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CROSS-CULTURAL PSYCHOLOGYLecture 1How do they define cross-cultural psychology? We will see various definitions. “Cross-cultural research in psychology is the explicit, systematic comparison of psychological variables under different cultural conditions in order to specify the antecedents and proces...

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CROSS-CULTURAL PSYCHOLOGY Lecture 1 How do they define cross-cultural psychology? We will see various definitions. 1.

“Cross-cultural research in psychology is the explicit, systematic comparison of psychological variables under different cultural conditions in order to specify the antecedents and processes that mediate the emergence of behaviour differences” (Eckensberger, 1972, p. 100)

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“Cross-cultural psychology is the empirical study of members of various culture groups who have had different experiences that lead to predictable and significant differences in behaviour. In the majority of such studies, the groups under study speak different languages and are governed by different political units” (Brislin, Lonner, & Thondike, 1973, p. 5).

We see here again the focus on the differences in behaviour. What they add here is the importance of language. Cultural groups differ in language and in political units, the way a society is politically organised. 3.

“Cross-cultural research is any type of research on human behaviour that compares behaviour of interest across two or more cultures” (Matsumoto, 1996, p. 5).

Here, you have a comparative aspect. This psychology implies that you need to compare. There is no reference to a necessary comparable. You look at culture and you see how it impacts the mental life of human beings. 4. 5.

“Cultural psychology [is] the study of the culture’s role in the mental life of human beings” (Cole, 1996, p. 1). Cultural psychology “has a distinctive subject matter (psychological diversity, rather than psychological uniformity): it aims to reassess the uniformitarian principle of psychic unity and develop a credible theory of psychological pluralism” Shweder, 2007, p. 827).

All definitions agree that it is about cultural differences, but in many approaches they will assume psychological uniformity. They try to identify psychological pluralism. Culture has an impact on the psychological mechanisms. We see that culture is central to all definitions. But none of these define culture. For the time being, we will just define culture as the shared way of life of a group of people. There are different aspects. Depending on the definition, one of these aspects is stressed more clearly. What is not discussed is the uniformity. Maybe cross-cultural psychology is not only about the differences. Maybe we should focus at the same time on what is similar. We need a point of reference. So you should also look for uniformity. There is also a limited attention for biological and ecological aspects. Where do people live? In which environment do people live? The more you go to Scandinavia, the more people will drink milk. Do you drink milk or do you not drink milk in adult life? This is an example of a biological aspect causing behavioural differences. What we also see lacking in these definitions are minorities. Then there’s also very little focus or attention to change. On the one hand, there must be some stability. But stability does not mean that it is unchangeable. If we look at how we live today and you look at how our grandparents lived, you can see huge differences. There is quite a change in values. There used to be lawyers who would not defend you when you came for legal help in a divorce. Nowadays, we cannot imagine that. So there is cultural change. We should also study this cultural change.

We can now come to a more comprehensive definition. “Cross-cultural psychology is the study: of similarities and differences in individual psychological functioning in various cultural and ethnocultural groups; of ongoing changes in variables reflecting such functioning, and of the relationships of psychological variables with sociocultural, ecological and biological variables.” We are interested in the individual, but of course in relation to … You can look at more practical aims. Why do we want to do cross-cultural psychology? The most common way people do cross-cultural psychology is transport and test. They take the Western instrument and they apply it in another culture. This is as such interesting, but we will see that there are quite a number of biases. It’s interesting, but they have to be careful with these studies. A second aim is to explore cross-cultural differences. There’s a risk to exaggerate the differences. A third aim is trying to develop a (quasi-) universal psychology. Our psychology is developed in a Western context. If we want to come to a universal psychology, we will need to do cross-cultural psychology. That theory can not necessarily be generalized. There’s a fourth aim: behaviour change through psychological interventions in other cultural contexts. Aids is a medical issue, but it is also behavioural. How do you protect yourself? If you want to reduce aids infections, you will have to adapt to the local sensitivity. There are many of these projects where they try to improve the programme to cultural sensitivities. Then there is a topic that we have to be very well aware of and that is ethnocentrism. You also value your own position more. You value the habits, the convictions of your own culture more than that of other cultures. It is an explicit tendency to value oneself more than others. People who do cross-cultural psychology think they do not have that tendency so much. We are often not aware that we are interpreting behaviour from our own cultural framework. We do not notice shifts in meaning. It is not because we have a good translation that it means the same in another cultural group. A belge in Western cultures is clearly impolite. In other cultural groups, the same behaviour is very polite. You should belge, because there, it is not polite to not belge. Nepotism is considered a crime in one culture, in others it is considered as responsibility. Although we might think we are talking about the same behaviour, it might be valued completely different in cultural groups and we may not be aware of that. You can go even a step further. Our cultural values might have an impact on how we develop our theory. For instance, in typical Western thinking: adolescence is a period where children have to become autonomous and development is considered as healthy and necessary. There are other cultural groups where the idea to become autonomous is not valued. There you have therapies that will stress the link you have with your parents and will even induce guilt feelings. Depending on the value of the cultural, you will have a different theory development. It also affects your research topics. We investigate in the West what is relevant for the Western culture. There is quite some disagreement. We are now going to look at the themes of debate. Where do we find major differences? There are three large themes which we can identify. Theme 1: Culture as internal or external to the person We can look at the antecedents: what accounts for differences in psychological function? 

