CHAPTER 1.

INTRODUCTION TO CULTURE AND

PSYCHOLOGY

Learning Outcomes:
1. Outline the historical linkages of culture and psychology.
2. Asses the importance of a psychology with a cultural perspective.
3. Examine the role of indigenous psychologies in the building of basic cultural psychology.
4. Explain culture and its contents.
5. Analyze how culture influences human behaviors and mental processes.

I. Historical Linkages of Culture and Psychology (Valsiner, 2012)

An effort to re-unite two large domains of knowledge—one covered by the generic term
psychology, and the other by the equally general term culture. When two giants meet, one never knows
what might happen—it can become a battle or the two can amiably join their forces and live happily ever
after. The latter “happy end” of a fairy tale is far from the realities of the history of the social sciences.

A. PSYCHOLOGY’S “BLIND SPOT”: PERSONAL WILL AS A CULTURAL PHENOMENON

Historical myopia of a discipline has dire consequences. Psychology of the last century turned
out to be mute when basic human life phenomena—famines, wars, epidemics, religious piety and
prejudice, political negotiations, and migration—have been concerned. It has refrained from the study of
higher—volitional—psychological functions, while concentrating on the lower, simpler ones.
Psychology's blind spot- personal will is cultural
Psychology has been fearful of the willful human being and has instead presented the human
psyche as an object influenced by a myriad of “factors” from all directions—biological, social, economic,
even unconscious—rather than by the volition that could break out from all these confines and develop
in new directions.

B. WHY ANOTHER EFF ORT TO LINK PSYCHOLOGY WITH CULTURE?

Bringing culture back into psychology is also a very multifaceted effort in today’s intellectual
environment. There can be very many different vantage points from where culture could enter into
psychology in the twenty-first century. First, there are the realistic connections with neighboring
disciplines—cultural anthropology (Holland, 2010; Obeyesekere, 2005, 2010; Skinner, Pach, & Holland,
1998; Rasmussen, 2011), and sociology (Kharlamov, 2012)—from where such efforts could find their
start. Second, it is the rapid movement—of messages and people—that renders the former images of
homogeneous classes that dominated cross-cultural psychology either moot or problematic.

C. THE THIRD EFFORT FOR PSYCHOLOGY IN ITS HISTORY: HOW CAN IT SUCCEED?
This effort—uniting culture and psychology—that has been taking place from the 1990s to the
present time is actually the third one in the history of psychology. Psychology’s historical inroads can be
seen to have delayed such return to culture. The issue has been ideological in the history of the science
of psychology—how to treat complex, meaningful, intentional, and dynamic psychological phenomena?

D. THE OBSTACLES TO INNOVATION

As psychology is non-neutral in its context of social existence, it is not surprising that its progress
is constantly organized by different promoting fashions (e.g., the need to look “socially relevant”) in unison

Culture Psychology 1
with a multitude of conceptual obstacles. The latter are often the targets of discourse in cultural
psychology that cannot avoid addressing them.

DECISION ABOUT WHERE NOT TO LOOK: AXIOMATIC DISMISSAL OF COMPLEXITY

Many of the habits of psychology, in their insistence on the study of elementary phenomena
(Toomela & Valsiner, 2010), have led to avoiding the complexities of the human psychological
functioning. This happens in a number of ways: by imperative to quantify those phenomena that are of
“scientific interest” and by developing theories inductively—moving toward generalization from the
thus selectively quantified evidence. This all happens with the belief in the work of elementaristic causality
(factor X causes Y; e.g., “intelligence” causes success in problem solving; or “culture” causes “girls being
shy”; see Toomela, 2012).

In contrast, cultural psychology leaves such causal attributions behind. Culture here emerges as
a generic term to capture the complexity of human lives—rather than narrowly concentrating on their
behavior.

THE TERMINOLOGICAL DIFFICULTY—CULTURE IS POLYSEMIC

Culture is in some sense a magic word—positive in connotations but hard to pinpoint in any
science that attempts to use it as its core term. Cultural psychology is being sculpted in a variety of
versions—all unified by the use of the word culture (Boesch, 1991; Cole, 1996, Shweder, 1990). That
may be where its unity ends, giving rise to a varied set of perspectives that only partially link with one
another. Heterogeneity of a discipline breeds innovation—whereas homogenization kills it.

