Unifying Biological and Cultural Psychology

Abstract

The tension between biological and sociocultural approaches to human behavior has been with the social sciences since their beginning. Wilhelm Wundt, one of the founders of modern psychology, distinguished between two psychologies, a physiological psychology based on laboratory experimentation and a folk psychology based on ethnographic research (Cole, 1996, 28-29). Although a division of labor between biological and sociocultural perspectives makes considerable practical sense, such division has often turned into polarized opposition, as though a biological approach were in opposition to a cultural approach, and vice-versa.' Tensions between biological and cultural approaches to human behavior have heightened in recent years, perhaps because of their resonance with the wider cul-