Free Psychology Books: Cultural Issues in Psychology by A. Stevenson

Cultural Issues in Psychology by A. Stevenson

Cultural universals are aspects of behaviour and experience that are common to all cultural settings. For example, Deregowski (1972) was interested in whether the ability to perceive drawings as representa-tions of three-dimensional objects is common to all humans, irrespect-ive of culture. Pursuing such questions requires you to uproot yourself and relocate (with laptops, cameras, notebooks, etc.) to various cultural locations. But searching for cultural universals isn’t just about travelling into the field to conduct research (though this is part of it). If you think universal psychological phenomena are out there wait-ing to be discovered, you’re also likely to make certain assumptions about what global psychology is and how it should be carried out. These assumptions underpin an approach to global research known as cross-cultural psychology: a branch of global psychology that compares the behaviour and experience of people from different cultures in order to understand the extent of culture’s influence on psychological functioning. In other words, cross-cultural psychologists try to find out what aspects of behaviour and experience are common to all human cultures –and thus what aspects are unique to certain places. Cross-cultural psychology is an approach that is favoured by a large proportion of global psychologists, though as we will learn it is not the only approach (see Chapter 5). As I have just hinted, cross-cultural investigations into cultural universality are under-pinned by two key assumptions; one theoretical, one methodological.

 

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