Cross-cultural Psychology I

X-C psychology is the approach and discipline of psychology of explaining how and why cultural variations exist in how we think, feel and behave by comparing cultures against one-another in as culturally unbiased methods as can be utilised. To emphasize the key word here, it's all in the "cross". Cultural Psychology is different; this approach is closer to anthropology in that it explains how behaviour and thinking are formed within the cultural confines of the location-without a comparison being made to other cultures.

So how did X-C psychology come into being, and why is it so important?

One example always comes to mind. Do you remember Jean Piaget? Piaget (1952) claimed that a cornerstone for infant development is object permanence. Object permanence is the ability to recognise that someone or something exists when it is out of sight. Piaget believed this took place at around nine-months-old. To test this, Piaget hid toys under blankets. First, he would hide a toy under blanket A-and then reveal it to the child. Then he would hide the toy under blanket B. Despite the child plainly seeing where the toy was hidden, the child would look for the toy under blanket A. Piaget called this the A-not-B Error.

Well this theory seems to make sense. It has to happen at some point so many would believe this theory is universal-meaning this is the way it is for all humans in the world. But then anthropology had its say:

Susan Goldberg (1972) tried to test for object permanence in Zambian infants. However, the experiment consistently failed because Zambian culture places little emphasis on toys and play for infants. Additionally, children were kept in direct contact with their mother without toys until six-months-old. The experiment just didn't work and Goldberg concluded that object permanence could not be tested in Zambian children because the original experiment was 'culturally loaded' in its use of toys as experimental design.

I hope that you can see now, why X-C psychology has an important role if we are to understand human behaviour in all its social and cultural situations. X-C psychology often is responsible for creating studies, tools, questionnaires and methods that are 'culture-free' so that we can understand human behaviour irrespective of barriers of language, social convention, tradition and even our own ethnocentrism.

Ethnocentrism is "the name for the view of things in which one's own group is the centre for everything, and all others are scaled and rated with reference to it" (Graham Sumner, 1906). Moreover, when we do scale and rate other cultures against our own, we tend to view the other culture as lesser and inferior and view our own culture as the best.

I won't lie: one of my biggest pet peeves is how I have heard many Americans say, "The United States of America is the best country in the world," when these same people haven't even tried living in any other countries in the world. How do they actually know? The fact of the matter is, that they don't. Again, this is ethnocentrism at work. Geert Hofstede (1991) even uses an American farmer from Kansas as his key example of ethnocentrism. Hofstede quotes this farmer as saying to him in interview,

And Geert Hofstede said unto the people, "Despite your ethnocentric beliefs, Jesus was not American." "If English was good enough for Jesus Christ, it is good enough for me."

It's not that the poor farmer made a silly mistake. It's that ethnocentrism is at work.

He evaluates American culture so highly and all other cultures as inferior in his mind-that he doesn't even consider that objects he likes from other cultures could operate outside of how his perception of an ideal culture functions. The farmer evaluated Jesus Christ as American in his psychological thought process, and therefore assumed he spoke English when in actuality, Jesus was Jewish and likely spoke Aramaic, Hebrew and perhaps Greek and definitely, DEFINITELY did not speak English (Roberts, 2010 - view his blog here).

I hope I have given you a fun taster into the beginnings of X-C psychology. As this is my speciality area, I definitely have more to say and I just couldn't put it all into one blog. Now that I hope I have demonstrated why X-C psychology is important, perhaps next month (or rather, year) I will talk about the importance of how we define culture before we begin psychological testing.