|
|
| Chapter 14: Cultural Variation in Experience, Behavior, and Personality |
- If, as the phenomenologists claim, a person's construal of the world is all-important, a logical next question concerns the variations in such construals of reality across cultures.
- It is important to know whether psychological research and theorizing that originate in one culture can be applied to another, because misunderstandings across cultures can lead to conflict and even war, and because understanding how other peoples view reality can expand our understanding of the world.
- Some psychologists ignore cross-cultural issues, and deconstructionists argue that comparing cultures is impossible. Most modern cross-cultural psychologists follow a comparative approach, contrasting etics, elements common to all cultures, with emics, elements that make cultures different.
- Cultures have been compared on emic dimensions including complexity, tightness, and collectivism-individualism. This last dimension has generated a large amount of research comparing behavior, values, and views of the self between members of collectivist (mostly Eastern) and individualist (mostly Western) cultures.
- The collectivist outlook may have its roots in Buddhist philosophy and other Eastern traditions that view the individual self as part of a larger whole, rather than something isolated and apart.
- Trait analyses have assessed the average differences between members of separate cultural groups across various personality traits, and also have evaluated the degree to which the traits that characterize people in one culture can accurately characterize people in another.
- Analyses of thinking styles have addressed hypotheses such as the idea that members of collectivist cultures think more holistically and are less prone to self-expression.
- A few values may be universal—one analysis suggests ten potentially global values that can be organized in terms of two dimensions: openness to change vs. conservatism, and transcendence vs. self-enhancement.
- Despite the evidence for a few universal values, cultural differences are still important. Collectivist cultures place group values (such as harmony) ahead of individual values (such as freedom); individualist cultures do the reverse.
- Deconstructionists avoid the question of where cultural differences originate, but the ecological comparative approach holds that cultural differences originate in the diverse ecologies to which groups around the world must adapt.
- Ethnocentrism is a constant hazard because everyone's cultural context affects his or her point of view.
- It is both difficult and important to find ways to make basic moral judgments while avoiding ethnocentrism.
- Cultural differences may be exaggerated in some cases, because cultural psychologists are in the business of explaining differences, because researchers may be prone to stereotyping, and because analyses of statistical significance may describe small differences as important. Individuals differ within as well as between cultures.
- Cultures often contain subcultures; many individuals are multicultural, and in that sense may even have more than one personality.
- Although cross-cultural psychology has traditionally emphasized differences between cultures, some recent work is emphasizing psychological processes that all persons have in common. Moreover, beneath cultural differences is the existential, universal human condition noted by Sartre: everybody everywhere must exist, work, relate to other people, and ultimately die.
|
|
|
W. W. Norton | Credits | Site Feedback | Sitemap | Technical Support | Print This Page