Research In Cultural Psychology Research Articles

Toward Cultural Scripts of Trauma Sequelae

The concept of cultural scripts has proven to be very useful for describing depression-like psychological complaints in different cultural regions of the world. The article presents the galaxy model and its implementation in the model of cultural scripts theoretically for the first time and connects these with cultural psychological value research. A new, extensive series of research projects aims to investigate post-trauma -related psychological complaints in various regions of the world. The work in two countries/regions began with focus groups in which elements of cultural scripts were collected by traumatized clients and/or by (therapeutic) experts. For this purpose, a theory-based framework of possible post-traumatic script elements was provided. In Switzerland, focus groups were conducted with patients and experts. Focus groups were conducted with genocide survivors and other trauma victims in Rwanda and three East African countries. The evaluation was semi-quantitative. In Switzerland, around 50 symptoms and changes were mentioned as script elements (e. g. still having to function). Approximately 100 symptoms and changes were mentioned as script elements in East Africa (e. g. loss of dignity). The first temporal connections (i. e. strong scripts) were found for the Swiss scripts (e. g. self-devaluation - urge to function). In the East African study, cultural value orientations underlying the script groupings were also assessed (e. g. community reputation). The illustrative results presented here demonstrate the galaxy model and the suitability of the cultural script concept for recording the effects of trauma. There are differences and similarities in the two world regions examined so far. Further steps at the two study sites will be the temporal connections and the relationships to value orientations. The studies will be started at the other study sites in the following years.

The OECD’s ‘Well-being 2030’ agenda: how PISA's affective turn gets lost in translation

ABSTRACT Well-being 2030 has become the latest rationale for the OECD’s education work. This vision has given rise to new assessments of student well-being beginning with PISA 2015. The OECD, recognising the problems of PISA 2015, conceptualised a wider student well-being construct in PISA 2018, and attempted to measure ‘students’ feelings’. However, analyses of the OECD’s affective turn reveal major problems remain. Our critique is empirically underpinned by an innovative analytical strategy: comparing PISA 2018 student questionnaire translations across different ‘economies’ that use the same written language (China, Hong Kong, Macao, and Taiwan). Our analyses confirm that the OECD imagines a cultural and context-free world, one in which translation and measurements are simply technical problems to be engineered, rather than deeper ‘problems’ of worldviews that require attunement. To encourage the OECD to recognise these differences in its future assessments, we offer starting points from recent research in cultural psychology.

Development through Borders: Photogrammetry of a Moving Experience.

Recognizing the variety of borders that gather and divide our world, such as geographical, temporal, social and psychological, the study highlights that the transit across these borders drives changes and continuities that contribute to human development. The research emphasizes the relevance of reviewing both the individual singularities and the shared aspects of border crossing experiences. The matching of these approaches allows building theoretical models referring to those experiences. Thus, this article aims to review borders crossing as a developmental and abductively generalizable process. Through the analogy between Abductive Generalization and photogrammetry, the study proposes an innovative way of representing these complex experiences. Three ways of border crossing - spatial displacement, imagination and social interactions - are explored in terms of their developmental potential. Using a case study of psychologists in a humanitarian non-governmental organization - NGO, an abductively generalized model is presented highlighting the spatial, cultural and psychological dimensions involved. In addition, the study proposes a three-dimensional helical model of development inspired by photogrammetry, incorporating principles of this technique to improve the understanding on the border crossing process. By recognizing mesogenetic influences, such as institutional and cultural dimensions, the article puts forward an interdisciplinary approach to understand development through border crossing. The models presented may potentially drive future research and interventions in Semiotic Cultural Psychology, enriching the promotion of human development in different border contexts. The study fosters the extension of this work by including several perspectives, methods and paradigms.

Cultural Differences in People's Reactions and Applications of Robots, Algorithms, and Artificial Intelligence

Abstract Although research in cultural psychology has established that virtually all human behaviors and cognitions are in some ways shaped by culture, culture has been surprisingly absent from the emerging literature on the psychology of technology. In this perspective article, we first review recent findings on machine aversion versus appreciation. We then offer a cross-cultural perspective in understanding how people might react differently to machines. We propose three frameworks – historical, religious, and exposure – to explain how Asians might be more accepting of machines than their Western counterparts. We end the article by discussing three exciting human–machine applications found primarily in Asia and provide future research directions.

