CULTURAL PSYCHOLOGY

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CULTURAL PSYCHOLOGY

• Psychology 203
• K. Hlongwa
• Oct 2, 2003
• Key reading Shweder (1995) Cultural
  Psychology-what is it?

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Culture Psychology

• What is culture?
• Does this definition help us define cultural
  psychology?
• What is cultural psychology?

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Cultural Psychology

• Cultural psychology is the study of the way
  cultural traditions and social practices
  regulate, express and transform the human psyche
  (Shweder, 1995)
• Cultural psychology is a study of the ways
  subject and object, self and other, psyche and
  culture, person and content live together,
  require each other and make each other up
• Cultural psychology is premised up on human
  existential uncertainty
• The search for meaning in the sociocultural
  environment that has been arranged to provide
  meaning
• The basic idea of cultural psychology is that no
  sociocultural environment exists or has identity
  independent of the way humanbeings seize meanings
  and resources from it.

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...

• It is also premised on Human intentionality
• How humanbeings and environment constitute each
  other
• the interdependence
• A sociocultural environment is an intentional
  world because its existance is real, factual,
  and forceful, but only as long as there exists a
  community of persons whose beliefs, desires,
  emotions, purposes, and other mental
  representations are directed at it, and there by
  influenced by it.

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How is Cultural Psychology different from general
psychology

• General psychology assumes psychic unity of human
  kind
• General psychology aims to describe universal
  psychic structures of human functioning
• It studies the transcendent, abstract, fixed, and
  universal property of the human psyche
• It distinguishes the intrinsic psychological
  structures and processes from extrinsic
  environmental conditions
• Phenomenon that is outside the central processing
  mechanism is of no interest

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How is cultural psychology different from
cross-cultural psychology

• Cross-cultural psychology is a subdiscipline of
  general psychology
• Aims to replicate findings across cultures using
  the same psychologists tests and research
  procedures
• Usually fails to generalise research observed
  with western subjects to other cultures
• Has been engaged on explaining how such
  differences ought to be interpreted.
• It offers no substantial challenge to the
  universality principle of general psychology.

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Main goals for cultural psychology

• Tries to combine some virtues of general
  psychology, cross-cultural psychology and
  psychological anthropology
• Attempts to discover the systematic principles
  underlying the diversity of culturally patterned
  socialites and psyches
• Provide a description of the universal processes
  by which psyches and cultures construct each other

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Core assumptions

• cultural psychology is a study of situated
  meanings
• cultural learning is the refashioning of
  inherited complexity
• it is not a blatant denial of universals

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Critique?

• Relatively fragmented in comparison to
  universalists
• Considered unscientific and soft
• Its scholars became victims of the limitations of
  their language and society that were prone to
  value-judgement inferences
• stereotyping component