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External: climate can have an impact on behaviour. We live in a democratic system, but there are many more other systems. This has an impact on how values are interpreted. Affluence is a very important factor: how wealthy are you? One of the dimensions is individualism/collectivism. The measurement is correlated .80 with wealth. So these are all external aspects. On the other hand you have approaches that look more at the internal aspects.

Does it go from external to internal or from internal to external? In general, they agree that both are important. So you both have to look at internal and external aspects, although we must say that we now see more focus on internal aspects, but they mostly agree that we have to look at both.

Theme 2: Relativism-Universalism Culture constructs the processes of psychological function. Universalism is the opposite. The idea that they are the same everywhere. It’s an ‘either or’ way of thinking. One of the examples we will discuss is colour perception. We have hugely different cultural groups with respect to the number of words they have. Does it make a difference if you have a word to refer to colour or not? Does it affect our colour perception? Another example will be guilt. There are cultural groups where there’s no word for guilt. Does this mean that these people don’t feel guilt? It’s clear it doesn’t work that way. There are too many phenomenon that are a combination. There is no real truth.   

With moderate relativism, we assume that it is not just a point of view and that also people in principle can be adapted to any cultural context. Similar mechanisms but at the way they translate in actual behaviour can be different = moderate universalism. Extreme: if you find differences, they are basically genetic. What you observe has exactly the same meaning.

We see often that people have a preference and they do their research based on their preference. Theme 3: Psychological organisation of the cultural differences This one is more concrete than the previous ones. The question is: how should we interpret the cultural differences? We can think of 5 levels of inferences, from very concrete to very broad. 1) Culture as a system 2) Broad cultural dimensions 3) A bit less broad is the idea of cultural styles When you look at different cognitive tests, we know that we have a G factor and that some groups score lower and some score higher, but we also found that depending on the type of information, there we see that cultural groups that are field independent will do such specific task better than groups who are field dependent. 4) A bit more concrete even is the focus on behavioural domains. What do cultures do when it comes to mating? 5) At the lowest level you have customs, practices and conventions A very nice example is: on which side of the road do you drive? In the UK, they drive at the left side of the road. It is very important, if you’re not aware that you have to change, you can get killed. They should not be generalized. It’s just a convention. At a certain moment, traffic became more advanced, so we needed rules. If we find cultural differences, at which level do we need to interpret them? Do we need to generalize them to a broader domain? Interpretative domains: 

Culture-comparative psychology

What we then see is that there are feedback loops. Individuals can have an impact on the ecological context. One of the examples is Easter Island.

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Cultural psychology

They reacted against the idea of a psychic unity of mankind. Depending on the culture where you grow up, you will function in a different way. It will be qualitatively different. They also assume that there are differences in underlying processes. In cultural psychology, a very important theme is the independent vs. interdependent self-construction. Self-enhancement is absent in Japan = claim. In Japan you have an interdependent selfconstruction: the self is defined in terms of relationships to others. When your self is bounded, then you have the constant need to protect those boundaries and you will see that is the base for self-enhancement. 

Indigenous psychology

They all share the idea that psychology is in many cultures an import science. The way we work in psychology doesn’t work in the Philipenes. They developed a way of doing interview in these traditional groups which are in line with their traditional expectations. Is amae typically Japanese? Maybe, but there are behaviours here that seem like amae, but we don’t have a word for it f.e. grandchildren asking all kinds of things to their grandparents which they should not ask, but they know they’re going to get it. In Japan, they refer to that as ‘amae’. One of the very challenging issues is the sampling of cultures. First of all, when we think about cultures, we can think about it in two ways: (I) a population of persons or (II) a repertoire of behaviour of such a population. One of the problems we are faced with is that cultures are often confused with countries. That is highly debated. Culture is something that differentiates us. Although it can change, it will not easily change. There is some stability. We have to be very well aware of which aspect we are investigating. Depending on the type of phenomenon we are looking at, two countries can belong to the same cultural unit. Another problem is that we often work with students. With students, you might get the wrong impression. There’s an implicit assumption of cultural homogeneity. Then there’s a problem of matching and mismatching. A second big issue is whether we will use a qualitative or a quantitative approach. Phonemics is the study of sounds that are specific to a language. He made a distinction between an emic and an etic approach. Etic approach: you take a position outside the system. You can see the differences in table 11.1.