Psychology has suffered from too many consensual fixations of the “right” methods in the last
half-century (Toomela, 2007a), rendering its innovative potentials mute. Cultural psychology as a new
direction entails an eff ort to un-mute the discipline. It is helped by the appeal—and uncertainty—of the
label culture.

CULTURE AS A “CONTAINER” AS OPPOSED TO A “TOOL”

We will encounter two opposite directions in handling of the notion of culture—that of a container
of a homogeneous class and that of a unique organizer of person–environment relations. These two uses
have little or nothing in common, once more indicating the vagueness of the use of culture in our present-
day social sciences.
people

culture

Two meanings of culture in psychology. (A) Culture as a container (P = person). (B) Culture (C) as a tool within person. (From
Valsiner, 2012)

Culture Psychology 2
THE HERO MYTHOLOGY—REPLACING INNOVATION BY FINISHED IDEAS
It is in the communication process between a science and the society that the making of such
“hero myths” operates in creating cultural connectors (Aubin, 1997, p. 300). Freud, Skinner, Piaget, and
Vygotsky are often put on the pedestal for having revealed the great secrets of the psyche. Telling such
stories is dangerous for the ideas of precisely those persons who are being honored.

Taking a theoretical perspective becomes transformed into a membership of a fan club of one or
another of such guru figures—leading to a variety of intra- and intergroup relationship issues of such
groups of followers. The main function of theories—being intellectual general tools for understanding—
easily gets lost. Social scientists seem to enjoy the game of social positioning.

Mere membership in a community is no solution to problems that the members of the community
try to solve. The scientific community is a resource for providing new solutions—rather than a club, the
membership of which is determined by loyalty to old ones.

VAGUENESS IN SCIENCE AND ITS FUNCTIONS

Although it is well-known (Valsiner, 2001, 2004a) that the term culture is vague, as it has been
proven indefinable, yet its functional role in public discourse has been growing steadily. Vagueness of a
concept need not be an obstacle in scientific knowledge-building (many terms in many sciences are) and
are kept vague, so as to enhance their generative potential (Löwy, 1992).

PSYCHOLOGY IS BECOMING GLOBAL

Globalization in a science—like in economics and society—is an ambiguous process. It brings
with it emergence of new opportunities together with the demise of old (and “safe”) practices. The
immediate result of globalization is the increase of “sudden contacts” between varied persons of different
backgrounds—with all that such contact implies (Moghaddam, 2006).

Like other sciences psychology is no longer dominated by few (North American or European)
models of “doing science” in that area. Instead, creative solutions to complex problems emerge from the
“developing world,” where the whole range of the variety of cultural phenomena guarantees the potential
richness of psychology.

CULTURAL PSYCHOLOGY: ITS INDIGENOUS ROOTS

Cultural psychology has been the witness—an active one—of the transformations that go on in
all of psychology as it is globalizing (Valsiner, 2009a, 2009b). Nevertheless, within psychology, cultural
psychology remains “indigenous”—emphasizing the phenomena, rather than data, as these are central
for science.

Indigenous is not a pejorative word. We are all indigenous as unique human beings, social units,
and societies—coming to sudden contact with others of the same kind, and discovering that it is “the
other” who is indigenous, not ourselves.

THE GAINS—AND THEIR PAINS—IN CULTURAL PSYCHOLOGY

The last two decades of the twentieth century were productive for cultural psychology. Following
the lead of the originators of the rebirth of the cultural direction, a number of younger-generation
researchers started to look at human phenomena intertwined with their everyday contexts.

By the twenty-first century, many new research directions have become emphasized—ruptures
as central for new developments (Hale, 2008; Zittoun, 2004, 2006, 2007, 2010), actuations as a new way
to unite actions and meanings (Rosa, 2007), generalized significant symbols (Gillespie, 2006) as well as

Culture Psychology 3
 search for the self through looking at the other (Bastos & Rabinovich, 2009; Simão & Valsiner, 2007) and
finding that other in the contexts of social interdependence (Chaudhary, 2004, 2007; Menon, 2002; Tuli
& Chaudhary, 2010). At the same time, we see continuous interest in the cultural nature of subjectivity
(Boesch, 2005, 2008; Cornejo, 2007; Sullivan, 2007) and the unpredictability of environments (Abbey,
2007; Golden & Mayseless, 2008). The topic of multivoicedness of the self as it relates with the world
has emerged as a productive theme (Bertau, 2008; Joerchel, 2007; Salgado & Gonçalves, 2007; Sullivan,
2007), including the move to consider the opposites of polyphony (“intensified nothingness,” Mladenov,
1997). This is embedded in the multiplicity of discourse strategies (Castro & Batel, 2008) in institutional
contexts (Phillips, 2007). Affective lives are situated in social contexts but by persons themselves as they
relate to social institutions.

