Key Issues in Cross-cultural Psychology

Hector Grad, Amalio Blanco, James Georgas, Hector Grad, Amalio Blanco, James Georgas

• Publisher: Garland Science
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781000142570
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Tecnología e ingeniería
• Subtopic: Ingeniería civil

These proceedings are organized into six parts, covering conceptual and methodological issues; consequences of acculturation; cognitive processes; values; social psychology; and personality, developmental psychology and health psychology.

Part I

Conceptual and Methodological Issues

Cross-Cultural Psychology at the Crossroads or: Lake Victoria is not Lake Mwanza, while Cross-Cultural Psychology is not Cultural (Enough)

Pawel Boski

Institute of Psychology, Polish Academy of Sciences, Warsaw, Poland

For the past two years an unusually interesting and fruitful discussion has been going on in the pages of the Cross-Cultural Psychology Bulletin about the name, content and purpose of our discipline: “Who are we and what makes (or should make) our work distinct in relation to the broader family of psychological sciences?” Inspired by this discussion and my own thoughts on this problem of professional identity, I convened a symposium at the 12th IACCP Congress in Pamplona, Cross-cultural psychology at the cross-roads: Comparative international studies or psychological analyses of the cultures¹ to further discuss these issues. Similar symposia were simultaneously organized at the 23rd IAAP Congress in Madrid and a year later for the IVth European Congress of Psychology in Athens. Judging from all these recent and ongoing events, the renewed concern about the basics reflects the state of our collective professional consciousness rather than idiosyncrasies of few individual minds.

The paper has two aims: 1) to provide a critical appraisal of current cross-cultural psychology, which – in my view – is insufficiently cultural; and 2) to offer a positive conceptual framework for a postulated model of cultural psychology, combined with empirical examples which illustrate my ideas.

There is Not Enough Culture in Cross-Cultural Psychology

In this section I will attempt to show conceptual and empirical evidence supporting the above thesis; arguments will also be presented that the status of the discipline suffers because of this deficit.

Back to the Semantic Basics: Why CROSS-Cultural Psychology?

Let me start with a naive question: “Why the hyphenated Cross- and not simply Cultural Psychology?” Historically speaking, the question should be addressed to JCCP and IACCP’s founding fathers: “Did you consider, around 25 years ago, any terminological option other than CROSS-cultural, or was this one consciously agreed upon as the most adequate name to the goals which were then outlined? At this point, there is no answer to this question in Lonner’s (1994) JCCP anniversary reminiscences.

Let’s look around our neighboring disciplines. I can not see any cross-cultural sociology or anthropology, although both of them are well established academic disciplines without the hyphen. Or consider such semantic stimulus: cross-social psychology. To me it simply does not sound good, neither in English nor in Polish.

Theoretically, there is a persuasive argument that one should first establish the more general (basic) level of analysis, e.g., cultural, before going to the more specific (subordinate) levels. Thus, we have a (a) general PSYCHOLOGY, next (b) developmental, social or clinical psychology, and only later (c) can they become, say, cognitive-developmental, cognitive-social, or clinical-developmental psychologies.

Let’s have another set of examples. We have a growing number of international associations, some of them obviously familiar to our members: Political, Economic, etc. Psychology. International comparisons are not rarities in their workings; if they are not a rule yet, such studies will definitely become the rule in the future. And yet, these disciplines do not bear anything like Cross-, Trans-, hyphenated name tags (e.g., Cross-Political Psychology). Moreover, these new emerging disciplines do not aspire to be cross-cultural; international will suffice, both for membership and for the type of work being done. Thus, our founding fathers took two steps at one time (which is a well understood youthful reaction), believing that it was feasible to put culture(s) and international comparisons on the same plate.

My intuition is that the initial emphasis on defining our discipline was on its comparative/methodological character, but since the term comparative had already been reserved for the inter-species analyses and international appeared in the names of associations, CROSS- became the agreeable option of the day. The position that our discipline bore mainly methodological character at birth is shared by other authors (see, Triandis, 1990; Eckensberger, 1994). But the hyphenated double meaning contributed, in practice, to a semantic confusion which has been more and more with us: To compare psychological phenomena across (above!) various social (national, ethnic, cultural) groups or to study in-depth the cultural context and determinants of psychological processes? – That is the question.

Vague or Peripheral Image of Cross-Cultural Psychology in Psychology

There hardly is any situation more embarrassing for a scientific discipline (as well as for an individual scientist) than being considered marginal or peripheral. And yet, evidence exists that things have been like this with cross-cultural psychology. Lonner (1989) found few and poorly representative references to cross-cultural research in American introductory textbooks. Recently, Zimbardo observed in the forword to Triandis’s Culture and Social Behavior (1994): “Yet, the work of cross-cultural psychologists has remained on the periphery of general psychology, given short shrift in introductory texts and even in many social psychology texts. […] The Zeitgeist is finally right for the emergence of cross-cultural psychology into the mainstream of social and general psychology” (pp. xii-xiii). The first part of this statement reflects the status quo; the other expresses a hope which is socially desirable in this type of text.

Rather than externalizing the blame for our relative absence in psychological literature, it may be more productive to turn the critical-attributional attention inward. I would like to share my editorial experience with the preceding volume of the IACCP proceedings, Journeys into Cross-Cultural Psychology (Bouvy, van de Vijver, Boski, & Schmitz, 1994). In reviewing the manuscripts, we found among many submitting authors, two types of conceptual ambiguities about the criteria that a standard text in an IACCP publication should meet.

