Cognitive contours: recent work on cross-cultural psychology and its relevance for education

This paper outlines new work in cross-cultural psychology largely drawn from Nisbett, Choi, and Smith (Cognition, 65, 15–32, 1997); Nisbett, Peng, Choi, & Norenzayan, Psychological Review, 108(2), 291–310, 2001; Nisbett, The Geography of Thought: How Asians and Westerners Think Differently...and Why. New York: Free Press 2003), Ji, Zhang and Nisbett (Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 87(1), 57–65, 2004), Norenzayan (2000) and Peng (Naive Dialecticism and its Effects on Reasoning and Judgement about Contradiction. University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, Michigan 1997) Peng and Nisbett (Cross-Cultural Similarities and Differences in the Understanding of Physical Causality. Paper presented at the Science and Culture: Proceedings of the Seventh Interdisciplinary Conference on Science and Culture, Frankfort, K. Y. 1996), and Peng, Ames, & Knowles (Culture and Human Inference: Perspectives from three traditions. In: D. Matsumoto (Ed.), Handbook of Cross-Cultural Psychology (pp. 1–2). Oxford: Oxford University Press 2000). The paper argues that the findings on cultural influences on inference-making have implications for teaching and education generally, and specifically for the debate on conceptions and misconceptions of Asian students studying in western tertiary institutions around the world. The position defended is that, while there seems to be compelling empirical evidence for intercultural differences in thought patterns, these patterns are, for the most part, insignificant in everyday exchanges, though language and culture might subtlety modulate our inference-making at the margins. Linguistic determinism however is not defended. Nonetheless, the evidence provides food for thought, and it needs to inform the recent debates about international students studying overseas.

松-紧文化:跨文化心理学研究的新维度

松-紧文化是跨文化心理学研究的新维度,它发轫于人类学的文化田野考察,致力于刻画不同文化间社会规范强度和对偏差行为宽容程度的结构性特征.松-紧文化有其较为明确的概念定义和成因,以及在国家、区域和个体层次上的测量方法.松-紧文化已广泛运用于自我、人格、心理健康与幸福感、判断与决策、创新、脑认知神经和基因、恐怖主义与社会和谐等心理学基础和应用研究主题之中.未来研究可进一步甄别细分社会规范中的描述性规范和命令性规范,并综合吸收其它研究视角的长处.     

Between orientalism and normalization: cross-cultural lessons from Japan for a critical history of psychology

Cross-cultural research performs a vital role within the confirmation of psychological "truths." Its differentiations work simultaneously to establish their general applicability and the superiority of Anglo-U.S. ways of living and relating. Taking three examples of how "Japan" figures within English language psychological accounts (i.e., group/individual, shame/guilt societies, and attachment styles), I indicate how the apparent stability of these truths suppressed the violent history of their generation. Moreover, I suggest how resisting the assimilation of cultural specificity into a discourse of mere variation can challenge the hegemony of Anglo-U.S. psychology and reframe the vexed question of specificity versus universality.     

Social psychology, terrorism, and identity: a preliminary re-examination of theory, culture, self, and society

This article relies upon structural symbolic interactionism and five of its organizing concepts (i.e. symbols, the definition of the situation, roles, socialization and role-taking, and the self) to put forth a novel conceptual framework for understanding the terrorist identity. In order to demonstrate the practical utility of the framework, applications to various terrorist groups around the globe are incorporated into the analysis. Overall, both the theoretical and application work help reorient the academic and practitioner behavioral science communities to the importance of culture, self, and society when investigating one's membership in and identity through militant extremist organizations. Given the unique approach taken by this article, several provisional implications are delineated. In particular, future research on terrorism, strategies linked to counter-terrorism, legal and public policy reform, and the relevance of utilizing a sociologically animated social psychology in the assessment of other forms of criminal behavior are all very tentatively explored.     

Social psychology and the wrong revolution

Many social psychologists take increasing comfort in cognitive explanations of human action. This paper first attempts to demonstrate that cognitively based formulations not only delimit the possibilities for social understanding, but create a range of intractable conceptual problems. If real world events are reduced to cognitive representations of the world, then social events cease to exist for the discipline as legitimate foci of concern. Further, once the reality of cognition is granted, there is no conceptual means of viably explaining either the origins or acquisition of cognitive categories (schemas, representations, etc.), or the relationship between cognition and action. The paper then goes on to argue that the cognitive revolution in psychology blinds the discipline to the far more pervasive revolution occurring elsewhere in the intellectual world, that of social epistemology. When cognition is replaced by language as the major means for representing the world, then the individual is replaced by the social relationship as the central focus of concern. Theory and research within the framework of social epistemology are reviewed and their implications discussed.     

In search of cultural diversity: recent literature in cross-cultural and ethnic minority psychology

The purpose of this study was to identify where the most work on cross-cultural and ethnic minority psychology is being published and who the most productive authors are. The journals that published the most articles on cross-cultural and ethnic minority issues from 1993 to 1999 and the most prolific authors on these issues were identified by PsycINFO. Cross-cultural research is cross-national, whereas ethnic minority research involves groups of color within the United States. The citation impact of these journals and authors was determined from the 1997 Social Sciences Citation Index. The results suggest that there is very limited overlap between the literatures in cross-cultural and ethnic minority psychology. Most of the research in these areas is published in specialty journals, and there is a paucity of this research in prestigious journals. Perceived or actual barriers to publication in prestigious journals may cause some to seek specialty journals as outlets for research on cultural diversity. The top scholars in cross-cultural psychology are primarily men of European ancestry, whereas most of the top scholars in ethnic minority psychology are ethnic minority men and women. Strategies to increase the prominence of cultural diversity in the psychology literature include combining cross-cultural and ethnic minority psychology, increasing the number of editorial board members of prestigious journals having expertise in cultural diversity, and increasing the quality of specialty journals. Psychology will remain ill-equipped to face the challenges of the new millennium without increased attention to cultural diversity.     