II. Psychology with a Cultural Perspective

THE GOALS OF PSYCHOLOGY (Matsumoto & Juang, 2013)

No field is better equipped to meet the challenge of cultural diversity than psychology. And
psychology has met this challenge through the emergence of a subfield known as cultural psychology.
In order to get a better handle on what cultural psychology is all about, it is important first to have a good
grasp of the goals of psychology.

Psychology essentially has two main goals. The first is to build a body of knowledge about people.
Psychologists seek to understand behavior when it happens, explain why it happens, and even predict it
before it happens. Psychologists achieve this by conducting research and creating theories of behavior.

The second goal of psychology involves taking that body of knowledge and applying it to intervene
in people’s lives, to make those lives better. Psychologists achieve this in many ways: as therapists,
counselors, trainers, and consultants. Psychologists work on the front lines, dealing directly with people
to affect their lives in a positive fashion.

The two goals of psychology—creating a body of knowledge and applying that knowledge—are
closely related. Psychologists who are on the front lines take what psychology as a field has collectively
learned about human behavior and use that knowledge as a basis for their applications and interventions.
This learning initially comes in the form of academic training in universities. But it continues well after
formal education has ended, through continuing education programs and individual scholarship—
reviewing the literature, attending conferences, and joining and participating in professional
organizations. Applied psychologists engage in a lifelong learning process that helps them intervene in
people’s lives more effectively. Likewise, researchers are cognizant of the practical and applied
implications of their work, and many are well aware that the value of psychological theory and research
is often judged by its practical usefulness in society (see, for example, Gergen, Gulerce, Lock, & Misra,
1996). Theories are often tested for their validity not only in the halls of science but also on the streets,
and they often have to be revised because of what happens on those streets, and the testing of limitations
to knowledge using cross-cultural research methods.

THE ROLE OF INDIGENOUS PSYCHOLOGIES IN THE BUILDING OF BASIC CULTURAL

PSYCHOLOGY (Valsiner, 2012)
The current psychological literature on the relationship between culture and the human psyche
differentiates between subdisciplines and/or approaches on the basis of their historical lines of
development, their basic theoretical assumptions, and the research methods they consider appropriate
for the investigation of the psychological role of culture. Although their historical lines of development can
be traced back quite far into the history of thought, when it comes to the historical impact of the

Culture Psychology 4
approaches and their scientific merits and the number of scholars representing these fields, the following
subdisciplines and/or approaches may be named the most influential:

a. psychological anthropology, a research tradition that introduced psychological theories and

methods into cross-cultural scientific field work and had an impact on psychology’s cultural turn
in the twentieth century (Jahoda, 1982; 1992);

b. cross-cultural psychology, which emerged from psychological anthropology and has always
been inclined toward mainstream psychology’s nomothetic/quantitative approach and an
experimental paradigm in which culture is treated like just another quasi-independent variable
(Berry et al., 2011);

c. Soviet Russian cultural historical psychology, which helped uncover the role of the contextual
dependence of human psychological development and the complex process of the cultural
mediation of meaning through social interaction (Vygotsky, 1930/1978; Wertsch, 1985);

d. cultural psychology, which (in its current form) owes much of its interdisciplinary character, its
focus on the “meaning making process” in human action and experience, to the Soviet school and
is also characterized by its corresponding preference for qualitative and interpretative methods
(e.g., Boesch, 1991, 1996; Bruner, 1987, 1991; Chakkarath & Straub, in press; Cole, 1996;
Lonner & Hayes, 2007; Ratner, 2002; Shweder, 1990; Valsiner, 2009);

e. indigenous psychology, which shares many perspectives with cultural psychology, but (in its
current form) resulted from the dissatisfaction with the historically and politically rooted dominance
of certain other psychological disciplines (including cultural psychology) and the frequently
insufficient expertise of their representatives when pursuing their goals in other cultural contexts
than their own (e.g., Chakkarath, in press; Ho, 1998; Kim & Berry, 1993; Kim, Yang, & Hwang,
2006).