Cultural Psychology: Beyond East and West.

Research in cultural psychology over the last three decades has revealed the profound influence of culture on cognitive, emotional, and motivational processes shaping individuals into active agents. This article aims to show cultural psychology's promise in three key steps. First, we review four notable cultural dimensions believed to underlie cultural variations: independent versus interdependent self, individualism versus collectivism, tightness versus looseness of social norms, and relational mobility. Second, we examine how ecology and geography shape human activities and give rise to organized systems of cultural practices and meanings, called eco-cultural complexes. In turn, the eco-cultural complex of each zone is instrumental in shaping a wide range of psychological processes, revealing a psychological diversity that extends beyond the scope of the current East-West literature. Finally, we examine some of the non-Western cultural zones present today, including Arab, East Asian, Latin American, and South Asian zones, and discuss how they may have contributed, to varying degrees, to the formation of the contemporary Western cultural zone.

Mothers’ ethnotheories of sibling relationships:A qualitative study in Turkey

In this article, Turkish mothers’ perspectives on sibling relationships are described and analyzed on the basis of 15 qualitative interviews. It is surprising that sibling relationships have received little attention in cultural psychological or sociological research for decades, while other social relationships—such as parent–child relationships, (marital) partner relationships, peer relationships, or hierarchical relationships (e.g., superior–subordinate)—were often studied. The two main goals of the present study are first, to examine Turkish mothers’ ethnotheories of sibling relationships between their own offspring and second, to analyze these parental ethnotheories through the lenses of the cultural psychological and sociological concepts of collectivism/individualism and interdependent/independent self-concepts. The interview data for this empirical study was derived from a larger project which focuses on parental ethnotheories more broadly. Problem-centered interview method was used. Eleven of the interviews took place via a digital platform due to the COVID-19 pandemic, while four of the interviews were conducted face-to-face just before pandemic’s onset. The Turkish mothers interviewed were from Istanbul and Sinop, a small Turkish city on the coast of the Black Sea. The data was interpreted using the documentary method and relational hermeneutical analysis. The article examines and discusses three topics of sibling relationships, namely hierarchical/equal sibling roles based on birth order, solidarity/sharing, and conflict. We show that all of the mothers interviewed place a high value on connectedness between siblings. With regard to the hierarchical or egalitarian distribution of roles, some of the interviewees differ.

Culture and Attention: Future Directions to Expand Research Beyond the Geographical Regions of WEIRD Cultures.

Henrich et al. (2010) highlighted the necessity of broadening the range of regions for cross-cultural investigation in their seminal paper “The weirdest people in the world.” They criticize the current psychological framework for relying dominantly on American undergraduate students for their participant database, and state that there is a risk associated with investigating human nature by focusing solely on a unique population. This line of research has, over the past 30 years, successfully demonstrated the diversity of human cognition. However, it is true that there are still only a limited number of studies that have extended their geographical regions of research outside of G7 (Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, United Kingdom, and United States) and G20 countries (Argentina, Australia, Brazil, China, India, Indonesia, Mexico, Russia, Saudi Arabia, South Africa, South Korea, Turkey, EU countries, and the above G7 countries). In order to fully examine the issue of culture and cognition, we maintain that the field of psychology must extend its research globally. In this paper, we will briefly discuss the history of cross-cultural research in the 1960s which can be seen as the beginning of addressing the above concerns, and review some contemporary empirical studies which took over their 1960s predecessors’ mission. Here we address three strengths of extending the geographical scope to advance cultural psychology. In the second half of the paper, we will introduce our preliminary study conducted in Mongolia as a sample case study to demonstrate a way of administering cultural psychological research outside of the existing research field. We will then discuss implications of this line of research, and provide tips on how to open a new research site.

Culture and Business: How Can Cultural Psychologists Contribute to Research on Behaviors in the Marketplace and Workplace?