We have qualitative methods f.e. a field research: you study behaviour in a natural setting. The role of the researcher is extremely important. An advantage is that participants are actively involved. You will really try to listen to what your participants have to say. A disadvantage is the interpretation of the information you get.

We also have quantitative methods.

A quasi-experiment is not a real experiment. Why? You have control over the treatment, but there are only a few ambient events you have control over. Group membership will have weak effects on exchangeability. Then we have culture. Both characteristics are just not there. We have no control over the treatment nor the ambient factors. The group membership plays an important role. It’s not because you move from Hong Kong to Belgium, you will not suddenly change in your behaviour. How can we still try to get some control? That’s by primarily selection of populations. What we mostly see is ad hoc choice of population. They give a post hoc explanation of the findings they have. Quantitative methods have the advantage that you construct methods where you, in a very systematic way, try to observe behaviour. The idea is that for good cross-cultural research, you need both. We’ll end with a last important challenge in cross-cultural psychology. How do we interpret our data? What are the risks that are there? We start with a very old example and try to identify what is the problem with that example. Porteus is one of the first who really did empirical research on cognitive function across culture groups. Porteus believed that the maze test was the best test to identify intelligence. He found out that in South-Africa you have some people and they score extremely low on this test. Conclusion: San people have the lowest intelligence of all people. What is the problem with this interpretation? Let’s look at the assumptions he makes when he makes his interpretation. 1.

Intelligence was measured by the maze test in precisely the same way across cultures: Equivalence of concepts and data

The idea is to identify where we are measuring. Only when we have evidence for full score equivalence, then we can make good comparisons.

2.

Scores on the maze test allowed inferences about the level of innate intelligence of testees: generalization to high level construct

You can make a distinction between the performance, the competence and then the underlying process or trait. If you stay close to the data, maybe it’s correct that some people are very bad at making mazes. It might not say anything about the competence. In the time of Porteus, the San were not familiar with working with paper and pencil. Maybe the San have developed or have not developed the competence of mazes. It is very likely that they have not developed this competence. They live in very extended areas. A maze has not a lot of meaning there. If you live in New York f.e. a maze is very important, because you can get lost. Does that mean they are not intelligent? Not at all. That is one of the central issues. The maze test measures one aspect of intelligence. It is not a good indicator of general intelligence. So there is a real problem here: the maze test is not an indication of general cognitive function. So what is important if we make these generalizations is that we check how representative our test material is. 3.

Mean differences between samples of individuals allow statements about the cultures they belong to: aggregation of individual level data to cultural level organization

Then we have the most tricky issue: we must distinguish cultural and individual level of function. A multilevel thinking was very strongly developed in indicational sciences. Your data are hierarchically organised. A very nice example to make you aware of this problem is the relationship between divorce and happiness. At individual level, there’s a negative relationship. At a cultural level, we find the opposite relation. The more divorces, the happier the people are. People have more freedom to make their own life choices. Relationships can be different. That means that we can make aggregation errors and disaggregation errors. It’s not that when you live in a democratic society, that all people are democratic. The idea is that if we really want to compare groups, we need isomorphism.

Lecture 2 Individual development Culture as context for development We can look into some developmental theories. Historically, you have two very different theories: 

On the one hand, you have the maturational theories which take a strong biological approach to development. Humans develop and as they develop their brain wil develop and new capacities will develop and this is somehow genetically preprogrammed. There is no or very little impact expected from culture.

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On the other hand, you have the learning theories or behavioralistic theories who stress operant and classical conditioning. These learning theories do assign a lot of importance to the environment, but they are not cultural theories. The idea is that the environment, in a mechanistic way, determines what we learn and how we learn things. And so the way we learn things is universal across cultural groups.

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In the literature we also see an interaction between the two: interactional theories claim that human development is a combination of on the one hand biological development, and on the other hand depend on how this biological development interacts and is confronted with the environment. A typical example is the theory of Piaget who assumes that there are four stages of cognitive development and he assumes that how fast you go from one stage to another is determined by the environment. Still, the theory of Piaget is not a cultural theory: he doesn’t assign a lot to culture.

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Next to this, you have cultural theories like Vygotsky’s theory: he assumes that the cultural environment where you find yourself in, will determine what you will learn. A lot of psychological experiences and functions at the individual level are first created at the cultural level.

When we look at these theories, we see that they separate nature (biology, genes) and nurture (environment). In the environment we can make a distinction between the environment of the learning theories and the cultural environment (e.g., Vygotsky). We also see that there is more and more attention for the material environment; the artifacts with which we grow up. But the question is: what is the role of culture? People like Vygotsky will say that culture is a very important concept to understand how people develop, so it’s not just the environment from the learning theories, but the culture will determine what you will learn and how you will learn. There is some very interesting research on the efficiency of memory. In these studies they compared memory tasks with black African children and children in the US. They see that the African children will do much better with oral information. If you tell them a story, they will retain more information of this story than US children. One of the arguments is that in an oral culture, where there ...