What is Cultural Psychology

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What is Cultural Psychology?
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On the nature of mind (Francis Crick Astonishing
Hypothesis)

• You, your joys and your sorrows, your memories
  and your ambitions, your sense of personal
  identity and free will, are in fact no more than
  the behavior of a vast assembly of nerve cells
  and their associated molecules. In other
  words, you are nothing but a pack of neurons.
• How is knowledge (about the human mind)
  represented in this statement? (ontology)
• How is the knowledge (about the human mind)
  sought, according to this statement?
  (epistemology)?

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General psychology

• Assumes The workings of the mind can be bound to
  natural laws produced by research that underpin
  human behavior in general, not just in the
  peculiar laboratory circumstance or the specific
  historical period and culture in which the data
  were collected.

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General Psychology (cont).

• The methods of a naturalistic scientific program,
  is believed to reveal patterns of organization of
  human perception, learning, and development, and
  therefore asserting that such patterns must be
  true for everyone everywhere.
• Principle of psychic unity

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Cross-Cultural Psychology (CCP)

• Shares with general psychology the aim of
  searching for a universal central processing
  mechanism.
• Carry the general psychologists tests and
  research procedures abroad.
• Main finding There are performance differences
  and it is difficult to replicate findings of that
  in North America.

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CCP (cont.)

• Conclusions
• 1. Differential development in the central
  processor.
• 2. Problem of etic/emic
• Sensitive cross-cultural psychologists become
  focused around these issues.3Resolution to
  understand the noise and make use of it
• Resolution To understand the noise better so
  as to find a better way around it.

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Downfall of CCP

• Constantly encountering obstacle and constantly
  working to get around them to discover the
  abstract form of the postulated central
  processing mechanism.
• No substantial benefit to learn more and more
  about the background noise, yet that is all they
  end up doing.
• CCP literature is secondary to General
  Psychology, because it subordinates the
  psychological value of sociocultural context to
  the postulated psychic unity vis-à-vis the
  central processing mechanism.

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What is Cultural Psychology?

• It is not General Psychology
• It is not Cross-Cultural Psychology
• Definition Study of how culture and the mind
  make each other up.
• Examine assumptions about higher-level mental
  phenomena that are thought to be universal in
  general psychology.
• Incorporate cultural world-views to expand
  understanding of psychological concepts.