the contrary, is aimed at searching for possible universal tendencies in behavior and mental processes. It is seen more as a type of research methodology rather than an entirely separate field of psychology.
Differences from international psychology
Furthermore, cross-cultural psychology can be distinguished from international psychology, which centers around the global expansion of psychology as a science, especially in recent decades. Nevertheless, intercultural, cultural and international psychology are united by a common interest in expanding this science to the level of a universal discipline capable of understanding psychological phenomena both in individual cultures and in a global context.
First Intercultural Studies
The first cross-cultural studies were carried out by 19th-century anthropologists. These include scholars such as Edward Burnett Tylor and Lewis G. Morgan. One of the most striking cross-cultural studies in historical psychology is the study by Edward Tylor, which touched on the central statistical problem of cross-cultural research - G alton. In recent decades, historians, and especially historians of science, have begun to study the mechanism and networks by which knowledge, ideas, skills, tools, and books moved across cultures, generatingnew and fresh concepts concerning the order of things in nature. Research like this has graced the golden pool of examples of cross-cultural research.
Studying intercultural exchanges in the Eastern Mediterranean in the 1560s-1660s, Avner Ben-Zaken concluded that such exchanges occur at a cultural foggy locus, where the edges of one culture intersect with another, creating a "mutually embraced zone" in which exchanges take place peacefully. From such a stimulating zone, ideas, aesthetic canons, tools and practices move to cultural centers, forcing them to renew and refresh their cultural representations.
Cross-cultural perception studies
Some of the early field work in anthropology and intercultural psychology focused on perception. Many people who are passionate about this topic are very interested in who first conducted cross-cultural ethnopsychological research. Well, let's turn to history.
It all started with the famous British expedition to the Torres Strait Islands (near New Guinea) in 1895. William Holes Rivers, a British ethnologist and anthropologist, decided to test the hypothesis that representatives of different cultures differ in their vision and perception. The scientist's guesses were confirmed. His work was far from definitive (although subsequent work suggests that such differences are minor at best), but he was the one who introduced an interest in cross-cultural differences into academia.
Later, in studies that are directly related to relativism, various sociologists argued that representatives of cultures with different, rather motley vocabularies will perceive colors differently. This phenomenon is called "linguistic relativism". As an example, we consider a careful series of experiments by Segall, Campbell, and Herskovitz (1966). They studied subjects from three European and fourteen non-European cultures, testing three hypotheses about the impact of the environment on the perception of various visual phenomena. One hypothesis was that living in the "dense world" - a common environment for Western societies dominated by rectangular shapes, straight lines, square corners - influences susceptibility to the Müller-Lyer illusion and the Sander parallelogram illusion.
As a result of these studies, it has been suggested that people living in very "built up" environments quickly learn to interpret oblique and acute angles as offset right angles, as well as to perceive two-dimensional drawings in terms of their depth. This would cause them to see the two figures in the Müller-Lier illusion as a three-dimensional object. If the figure on the left was considered to be, say, the edge of the box, that would be the leading edge, and the figure on the right would be the back edge. This would mean that the figure on the left was larger than we see it. Similar problems arise with Sander's illustration of the parallelogram.
What would be the results of people living in barrier-free environments where rectangles and right angles are lesscommon? For example, the Zulus live in round huts and plow their fields in circles. And they were supposed to be less susceptible to these illusions, but more susceptible to some others.
Perceptual relativism
Many scientists argue that how we perceive the world is highly dependent on our concepts (or our words) and beliefs. The American philosopher Charles Sanders Peirce pointed out that perception is really just a kind of interpretation or inference about reality, that it is not necessary to go beyond ordinary observations of life to find many different ways of interpreting perception.
Ruth Benedict argues that “no one sees the world with untouched eyes”, and Edward Sapir argues that “even relatively simple aspects of perception are much more dependent on social patterns instilled in us through words than we could assume." Whorf echoes them: "We analyze nature along the lines established by our native languages … [Everything is determined by] categories and types that we distinguish from the world of phenomena and which we do not notice because they are right in front of us." Thus, the perception of the same phenomena in different cultures is primarily due to linguistic and cultural differences, and any cross-cultural ethnopsychological study involves identifying these differences.
