Understanding Cross-Cultural Psychology

Eastern and Western Perspectives

Pittu D Laungani

• Publisher: SAGE Publications Ltd
• Year: 2006
• ISBN:
  9781473903715
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: History & Theory in Psychology
• Index: Psychology

Eloquently introducing students to international perspectives on cross-cultural psychology (both Eastern and Western cultures), this textbook contains many features to promote student learning. It:

-contains an array of vignettes, case studies and other text features

-addresses international research on cross-cultural psychology unlike other books that focus purely on Western perspectives

-is thoughtfully yet provocatively written, appropriately combining the narrative and the informative

The main thrust of the book?s content is to discuss the framework of culture, family structure, health, bereavement and intercultural interaction - and all of their intersections - and consideration is also given to methodological and ethical research issues and their application to differing cultures.

Part I

Theoretical Perspectives

1

What Is This Thing Called Culture?

Imagine that you are in India. You are travelling on a train from Bombay (now known as Mumbai) to Delhi. You have a window seat in a First Class compartment, which is empty. Presently an Indian family of four – a man, a woman, and two children – enters your compartment. The coolie (porter) disgorges their luggage, haggles over his payment, and finally, with a half-hearted salute, leaves.

No sooner does the train start than the man strikes up a conversation with you. Much to your astonishment, he starts to pry you with personal questions: your name, your nationality, your age, your occupation, and a variety of other questions, including your reasons for coming to India. No stranger in England, you know from your own experience, would dare ask such personal and impertinent questions. Even your close friends would tread more cautiously! What an uncultured brute, you say to yourself. You wonder how in the nicest possible way you might tell him to mind his own business.

Meanwhile, the woman accompanying him has been busy. From a wicker basket next to her she removes a few paper packets; nostrils quiver as the aroma of savoury Indian snacks wafts through the compartment. The man turns to you once again and opening each packet carefully offers you a snack. You are even more bewildered. A moment ago, he was being personal almost to the point of rudeness, a moment later, kindness itself. Why would a total stranger wish to share his food with you? Several explanations rush through your head. Is the offered hospitality a form of atonement for his initial rudeness? Is he one of those who still ‘suffers’ from a post-colonial ‘hangover’ and is trying desperately to impress you because you are white, a foreigner? Would his behaviour and his openhearted hospitality have been any different if his travelling companion had been a fellow Indian instead? Or is he just being friendly, hospitable because that is ‘part of his nature’? Would another Indian family have behaved similarly? Is it an Indian custom, a part of Indian culture? Any one of the explanations could be the ‘correct’ one, or none. Or they could all be partially relevant. Although the encounter that I have described might seem exaggerated to you, it is neither idiosyncratic nor unique in any way – certainly not from an Indian point of view. As I have stated elsewhere (in conversation with West, 2004),

People from Eastern cultures, by which I mean people from the Indian sub-continent, in general tend to relate on a personalized and emotional basis. Feelings, intuitions, and subjectivity, play a large part in their assessments of and relationships with others. This means they seldom shy away from asking personal questions – even of strangers: ‘How old are you? Are you married? Do you have children? How many children do you have? Do you have a job? What kind of work do you do? What’s your salary? Which caste do you come from?’ These questions can be and often are asked at the very first meeting between strangers … These are seen as practical, matter-of-fact questions. There’s no embarrassment whatever in asking such types of questions. They serve as markers, which determine whether one will continue to relate to the person concerned at a social level or ignore the person after the initial preliminaries. Thus, within the first five minutes one works out a pattern of relationships, and there’s no beating about the bush. One doesn’t have to wait for a long time to find out what the other person does for a living. (pp. 430–431)

Once you take these factors into account, the bizarre behaviour of your travelling companion begins to make sense. The point being made is this. Our perception of the world and the people in it is generally reflected through our cultural lenses. By perception I mean not the images that strike our retina, the sounds that vibrate through the tympanic membrane of our ears, or the smells that tickle our nostrils, but our interpretations of the events that unfold before our senses. It is our subjective interpretations influenced by our upbringing that allow us to revel in rapturous rhapsodies when listening to the Pastoral Symphony, or gnash our teeth at the sound of a road drill. One should not, however, conclude that all our perceptions are subjective and arise from our own cultural upbringing. That clearly is not the case.

As human beings we all share what might be termed ‘a common humanity’. We are all born as helpless and defenceless infants. We need care, comfort, food, and shelter for our biological survival, which runs parallel with our cognitive, linguistic, and emotional development. Without human care and guidance, it would be impossible for us to acquire any human characteristics.

The nature of human nature

In the past, there was a strong belief that human nature was universal. People all over the world acted in accordance with their inherent nature. In invoking human nature as the fundamental explanatory construct one did not have to look further. If a given behaviour is part of human nature and is shared universally, then there is nothing more to be said. ‘It’s human nature! ‘Just as there is no fighting against ‘fate’ – a theme enshrined in many religious philosophies – there is no point in going against human nature. Is there such a thing as a universal human nature? One has heard the phrase ‘human nature’ so often and in such a wide variety of situations that one has come to believe that one knows what human nature really is. How far is this belief justified? And how far do we really know and understand what human nature means? The word ‘nature’ suggests that all human beings are born with certain physical and psychological characteristics, which they share in common. The term ‘human nature’ is often used as an umbrella term to explain a variety of complex and even contradictory behaviours, including greed and avarice, weakness and strength, selfishness and selflessness, vice and virtue, kindness and cruelty, industriousness and indolence, willpower, or the lack of it, pursuit of pleasure, avoidance of pain, love and aggression, and so on.

