Cultural psychology and human development

Abstract

Cultural psychology is a theoretical approach that treats human beings as intimately intertwined with the surrounding social world, which is filled with meanings conveyed through signs. It is based on the axiom that cultural contexts and psychological phenomena are assumed to be mutual, inseparable, and co-constructive. This focus fits the general scientific status of all open systems, which exist only due to the continuous exchange of materials with the environment. Cultural psychology is an integrated approach to psychology rather than a separate branch, as is sometimes believed, since psychology and culture “make each other up.” This involves constructive internalization (intra-mental construction of personal meanings) and equally constructive externalization (changing the environment in the direction specified by the internal meanings). As a collaborative, multidisciplinary perspective, cultural psychology is closely linked with disciplines like anthropology, sociology, linguistics, literature, and others. Cultural psychology focuses on the study of cultural—sign-mediating—processes within the mind. A common misconception relates to the fact that the term “cultural” refers to the study of similarities and differences between various communities. Rather than focusing on static comparisons, meaning-making and dynamic organization of personal and collective reality are studied. Differences between societies are important only as illustrations of the possible patterns of human psychological variation as they emerge in a particular time-space coordinate. Thus, another important axiom is that there can be no psychology without culture. Culture is constructed by goal-oriented human actions and involves continuous thought, action, and emotion in the face of uncertainty. Thus, the centrally important feature of cultural psychology is the inclusion of personal, interpersonal, and collective processes as they make up the different layers of meaning in irreversible time. Culture is both inside a person’s mind, as a personal manifestation, and also a shared system or collective set of customs. Cultural psychologists tend to treat the person as a whole rather than as separate different domains of activity because a comprehensive and multidimensional approach to a person within context is believed to be the key to meaning. Cultural psychology attempts to bring the notion of context into the central focus in psychology and the notion of person back into ethnography, as these are believed to be constructive. Context is viewed in two ways—as inevitably and inseparably linked with the phenomenon and as external social setting (e.g., home, school) in which human activities take place. Another important feature is that “cultural psychology is inherently a developmental discipline and developmental psychology is inherently cultural” (Shwartz, et al. 2020, p. 2). All levels of culturally organized human ways of living—persons, communities, societies—are constantly developing systems.