Taken together, these fields are frequently and collectively referred to as “culture-sensitive,”
“culture-inclusive,” or “culture-informed” psychology. Although they consider themselves culture-
sensitive, they nonetheless vary as regards the extent to which they agree or disagree that (1) psychology
should follow the nomothetic paradigm of the natural sciences and (2) the established methodological
standards and procedures of natural scientific psychology will enable us to deal with the psychological
role of cultural phenomena. It is also the extent of agreement or disagreement with these positions that
determines whether the positions mentioned above consider themselves to be more a subdiscipline or
an alternative, new conception of mainstream psychology—that is, a new paradigm for doing
psychological research and analysis.

APPROACHES TO THE STUDY OF CULTURE (Greenfield, 2000)

There are three approaches to the psychology of culture: cultural psychology, cross-cultural
psychology, and indigenous psychology. Before we focus on cultural psychology, which this course is
about, let us first look at the similarities and differences of the three approaches.

REQUIRED READING:
Greenfield, P. M. (2000). Three approaches to the psychology of culture: Where do they come from?
Where can they go?. Asian Journal of Social Psychology, 3(3), 223-240.

SUPPLEMENTARY READING:
Henrich, J., Heine, S. J., & Norenzayan, A. (2010). Most people are not WEIRD. Nature, 466(7302), 29.

Culture Psychology 5
III. What is Culture? (Matsumoto & Juang, 2013)
Understanding psychology from a cultural perspective starts with a better appreciation of what is
culture. Unfortunately, many psychologists and laypersons use the words culture, race, nationality, and
ethnicity interchangeably, as if they were all terms denoting the same concepts. They are not, and as we
begin our study of culture and psychology, it is important to define exactly what we mean by the term
culture.

Clearly, we use the word culture in many different ways in everyday language and discourse.
Culture can be used to describe activities or behaviors, refer to the heritage or tradition of a group,
describe rules and norms, describe learning or problem solving, define the organization of a group, or
refer to the origins of a group (Berry, Poortinga, Segall, and Dasen, 1992; Kroeber & Kluckholn,
1952/1963). Culture can refer to general characteristics; food and clothing; housing and technology;
economy and transportation; individual and family activities; community and government; welfare,
religion, and science; and sex and the life cycle (Murdock, Ford, and Hudson, 1971; Barry, 1980; Berry
et al., 1992). Thus, we use the concept of culture to describe and explain a broad range of activities,
behaviors, events, and structures in our lives. It is used in many different ways because it touches on so
many aspects of life. Culture, in its truest and broadest sense, cannot simply be swallowed in a single
gulp. Although we will attempt to bring you closer to a better understanding of what culture is and how it
influences our lives, we must begin by recognizing and admitting the breadth, scope, and enormity of
culture.

And, the concept of culture may have different meanings in other cultures. If you refer to culture
in Japan, for instance, a Japanese person may think first of flower arranging or a tea ceremony rather
than the aspects of culture Americans normally associate with the word. In Paris, culture might refer to
art, history, or food. Because we use culture to refer to so many different things about life, it is no wonder
that it generates so much confusion and ambiguity.

A DEFINITION OF CULTURE
Over the years, many scholars have attempted to define culture. Well over 100 years ago, for
example, Tylor (1865) defined culture as all capabilities and habits learned as members of a society.
Linton (1936) referred to culture as social heredity. Kroeber and Kluckholn (1952/1963) defined culture
as patterns of and for behavior acquired and transmitted by symbols, constituting the distinct
achievements of human groups, including their embodiments in artifacts. Rohner (1984) defined culture
as the totality of equivalent and complementary learned meanings maintained by a human population, or
by identifiable segments of a population, and transmitted from one generation to the next. Jahoda (1984)
argued that culture is a descriptive term that captures not only rules and meanings but also behaviors.
Pelto and Pelto (1975) defined culture in terms of personality, whereas Geertz (1975) defined it as shared
symbol systems transcending individuals. Berry et al. (1992) defined culture simply as the shared way of
life of a group of people, and Baumeister (2005) defined culture as an information-based system that
allows people to live together and satisfy their needs.

To be sure, there is no one accepted definition of culture in either psychology or anthropology.

What is important, however, is that we have a working definition of culture for our own use. Matsumoto
and Juang (2013) define human culture as a unique meaning and information system, shared by a group
and transmitted across generations, that allows the group to meet basic needs of survival, pursue
happiness and well-being, and derive meaning from life.

Of course, human cultures exist first to enable us to meet basic needs of survival. Human cultures
help us to meet others, to procreate and produce offspring, to put food on the table, to provide shelter
from the elements, and to care for our daily biological essential needs.