The concept of human nature has fascinated philosophers over the centuries. In their search for general laws of human nature, philosophers, right down from the times of Plato to the present, assumed that there exist certain unchanging, invariant attributes, which all human beings share. Plato referred to such unchanging attributes as ‘essences’. All one had to do was to discover the key to those ‘essences’ and one could unlock the doors of human understanding. Moreover there has never been a shortage of theories concerning human nature. Over the years, philosophers, prophets, social scientists, psychologists, sociologists, economists and biologists, have proposed a wide variety of theories of human nature.

But gradually the idea of a universal human nature came to be questioned. Machiavelli perhaps was one of the first philosophers during the Rennaissance period to question the universality of human nature. Locke, the famous British philosopher, gave it no credence. He asserted that there are no innate ideas in the human mind. He proposed the tabula rasa theory, in which he argued that nature was a blank slate upon which experience (nurture) etched its indentations, thus pre-empting the present-day controversies related to nature/nurture theory. Locke’s formulations were of significant appeal to the early behaviourists, in particular Watson, followed by Skinner. Skinner, the radical behaviourist, even went to the extent of proposing that there were species-specific modes of learning and that all behaviour was modifiable through carefully programmed reinforcement contingencies. But the belief in human nature hasn’t quite gone out of fashion and the search for universals has by no means been abandoned.

One of the goals of cross-cultural psychology is its search for ‘universals’, namely behaviours, which despite variations in cultures, climates, ecology, terrain, levels of affluence, can be classified as universals (Berry, Poortinga, Segall, & Dasen, 1992). We shall discuss these issues in depth throughout the book.

Nature and nurture

The main arguments related to human nature as Fukuyama (2002) points out have centred on defining the boundary line that separates nature from nurture. The controversy between nature and nurture came to a head when Charles Darwin proposed his spectacular theory of evolution. Concepts such as random selection, variations due to environmental influences, survival of the fittest, the limitations set by nature itself on growth and development led to a re-evaluation of the ideas underlying theories of human nature. In keeping with Darwinian theory, it would be more correct to say that the variance in human behaviour is likely to be far greater than for virtually any other species.

Hull (1998) points out that there are no true human universals that can be traced to a common nature. One can hardly talk about human nature without at the same time considering the important role of nurture. Human beings are cultural animals. They are capable of modifying their behaviour based on learning. They are also able to pass that learning on to future generations in non-genetic, culturally transmitted ways (Eisenberg, 1972; Fukuyama, 2002). Paul Ehrlich (2000) goes a step further. He argues that it is in human nature not to have a single nature. Human nature can be understood less by its uniformity and more by its variation. It was in the mid-twentieth century that psychologists, biologists and geneticists began to investigate the nature and the degrees of variations in human behaviour with respect to what we are as a result of our experiences.

Modifying the formulation of Locke, it would be fair to say that nature (which consists of our chromosomes, genes, our DNA structures) provides a template on which experience writes. This suggests that there is a continuing interactive process between nature and nurture. Since the interactive process is continuous, it makes it difficult to predict with any degree of precision the influence our genes exercise over our behaviour. Therefore our perception of others, the world around us, and even our own internal subjective world is not simply a matter of inherited biological and genetic mechanisms. It is more than that. It is influenced by our familial orientations, our processes of socialization, which include our beliefs, attitudes, and the values prevalent in our culture.

For any encounter to be meaningful, it is necessary that the persons involved are aware of the rules, which guide and foster their encounters. But for either party to misunderstand the rules, or to flaunt the rules, or to arbitrarily change the rules during the course of the encounters, is likely to lead to an impasse. The rules that guide these encounters are generally unwritten and unspecified.

The problems underlying inter-cultural communication and interaction will be discussed in depth in a later chapter. Suffice it say for the moment that to understand and interpret correctly the behaviours of persons from different cultures one needs to acquire not only a body of objective knowledge but also the sensitivity to construe the world from the perspective of the other person. Sadly one is not born with such ability; nor is it acquired overnight. The reverse is often the case. It is easier to misunderstand than to understand. This is partly because a) one is rooted in one’s culture and as a result it becomes easier and safer to see the world from one’s own cultural perspective, and b) one is often unwilling to admit that one does not know, or that one does not understand. Under these conditions stereotypes rush in where even common sense might fear to tread.