Research by Geert Hofstede
Dutch psychologist Geert Hofstede revolutionized the field of cultural values research forIBM in the 1970s. Hofstede's theory of cultural dimensions is not only a springboard for one of the most active research traditions in intercultural psychology, but also a commercially successful product that has found its way into management and business psychology textbooks. His initial work showed that cultures differ in four dimensions: perception of power, uncertainty avoidance, masculinity-femininity, and individualism-collectivism. After The Chinese Cultural Connection expanded its research with local Chinese materials, it added a fifth dimension, a long-term orientation (originally called Confucian Dynamism), which can be found in all cultures except Chinese. This discovery by Hofstede has become perhaps the most famous example of cross-cultural exploration of stereotypes. Even later, after working with Michael Minkov, using data from the World Price Survey, he added a sixth dimension - indulgence and restraint.
Criticism of Hofstede
Despite its popularity, Hofstede's work has been questioned by some academic psychologists. For example, the discussion of individualism and collectivism has proved problematic in itself, and Indian psychologists Sinha and Tripathi even argue that strong individualistic and collectivist tendencies can coexist within a single culture, citing their native India as an example.
Clinical Psychology
Among the types of cross-cultural research, perhaps the most prominent is the cross-culturalclinical psychology. Cross-cultural clinical psychologists (eg, Jefferson Fish) and counseling psychologists (eg, Lawrence H. Gerstein, Roy Maudley, and Paul Pedersen) have applied the principles of cross-cultural psychology to psychotherapy and counseling. For those who want to understand what constitutes a classic cross-cultural research, the articles of these specialists will be a real revelation.
Cross-cultural counseling
Principles for Multicultural Counseling and Therapy by Uwe P. Giehlen, Juris G. Dragoons, and Jefferson M. Fisch contains numerous chapters on integrating cultural differences in counseling. In addition, the book argues that various countries are now beginning to incorporate cross-cultural methods into counseling practices. Countries listed include Malaysia, Kuwait, China, Israel, Australia and Serbia.
Five Factor Model of Personality
A good example of cross-cultural research in psychology is the attempt to apply the five-factor model of personality to people of different nationalities. Can the common features identified by American psychologists spread among people from different countries? Because of this issue, intercultural psychologists have often wondered how to compare traits across cultures. To explore this issue, lexical studies have been conducted that measure personality factors using attribute adjectives from different languages. Over time, these studies have concluded that the factors of extraversion, agreement, and conscientiousness are almostalways appear the same among all nationalities, but neuroticism and openness to experience are sometimes difficult. Therefore, it is difficult to determine whether these traits are absent in certain cultures or whether different sets of adjectives must be used to measure them. However, many researchers believe that the five-factor personality model is a universal model that can be used in cross-cultural studies.
Differences in subjective well-being
The term "subjective well-being" is often used in all psychological research and consists of three main parts:
- Life satisfaction (cognitive assessment of overall life).
- Having positive emotional experiences.
- No negative emotional experiences.
In different cultures, people may have polarized ideas about the "ideal" level of subjective well-being. For example, according to some cross-cultural studies, the Brazilians prioritize the presence of vivid emotions in life, while for the Chinese this need was in last place. Therefore, when comparing perceptions of well-being across cultures, it is important to consider how individuals within the same culture are able to assess different aspects of subjective well-being.
Life satisfaction across cultures
It is difficult to define a universal indicator of how much the subjective well-being of people in different societies changes over the course ofa certain period of time. One important theme is that people from individualistic or collectivist countries have polarized ideas about well-being. Some researchers have noted that individuals from individualistic cultures are, on average, much more satisfied with their lives than those from collectivist cultures. These and many other differences are becoming clearer thanks to pioneering cross-cultural research in psychology.