The development of in-group favoritism: between social reality and group identity

This study examined how social reality restricts children's tendency for in-group favoritism in group evaluations. Children were faced with social reality considerations and with group identity concerns. Using short stories, in this experimental study, conducted among 3 age groups (6-, 8-, and 10-year-olds), the authors examined the trait attribution effects of reality constraints on eye-color differences and national group differences. The results show that the trait attributions of all age groups were restricted by the acceptance of socially defined reality. In addition, when the information about reality was not considered accurate, only the youngest children showed positive in-group favoritism. It is argued that these findings are useful in trying to reconcile some of the divergent and contrasting findings in the developmental literature on children's intergroup perceptions and evaluations.     

Social psychology of institutional change: General principles for intervention

Six principles for achieving total institutional change are presented as a framework for developing intervention strategies for changing established human-service institutions for deviants. These principles are discussed and then explicated with examples from a total change effort in a state training school for adjudicated male delinquents. It is argued that most human service institutions for deviants are in desperate need of massive change and that all six of these principles must be realized, at least to some degree, if such change is to be effected.Numerous discussions over the years with Seymour B. Sarason, J. Terry Saunders, Brian P. V. Sarata, Charles W. Dean, and Leland Wilkinson have been instrumental in formulating the ideas expressed in this paper. The author is most appreciative of their support and contributions. Some of these ideas were originally presented in a paper of the same title by N. D. Reppucci, J. T. Saunders, and L. Wilkinson as part of a symposium at the Convention of the American Psychological Association, Honolulu, Hawaii, 1972.     

Social skills, friendship and happiness: a cross-cultural investigation

The present study investigated the associations between social skills, friendship quality, and happiness, and tested a mediational model positing that friendship quality would mediate the relationship between social skills and happiness among American and Malaysian college students. Although American students reported significantly higher levels of psychosocial well-being than Malaysian students, the study variables were positively associated with each other in both cultures. More importantly, findings supported the proposed model in both groups. Results suggest that part of the reason why social skills are associated with positive psychological well-being is because of friendship experiences. Overall, the findings of the present study reinforce, extend and cross-culturally generalize the presumed benefits of social skills in positive well-being elaborated by Segrin and Taylor (2007). The authors also provided suggestions for future research.     

Social comparison and social identity: Some prospects for intergroup behaviour

Recent studies have reported that the variable of social categorization per se is sufficient for intergroup discrimination. This paper presents an explanation of these findings in terms of the operation of social comparison processes between groups based on the need for a positive ingroup identity. The relationship between perceived social identity and intergroup comparison is elaborated theoretically, and it is argued that social comparisons give rise to processes of mutual differentiation between groups which can be analyzed as a form of ‘social’ competition. Social competition is distinguished from realistic competition (conflict of group interests). New data is reported which strengthens this interpretation of the ‘minimal’ categorization studies. It is found that minimal intergroup discrimination takes place in the distribution of meaningless ‘points’ as well as monetary rewards and that social categorization per se does not lead to intergroup behaviour where the subjects can act directly in terms of ‘self’. Other studies on intergroup biases are reviewed to argue for the generality of social competition in intergroup situations.     

Social psychology at the crossroads: Its encounter with cognitive and ecological psychology and the interactive perspective

This article discusses the implications for social psychology of recent developments in the neighbouring fields of cognitive and ecological psychology. The authors stress the importance of studying the cognitive processes directly instead of inferring them as hypothetical constructs from aggregate responses. This paradigmatic shift implies a change in the conduct of research from the traditional nomothetic perspective to a neo-idiographic one. A method of representational contextualization is offred to generate the affective and cognitive deep structure from surface, first order data. This structure identified as the internal environment, reflects simultaneously the construction of reality by a situated individual and the recoding rules operating in such a construction.     

The anticipatory construction of reality as a central concern for psychology and robotics

How is it that, given our diverse sensors that are moving at any moment, we get to the idea that there is a more or less permanent world around us that contains objects and living beings and that is endowed with spatial and temporal properties? This question is difficult, it is “the child’s construction of reality” issue. Given the complexity of the underlying phenomena, it requires a dialog between engineering sciences and life sciences to be solved. In this paper, we introduce the contributions to this dialog that have been collected in this special issue.     

Monocultural and cross-cultural indigenous approaches: The royal road to the development of a balanced global psychology

Comprehensive comparison and conceptual analysis of cross-cultural, cultural, and indigenous psychologies in terms of their aims and theoretical and methodological perspectives lead to the conclusion that the first two are special cases of the third. Two basic types of indigenous psychology are distinguished on the basis of conceptual analysis: monocultural indigenous psychologies (including monocultural cultural psychologies) and cross-cultural indigenous psychologies (including both cross-cultural psychology and cross-cultural cultural psychology). Corresponding to these two types of indigenous psychology are two basic ways to conduct indigenous research, namely, the monocultural indigenous approach and the cross-cultural indigenous approach. Both approaches require achievement of the condition of indigenous compatibility, which stresses the sufficient congruity of the researcher's theory, methods, and results with the studied psychological or behavioral phenomenon and/or its sociocultural context. Finally, several ways to integrate research findings obtained by the monocultural and cross-cultural indigenous approaches are delineated and discussed with respect to their function in creating an indigenously derived global psychology.