Cultural psychology has great potential to expand its research frameworks to more applied research fields in business such as marketing and organizational studies while going beyond basic psychological processes to more complex social practices. In fact, the number of cross-cultural business studies has grown constantly over the past 20 years. Nonetheless, the theoretical and methodological closeness between cultural psychology and these business-oriented studies has not been fully recognized by scholars in cultural psychology. In this paper, we briefly introduce six representative cultural constructs commonly applied in business research, which include (1) individualism vs. collectivism, (2) independence vs. interdependence, (3) analytic vs. holistic cognition, (4) vertical vs. horizontal orientation, (5) tightness vs. looseness, and (6) strong vs. weak uncertainty avoidance. We plot the constructs on a chart to conceptually represent a common ground between cultural psychology and business research. We then review some representative empirical studies from the research fields of marketing and organizational studies which utilize at least one of these six constructs in their research frameworks. At the end of the paper, we recommend some future directions for further advancing collaboration with scholars in the field of marketing and organizational studies, while referring to theoretical and methodological issues.

The Parasitic Nature of Social AI: Sharing Minds with the Mindless

Can artificial intelligence (AI) develop the potential to be our partner, and will we be as sensitive to its social signals as we are to those of human beings? I examine both of these questions and how cultural psychology might add such questions to its research agenda. There are three areas in which I believe there is a need for both a better understanding and added perspective. First, I will present some important concepts and ideas from the world of AI that might be beneficial for pursuing research topics focused on AI within the cultural psychology research agenda. Second, there are some very interesting questions that must be answered with respect to central notions in cultural psychology as these are tested through human interactions with AI. Third, I claim that social robots are parasitic to deeply ingrained human social behaviour, in the sense that they exploit and feed upon processes and mechanisms that evolved for purposes that were originally completely alien to human-computer interactions.

Cultural Variation and Similarities in Cognitive Thinking Styles Versus Judgment Biases: A Review of Environmental Factors and Evolutionary Forces

Cultural psychological research has compellingly demonstrated that reliable East-West differences exist in basic cognitive styles: in contrast to the analytic, focal, linear thinking prevalent in the West, East Asians prefer to engage in more holistic, contextual, and intuitive thinking. However, despite the consensus on these cultural differences in thinking style, the literature on cross-cultural variation in actual cognitive biases is far more equivocal. The Fundamental Attribution Error (and by extension the Ultimate Attribution Error) has received the most attention among cognitive biases in the cultural arena; multiple studies have shown both evidence for cultural differences and evidence for universality. Similarly equivocal findings have emerged for other cognitive biases like the hindsight bias, positive illusions, and social exchange. Error Management Theory offers to reconcile this paradox of why consistent variation in thinking style do not necessarily lead to similarly consistent differences in cognitive biases; different mechanisms drive preferences (i.e., for how to think) versus actual behaviors (i.e., involving judgments/decisions). While different features of the physical environment likely gave rise to differences in preferences, pressures from the social environment likely pushed cognitive processing in common judgment tasks (like inferring another person’s mind or one’s own) in similar directions.

Human-Computer Interaction Problem in Learning: Could the Key Be Hidden Somewhere Between Social Interaction and Development of Tools?

Homo sapiens is not just a tool-using species, they also can invent and develop tools. This is the feature that distinguishes humans from other species. It is necessary to get rid of the perceptual dominance of the present state of the material to invent and develop a tool. It is based on a mental process: designing. So how was that possible? In this article, I propose an evolutionary hypothesis in response to this question: the referential triangle. Accordingly, the relationship that people establish with things is mentally indirect, but the relationship they establish with each other is mentally direct. The hypothesis claims that the mental solutions of people have naturally established with each other are also used to invent and develop tools. The latest and most interesting product of this mechanism is artificial intelligence. Because artificial intelligence also acts as an inorganic system. What distinguishes it from other machines in this context is its social behavior. Artificial intelligence can generate social signals. So can artificial intelligence be both a tool and a partner at the same time in the referential triangle established with the tools by the human? In other words, can children, for instance, socially interact with artificial intelligence, just as they do naturally with people around? The article draws attention to that this problem should be included in the cultural psychological research agenda.