Culture Psychology 6
 But human culture is so much more than that. It allows for complex social networks and
relationships. It allows us to enhance the meaning of normal, daily activities. It allows us to pursue
happiness. It allows us to be creative in music, art, and drama. It allows us to seek recreation and to
engage in sports and organize competition, whether in the local community Little League or the Olympic
Games. It allows us to search the sea and space. It allows us to create mathematics, an achievement no
other species can claim, as well as an educational system. It allows us to go to the moon, to create a
research laboratory on Antarctica, and send probes to Mars and Jupiter. Unfortunately, it also allows us
to have wars, create weapons of mass destruction, and create terrorists.

Human culture does all this by creating and maintaining complex social systems, institutionalizing
and improving cultural practices, creating beliefs about the world, and communicating the meaning
system to other humans and subsequent generations. It is the product of the evolution of the human
mind, increased brain size, and complex cognitive abilities, in response to the specific ecologies in which
groups live and the resources available to them to live. People live in groups, and groups create cultures
to help us meet our needs. Culture results from the interaction between universal biological needs and
functions, universal social problems created to address those needs, and the context in which people
live. Culture is a solution to the problem of individuals’ adaptations to their contexts to address their social
motives and biological needs. As adaptational responses to the environment, cultures help to select
behaviors, attitudes, values, and opinions that may optimize the tapping of resources to meet survival
needs. Out of all the myriad behaviors possible in the human repertoire, cultures help to focus people’s
behaviors and attention on a few limited alternatives in order to maximize their effectiveness, given their
resources and their environment (Poortinga, 1990).

IV. The Contents of Culture (Matsumoto & Juang, 2013)

As culture is a meaning and information system, it is basically an abstraction that we use to refer
to many aspects of our ways of living. The contents of culture can be divided roughly into two major
categories—the objective elements of culture, and the subjective elements of culture (Kroeber &
Kluckholn, 1952/1963; Triandis, 1972).

OBJECTIVE ELEMENTS
The objective elements of culture involve objective, explicit elements that are physical. For
example, these would include architecture, clothes, foods, art, eating utensils, and the like. In today’s
world, advertising, texts, architecture, art, mass media, television, music, the Internet, Facebook, and
Twitter are all physical, tangible, and important artifacts of culture (Lamoreaux & Morling, in press; Morling
& Lamoreaux, 2008). A recent study actually analyzed millions of digitized books— about four percent of
all books ever printed—to investigate cultural trends over time (Michel et al., 2011) and demonstrated
changes in vocabularies, grammar, collective memory, the adoption of technology, the pursuit of fame,
censorship, and historical epidemiology.

SUBJECTIVE ELEMENTS
The subjective elements of culture include all those parts of a culture that do not survive people
as physical artifacts. Thus, they include psychological processes such as attitudes, values, and beliefs,
as well as behaviors. For this reason, cultural psychologists are generally much more interested in the
subjective elements of culture, because they tap into psychological processes and behaviors.

Culture Psychology 7
The subjective elements of culture (From Matsumoto & Juang, 2013)

1. VALUES
Values are guiding principles that refer to desirable goals that motivate behavior. They define the
moral, political, social, economic, esthetic, or spiritual ethics of a person or group of people. Values can
exist on two levels—personal values and cultural values. Personal values represent transitional desirable
goals that serve as guiding principles in people’s lives. Cultural values are shared, abstract ideas about
what a social collectivity views as good, right, and desirable.

2. BELIEFS
A belief is a proposition that is regarded as true, and people of different cultures have different
beliefs. Recently cultural beliefs have been studied under the concept known as social axioms (Bond et
al., 2004; Leung et al., 2002). These are general beliefs and premises about oneself, the social and
physical environment, and the spiritual world. They are assertions about the relationship between two or
more entities or concepts; people endorse and use them to guide their behavior in daily living, such as
“belief in a religion helps one understand the meaning of life.”

3. NORMS
Norms are generally accepted standards of behavior for any cultural group. It is the behavior that
members of any culture have defined as the most appropriate in any given situation. All cultures give
guidelines about how people are expected to behave through norms. For instance, in some cultures,
people wear little or no clothing, while in others, people normally cover almost all of their bodies. Recent
research has uncovered norms for describing the behaviors of people of other cultures (Shteynberg,
Gelfand, & Kim, 2009), as well as norms for controlling one’s expressive behavior when emotional
(Matsumoto et al., 2009; Matsumoto et al., 2008).