The first type concerns studies considered cross-cultural, if it derives from a single non-Western culture, and assumes that its results should be automatically compared with the already existing mainstream findings. A number of such papers by psychologists from the majority world (i.e., developing countries) were submitted for consideration to the Liege conference volume. The problem with such studies is not that they are monocultural, but that do not make any convincing claim for the operation of identifiable cultural variables.

The second type consists of using the term cross-cultural as equivalent to comparative/international. Thus a personality-temperament researcher may want to broaden the scope of his work on basic factorial dimensions and decides to administer translated versions of the original questionnaire for obtaining data from other national samples. The only cultural concern of such research is to ascertain an equivalent back-translation of the research instrument.

In both cases, either an off-mainstream single culture study without in depth cultural analysis or a comparative international replication, the outcome is similar – peripheral – because it lacks creative discovery of new knowledge.

Let’s focus on JCCP and examine, more systematically, the content of works published in our flag journal.

The 25th Anniversary Review of JCCP Confirms the Thesis: There is Little of Culture in Comparative Cross-Cultural Research.

The silver anniversary issue of JCCP reveals some empirical data about the type of research that has been published under the name of cross-cultural psychology. I would like to draw the reader’s attention to the following facts reported in Ongel & Smith (1994) paper: (a) 593 (93%) papers in their sample were classified as imposed etic (i.e., fundamentally acultural); (b) 97% of the published papers reported studies where culture was treated as a causal variable rather than a context “within which specified variables interact with each other”; (c) “88% studied samples of individuals with no reference to the cultural context by which they are influenced” (1994, p. 46). Lonner concurs with the latter by saying that “there have been too many occasions where the (sample) description has been incomplete” (1994, p. 16).

Coupled with other evidence on North-American (or Anglophone) dominance in authors’ nationality, education, and current academic address, the above meta-analysis points to one clear conclusion: Cross-cultural psychology has become an academic discipline conducted by WASP researchers and their followers, who are interested in testing the limits of the mainstream theories (imposed etic) around the world by using various national/ethnic samples, erroneously believing that cultural causation can be obtained this way. The mistake of a standard JCCP text consists of taking “empty labels” of national samples for cultural variables or of treating culture in a naive, amateurish perspective, added as a post-hoc speculative ornament at the end of Discussion section. The above conclusion coincides with Schweder’s (1990) criticism of cross-cultural psychology as another version of Platonic universalist ideas of the mind; but similar are some of our ingroup judgments: take Hofstede’s (1990) text in which he claims that there has been no culture in a standard cross-cultural text, other than culture = country or Ss’ nationality. More recent arguments by Betancourt and Lopez (1993) follow the same lines.

In this context, Lonner’s (1994) and Ongel & Smith’s (1994) calls for more detailed sample description, and for more emic or derived etic theoretical approach will remain cries in the wilderness until a deeper process in the paradigmatic thinking takes place in our minds. So far, a standard JCCP-style practice of calling culture “independent variable” or “causal factor” is a misnomer, since neither is this “variable” conceptually defined nor measured and manipulated. It is exactly the same type of erroneous or shorthand expression, at best, which we would attribute to someone treating gender or age as causal agents.

Some Examples of No-Cultural Cross-Cultural Studies

Even the fact that the statistical evidence provided by Lonner (1994) and Ongel & Smith (1994) is so abundant, it still makes sense to select some illustrations to document my conclusions on the “acultural nature of a standard JCCP text.

The special JCCP issue with Amir & Sharon’s (1987) replication studies in the area of person perception, attribution, attitudes, interpersonal attraction and group dynamics, offers an example often referred to in the literature. Their main conclusion was that the original main effects were easier to demonstrate in Israel, than were the interactions. Pepitone & Triandis (1987) wrote a critical commentary arguing that interaction effects are by necessity less robust and more context dependent than main effects. Yet, what is of most importance here is the fact, that culture was completely absent in Amir & Sharon’s work; neither did it appear at the conceptualization stage nor in the interpretation of their results. Interactions (or lack of them) were not seen through the “filter” provided by cultural contexts: American (mainstream) vs Israeli.

In the 1993(4) issue, Domino and Regmi (1993), Attitudes toward cancer – A cross-cultural comparison of Nepalese and U.S. students, culture(s) enter the picture in the discussion section after the authors have reported the finding that, with their Cancer Metaphors Test, “Nepalese students see cancer both more pessimistically and more optimistically than do United States students”. They offer a post-hoc free association type of thinking that because of Nepalese being Hindu or Buddhist, and reincarnation beliefs held in these religions, strong bipolar emotions can be generated with them, which is not the case with the U.S. subjects whose background must have been predominantly Judeo-Christian (p. 395). The result was neither predicted from any cultural analysis nor is the post hoc interpretation convincing, i.e., reincarnation beliefs > bipolar affects.

In the silver anniversary issue of JCCP, (Schaufeli & Janczur 1994), the cultural references which might justify a comparison between the two countries are limited to a list of conditions making life in the Netherlands (for nurses and everyone) easier than it is in Poland (pp. 98–99). Should the editor accept this as a legitimate cultural difference justifying publication in JCCP? The results confirmed this rather common-sense hypothesis: all the indices of burnout were higher among Polish nurses; the interpretation remained the same as was the introduction: because the life in Poland is tougher than it is in the Netherlands. We have thus a th...