The Parasitic Nature of Social AI: Sharing Minds with the Mindless

Can artificial intelligence (AI) develop the potential to be our partner, and will we be as sensitive to its social signals as we are to those of human beings? I examine both of these questions and how cultural psychology might add such questions to its research agenda. There are three areas in which I believe there is a need for both a better understanding and added perspective. First, I will present some important concepts and ideas from the world of AI that might be beneficial for pursuing research topics focused on AI within the cultural psychology research agenda. Second, there are some very interesting questions that must be answered with respect to central notions in cultural psychology as these are tested through human interactions with AI. Third, I claim that social robots are parasitic to deeply ingrained human social behaviour, in the sense that they exploit and feed upon processes and mechanisms that evolved for purposes that were originally completely alien to human-computer interactions.

Leaders in Interdependent Contexts Suppress Nonverbal Assertiveness: A Multilevel Analysis of Japanese University Club Leaders' and Members' Rank Signaling.

Previous research has shown that leadership is signaled through nonverbal assertiveness. However, those studies have been mostly conducted in individualistic cultural contexts, such as in the U.S. Here, we suggest that one important strategy for goal attainment in collectivistic cultures is for leaders to self-regulate their behaviors. Thus, contrary to the previous evidence from individualistic cultural contexts, in collectivistic cultural contexts, leaders might suppress nonverbal assertiveness. To test this possibility, we assessed nonverbal behaviors (NVB) of Japanese leaders and members, and how they were evaluated by observers. We recruited Japanese leaders and members of university clubs and video-recorded them while introducing their club. Then, we coded their nonverbal rank signaling behavior. Finally, we asked a new set of naïve observers to watch these video-clips and to judge targets' suitability for being possible club leaders. Results of a multilevel analysis (level 1: individual participants, level 2: clubs) suggested that the more the club culture focused on tasks (rather than relationships), the more likely were leaders (but not members) of those clubs to suppress their nonverbal assertiveness. Naïve observers judged individuals who restrained from emitting nonverbal assertiveness as being more suitable and worthy club leaders. Thus, our findings demonstrate the cultural fit between contextual effects at the collective level (i.e., cultural orientation of a group) and the signaling and perceiving of social ranks at the individual level (i.e., suppression of nonverbal assertiveness). We discuss the importance of studying the cultural fit between the collective reality that people inhabit and people's psychology for future research in cultural psychology.

Racism in the Structure of Everyday Worlds: A Cultural-Psychological Perspective

Theory and research in cultural psychology highlight the need to examine racism not only “in the head” but also “in the world.” Racism is often defined as individual prejudice, but racism is also systemic, existing in the advantages and disadvantages imprinted in cultural artifacts, ideological discourse, and institutional realities that work together with individual biases. In this review, we highlight examples of historically derived ideas and cultural patterns that maintain present-day racial inequalities. We discuss three key insights on the psychology of racism derived from utilizing a cultural-psychology framework. First, one can find racism embedded in our everyday worlds. Second, through our preferences and selections, we maintain racialized contexts in everyday action. Third, we inhabit cultural worlds that, in turn, promote racialized ways of seeing, being in, and acting in the world. This perspective directs attempts at intervention away from individual tendencies and instead focuses on changing the structures of mind in context that reflect and reproduce racial domination.

Becoming an athlete father: A media analysis of first time father tennis star Andy Murray and the implications for identity

Within sport psychology, little research on fathers has been done, with no research yet exploring the social construction of athlete father identities to learn more about gendered parental identities in sport. Building on media research within sport psychology, the present study sought to extend understanding of athlete father identities in a cultural context by examining how news media constructed one high profile athlete’s (i.e. tennis star Andy Murray) journey into new fatherhood in relation to identity. Ethnographic content analysis was used to explore Murray’s athlete and father identities as socio-cultural creations shaped by media narratives. Sixty stories from UK news media were collected between 1 December 2015 (two months prior to the birth of Murray’s daughter) and 31 December 2016 (the end of the 2016 tennis season), to explore Murray’s journey as a new father in relation to identity and athletic career. Eighty-seven images contextualised the meanings of news narratives. A central cultural narrative of involved fatherhood constructed two identities: the good father and the new and improved athlete father. These identities fed into multiple meanings of involved fatherhood and athletics. The meanings both affirmed and resisted gendered ideals in parenting and sport which had implications for athletic career. These findings extend cultural sport psychology research on the social construction of identity and previous media research on elite athlete mother identities into research on media representations of elite athlete fathers.