4. ATTITUDES

Culture Psychology 8
 Attitudes are evaluations of things occurring in ongoing thoughts about the things, or stored in
memory. Cultures facilitate attitudes concerning actions and behaviors, which produces cultural filters;
these, of course, serve as the basis of stereotypes and prejudice. Cultures also foster attitudes that are
not tied to specific kinds of actions, such as believing that democracy is the best form of government. In
many other cultures, especially in the past, people believed that most people aren’t capable of
understanding government, and that countries are best ruled by kings who are very religious or spiritually
advanced.

5. WORLDVIEWS
Cultures also differ importantly in cultural worldviews. These are culturally specific belief systems
about the world; they contain attitudes, beliefs, opinions, and values about the world. They are
assumptions people have about their physical and social realities (Koltko-Rivera, 2004). For example,
American culture fosters a worldview centering on personal control—that you are in control of your life,
destiny, and happiness. Many other cultures do not foster this worldview; instead, one’s life may be in
the hands of God, fate, or the supernatural.

V. Influence of Culture on Human Behaviors and Mental Processes (Matsumoto & Juang,
2013)
Culture influences psychological processes—behaviors and mental processes. First, culture is an
adaptational response to three factors—ecology, resources, and people. These three factors combine to
produce ways of living, and culture is an abstract concept that explains and describes those ways.
Individuals are first welcomed into their worlds at birth and begin a process of learning about their culture
through a process known as enculturation. The enculturation process gradually shapes and molds
individuals’ psychological characteristics, including how individuals perceive their worlds, think about the
reasons underlying their and other people’s action, have and express emotions, and interact with others.

At the same time, in understanding human behavior, we must realize that culture is just one of
several major factors that influences mental processes and behaviors (albeit a very important factor!).
Two other major factors of influence include the situational context and individual factors. The latter
includes personality, biological and physiological factors, and human nature. Moreover, the power of
situational context to affect behavior comes mostly from culture, because cultures give social contexts
important meanings, and it is these meanings that drive behavior. We believe that situational context is
an important moderator of the effects of culture and individual factors in influencing behavior. In some
contexts, behavior may be mostly influenced by individual factors; in other contexts, behaviors may be
more highly influenced by cultural factors. Understanding the influence of culture, therefore, requires us
to adopt a relatively more sophisticated way of understanding and explaining human behavior, one that
acknowledges and incorporates other great factors that push behaviors.

UNDERSTANDING CULTURE IN PERSPECTIVE: UNIVERSALS AND CULTURE-SPECIFICS

The evolution of human culture suggests that there are many psychological processes in which
all humans engage. For example, because humans have the unique ability to recognize that others are
intentional agents, we can draw inferences about the reasons underlying other people’s behavior. These
are called attributions, and the process of making attributions may be something that is universal to all
humans. are inferences that people make about the causes of events and behavior
people make attributions in order to understand their experiences
But because all human cultures exist in their own specific, unique environment, there are
differences among them. Thus, while making attributions may be something universal to all humans,

Culture Psychology 9
people of different cultures may differ in the way they make them. That is, there are probably cultural
differences in attributional styles among different human cultures.

This approach provides us with a relatively nuanced way of understanding the relationship
between culture and psychology, and of the discipline of cultural psychology. With this approach we can
understand how, at one level comparing human cultures with nonhuman animal cultures, the same
psychological process may be universal to all humans. At another level, comparing human cultures
among themselves, the same psychological process may be done differently. This is true for attributions,
emotions, cognition, and motivation, and one of the goals of this course is to highlight the universal and
culture-specific aspects of these psychological processes. (See Lonner, 1980; Norenzayan & Heine,
2005, for more discussion on universal psychological processes.)

ETICS AND EMICS

Cultural psychologists have a vocabulary for talking about universal and culturespecific
psychological processes. Etics refer to those processes that are consistent across different cultures; that
is, etics refer to universal psychological processes. Emics refer to those processes that are different
across cultures; emics, therefore, refer to culture-specific processes. These terms originated in the study
of language (Pike, 1954), with phonetics referring to aspects of language and verbal behaviors that are
common across cultures, and phonemes referring to aspects of language that are specific to a particular
culture and language. Berry (1969) was one of the first to use these linguistic concepts to describe
universal versus culturally relative aspects of behavior.

Culture Psychology 10