Stereotypes

A stereotype is a negative, unpleasant value-laden judgment that we often form of another individual or a group that we see as being ‘different’ from ours. Some differences are quite obvious: skin colour, age, mode of dress, physical appearance, patterns of speech, and so on; others are more subtle, such as a person’s social class, education, learning, manners, and so forth. But even a brief encounter with a person may reinforce negative evaluations: the person may appear to talk too loudly, too crudely, too rudely, too coarsely, may have a conspicuous physical handicap or blemish, may smell, may seem unkempt, untidy, aggressive, or whatever. Aronson (1992), Gudykunst and Bond (1997), Matsumoto (1996a) and others have pointed out that when we resort to stereotypes we tend to divide people into ‘in-groups’ and ‘out-groups’. It is then assumed that members of ‘in-groups’ (that is, the group to which we belong or aspire to belong) possess positive, desirable and praiseworthy qualities. ‘Out-groups’ on the other hand are seen as possessing negative qualities ranging from indolence and stupidity to cruelty and savagery. Although stereotypes have little or no basis in reality, they are widely shared. They may arise from our initial impressions and intuitions, through hearsay, through the prevalent beliefs within our own in-group, through experience, which may be imagined, baseless, or fantasized.

Persons subscribing to stereotypes can see neither any logical contradictions nor any irrationality in their evaluations of other people. They believe that all the negative characteristics attributed to an individual are also to be found in all the members of that group. Thus the entire group is tarred with the same brush – no exceptions! Thus – all Muslims are fundamentalists! All Hindus are deeply religious and superstitious! All Jews are shrewd and mercenary! All English people are tight-lipped and reserved! All blacks are lazy, and so on and so forth. Allport (1954) pointed out that one of the main functions of a stereotype ‘is to justify (rationalize) our conduct in relation to that category’ (p. 187). Having placed a person in a particular category, such as bad, or mad, or primitive, or stupid, or lazy, or superstitious, or evil, it becomes easier to justify our own behaviours towards them. We may despise them, avoid them, keep away from them, segregate them, discriminate against them, deny them equal rights and opportunities, banish them, imprison them, torture them, and in extreme cases, exterminate them.

The belief in the truth of stereotypes is the first step in the expression of national and racial prejudices (Allport, 1954). If unchecked, and when skilfully manipulated by political demagogues, such bigotry leads on to acts of extreme violence, which past history reveals, have often led to genocides of the most appalling kind. No country in the world, from times ancient to times present, has been free from the savagery arising out of such bigotry. All civilizations have been awash with blood.

Let us flavour a few national stereotypes to understand the generalized nature and their negative value-laden overtones:

• Americans: brash, aggressive, naïve
• Afro-Caribbeans: dumb, athletic, musical
• French: rude, arrogant, untrustworthy
• Germans: meticulous, boring, militaristic
• Indians: ignorant, religious, superstitious
• Irish: lazy, intemperate, alcoholic
• Italians: operatic, romantic, quarrelsome
• Pakistanis: religious, militant fundamentalist

Paxman (1998), writing about the English, lists a large number of stereotypes, which the English hold against the Welsh, the Scots, the Irish, the Indians and the Africans. He points out that even journalists and other literary figures of the past era, including Samuel Johnson, Thomas Carlyle and several others, traded in ugly and hurtful stereotypes concerning different nationalities. Daniel Defoe, the famous eighteenth-century English novelist incensed at the contempt with which the English held people of other races and nationalities, reciprocated the ‘compliment’ when he quoted in his poem, The True Born Englishman (1701/1984):

… A True Born Englishman’s a contradiction!
In speech, an irony! In fact, a fiction!

Here are a few more sweeping statements:

• I know why the sun never sets on the British Empire: God wouldn’t trust an Englishman in the dark. (Duncan Spaeth)
• The Irish are a fair people; they never speak well of one another. (Samuel Johnson)
• If one could only teach the English how to talk and the Irish how to listen, society would be quite civilized. (Oscar Wilde)
• A woman is only a woman, but a good cigar is a smoke. (Rudyard Kipling)
• It was wonderful to find America, but it would have been more wonderful to miss it. (Mark Twain)
• The German mind has a talent for making no mistakes but the very greatest. (Clifton Fadiman)

Slightly less well-known stereotypes related to what two foreigners of the same country do when they meet abroad:

• The Italians start an opera.
• The Indians start a family.
• The Germans start a putsch.
• The English start a club.
• The French start a romance.
• The Americans start a car park.
• The Greeks start to bicker.

One can see from the above that stereotypes are confined not just to national groups; they cover an entire range of human feelings and experiences, stigmatizing persons, countries, art, literature, drama, music, language, culinary practices, religion, patterns of worship, work patterns, and so on. There is hardly anything about which people do not form a stereotype!

It is often assumed that stereotypes generally, if not exclusively, are formed by people of limited learning, limited education, by the poorer, ill-informed sections of any society. This, as Mark Tully (1995), a renowned English journalist and broadcaster who lives and works in India, says is a mistaken assumption. He reports, ‘I have never been able to understand why British journalists who are open Francophiles, overt admirers of A...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Dedication
• A poem by the Mogul Emperor, Bahadur Shah Zafar
• Foreword: Understanding Cross-Cultural Psychology
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• PART I: THEORETICAL PERSPECTIVES
• PART II: APPLIED PERSPECTIVES
• Bibliography
• Author index
• Subject index