Gender Moderates the Influence of Self-Construal Priming on Fairness Considerations.

Research in social and cultural psychology has identified that self-construal, or the way the self is defined in relation to others, plays an important role in social decision-making processes. Yet it remains difficult to isolate the effect of self-construal in a comparative approach. Therefore, we used priming methodology in three studies to induce either an independent or interdependent mindset to test direct consequences on fairness considerations. Specifically, we asked whether participants would accept an unfair ultimatum game offer: a split of 10 euros, where the participant is allocated the marginal share of 3 and the proposer 7. If the participant refuses, neither gets paid. In the first study, we used the well-known similarities and differences prime. Here, activating an interdependent mindset decreased rejection of the unfair offer compared to the independent mindset and control condition, but only in females. The prime did not affect males. In the second and third study we modified our university's mission statement to instead include either independent or interdependent values. Females displayed a similar direction of effects; in males however, activating an interdependent mindset increased rejection. Taken together, the results show that whether participants accept or reject an unfair offer depends on both their gender and the self-construal prime. The results were interpreted using the distinction between relational independence that has been associated with females, and collective interdependence, that has been associated with males. Possible consequences for future studies are discussed.

I See Myself through My Avatar: Evidence from East Asia and North America for Acculturated Effects on Virtual Representation Preference

In the present research we argue that avatars, as identity containers, can mirror people’s self-concepts. Research in cultural psychology suggests that East Asians tend to be more tolerant of contradictions and that they more easily adjust their self-concepts in accordance with changing contexts compared to North Americans (see Heine 2001). We therefore assume that preferred forms of avatars among East Asians and North Americans are different because of this self-concept variability across cultures. We conducted a quasi-experiment to explore how people in the two cultures differently evaluate two forms of avatars, human-like and cartoon-like avatars, in terms of likeability and preference. We found that East Asians rated cartoon-like avatars more favourably than North Americans. Moreover, compared to North Americans, East Asians preferred cartoon-like avatars to human-like avatars for their hypothetical avatars to play games. We conclude by discussing implications for future research.

Beyond Whom and When

In the target article, Gelfand and Harrington have outlined three important motivations concerning when and for whom descriptive norms (i.e., personal cognition about what people do) guide behavior. The effects of these motivations likely vary substantially across and even within cultures, as informed by research in cultural psychology. In this commentary, we will discuss how power and residential mobility may moderate the effects of norms on social behaviors, within and across cultures.

Gulliver's Eggs: Why Methods are not an Issue of Qualitative Research in Cultural Psychology.

The future of qualitative methods regards the kind of object cultural psychology is interested and the kind of questions it can ask. I propose that the object should be experiencing, understood as a complex whole, consisting of lived-by action and counter-action, that is contextual inter-action with the world in the form of an experiencing subject and otherness. The kind of questions cultural psychology can ask is instead related to the epistemological status attributed to both researcher and participant. Probably few scholars such as Vygotsky, Piaget and Lewin understood to what extent experiencing is always changing, because the relationship between mind, alterity and culture is co-generative. This also implies a relativization and a decentralization of the psychology's perspective. Finally, I provide some examples from the history of psychology and some suggestions to work at the level of such complexity by using methods that can work with complex objects such as products of human activity (e.g., art, literature, architecture, etc.).

Getting something out of nothing: Analyzing patterns of null responses to improve data collection methods in sub-Saharan Africa

Careful development and adaptation of assessments are imperative for cultural psychological research. However, despite the best efforts, the use of assessments in new contexts can reveal atypical and/or unexpected patterns of performance. We found this to be the case in the testing of assessments to be used for a larger investigation of Specific Reading Disabilities in Zambia. In a sample of 207 children (100 female) from grades 2 to 7, we illustrated that assessment characteristics (i.e., stimulus type, answer choice, and response type) differentially impact patterns of responsiveness. The number of missing values was the highest for assessments that (1) used written stimuli, (2) had an open-ended answer choice, and (3) required an action response. Age and socio-economic status explained some of the variance in responsiveness in selected, but not all assessments. Consideration of the impact of stimulus and response types when adapting assessments cross-linguistically and cross-culturally is essential.