This fact is immediately evident whenever you travel to a differ- ent country or meet people from different cultural

backgrounds. In many ways, people from different cultures live their lives differently; they speak different
languages, have different customs, eat different foods, have different religious beliefs, have different child-rearing
practices, and so on. Much about a person’s lifestyle can be predicted just by knowing his or her culture.
Psychological processes are shaped by experiences. Because people in different cultures have many different
experiences, we should then expect to find differences in many ways that they think. As you read through this book,
I encourage you to examine the kinds of experiences that you have had and the ways that you think, and contrast
them to the descriptions provided of people from other cult. Psychological processes are constrained and afforded by
the neurological structures that underlie them. And because the brains that people are born with are virtually
identical around the world, people from all cultures share the same con- straints and affordances of the universal
human brain.

What Is Culture?
Culture to mean any kind of information that is acquired from other members of one’s species through social
learning that is capable of affecting an individual’s behaviors (see Richerson & Boyd, 2005). In other words,
culture is any kind of idea, belief, technology, habit, or practice that is acquired through learning from others.
Humans are therefore a cultural species, as people have a great deal of “culture” that fits this definition. Second, I
use the term “culture” to indicate a particular group of individuals. Cultures are people who are existing within some
kind of shared context. People within a given culture are exposed to many of the same cultural ideas. They might
attend the same cultural institutions, engage in similar cultural practices, see the same advertisements, follow the
same norms, and have conversations with each other on.
The term “culture” refers to dynamic groups of indi- viduals that share a similar context, are exposed to many
similar cultural messages, and contain a broad range of different individuals who are affected by those cultural
messages in divergent ways.

Cultural psychologists would argue that to fully understand the mind it is important to con- sider, say, whether one is
thinking about food, weapons, sexual partners, or sacred. Because humans are cultural beings, their actions,
thoughts, and feelings are immersed in cultural information, and this information renders these actions, thoughts,
and feelings to be meaningful (see Bruner, 1990, for an in-depth discussion). That is, these actions, thoughts, and
feelings come to relate to other things beyond them. Humans are so embedded in their cultural worlds that they are
always behav- ing as cultural actors, and their thoughts are always sustained by the meanings that are derived from
their cultures. There are no occasions when people step outside of their cultural meaning systems and start to think
instead like the universal human (see Geertz, 1973, for a rich elaboration of this); people’s thoughts are forever
bound up in their own cultural meaning systems. Last, if we conclude that a psychological phenomenon is equally
accessible in all cultures then we conclude that it is an accessibility universal. This is the strongest case for
universality and indicates that a given psychological phenomenon exists in all cultures, is used to solve the same
problem across cultures, and is accessible to the same degree across cultures. As noted earlier, in some respects
“people are the same wherever you go.” Tak- ing this perspective is called a “color-blind” (or “culture-blind”)
approach, and many people adopt this mind-set with the best of intentions. The hope underlying this approach is
that people will interact with each other without giving much attention to anyone’s ethnic background. In the words
of some advocates for racial equality, “the way to stop discrimination on the basis of race is to stop discriminating
on the basis of race” (Parents Involved in Community Schools v. Seattle School District No. 1, 2007, p. 2768). So
perhaps the best way for people of different backgrounds to get along is to stop attending to cultural differences and
focus instead on people’s common human nature. color-blind strategy, attending to and respecting group differences
is frequently called a multicultural approach. The rationale behind this approach is that people really do identify
strongly with their groups, and most group identities are far more meaningful than the kind that can be artificially
created in the lab. Furthermore, people are especially likely to identify with their groups if their groups are smaller
than other groups or are disadvantaged in some way. Minority groups tend to greatly val- ue their group identities,
and they often respond quite negatively to efforts by major- ity group members to ignore what makes them
distinctive (Verkuyten, 2005). As such, culturally normative behavior comes to be seen as natural, and deviations
from that natural path often tend to be viewed as less desirable or even immoral. This leads peo- ple to the error of
ethnocentrism—that is, judging people from other cultures by the standards of one’s own culture. Our cultures
ultimately socialize us to be ethnocentric because we are socialized to value normative cultural behaviors. As you’ll
see, learn- ing about other cultures can sometimes be provocative as people confront other ways of doing things that
go against their own cultural values. These experiences should help you gain a new perspective on how your culture
has influenced you.

Cultural psychology can be contrasted with much of “general psychology” in that it views the mind and culture to be
ultimately inseparable. The guiding assumption is that psy- chological processes are influenced by the content that is
being processed and by the context within which it is processed. With this view, people who participate in different
contexts should be expected to think differently. Controversy continues over whether given psychological processes
are universal to all cultures or are specific to certain cultures. These arguments are controversial because the
evidence for the universality of a process often depends on the level of abstraction by which that process is
considered. Furthermore, there are four different levels of universality of psychological processes (listed in order of
increasing universality): nonuniversals, existential universals, functional universals, and accessibility universals. The
extent of universality that exists for most psychological processes is still unclear. This is largely because the
database for psychological research has generally been limited to North American undergraduates in psychology
classes. Much recent research has shown that when other populations are investigated, the findings often look quite
different across cultures. When people adopt a multicultural approach and attend to cultural differences, people of
different cultural groups get along better and are more engaged. Cultural psychology is not new, as there have been a
number of attempts to study culture’s influences on ways of thinking throughout the history of psychology. The
more recent incar- nation of the field started in the early 1990s and has been the most influential. The past two
decades have produced an enormous amount of research that at the same time has raised many more unanswered
questions.