PSYCHOLOGY AND CULTURE

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Key Words cross-cultural differences in social cognition, cultural emergence

Abstract Psychological processes influence culture. Culture influences psychological processes. Individual thoughts and actions influence cultural norms and practices as they evolve over time, and these cultural norms and practices influence the thoughts and actions of individuals. Large bodies of literature support these conclusions within the context of research on evolutionary processes, epistemic needs, interpersonal communication, attention, perception, attributional thinking, self-regulation, human agency, self-worth, and contextual activation of cultural paradigms. Cross-cultural research has greatly enriched psychology, and key issues for continued growth and maturation of the field of cultural psychology are articulated.

INTRODUCTION

The relations between psychology and culture are multifaceted and dynamic, so inquiry into cultural psychology takes many distinct forms. Much recent research in cultural psychology focuses on cross-cultural comparisons. The past several years have witnessed an explosion of research on differences between East Asians and European North Americans in such areas as perception, thinking, and self-concept (e.g., Heine et al. 1999, Masuda & Nisbett 2001, Nisbett et al. 2001). Other recent research focuses on the situation-specific activation of cultural schemata (e.g., Hong et al. 2000). Still other lines of recent work focus on the psychological processes that contribute to origins of cultures and persistence of cultural information. This latter research, for example, reveals how distinct cultural populations emerge as the consequence of interpersonal communication and social influence (e.g., Harton & Bourgeois 2004). Each of these avenues of research contributes to our understanding of psychology and culture, yet oddly up until now they have not been considered together.

GOALS OF THIS REVIEW

With these observations in mind, we have three major goals for this review. One goal is to provide a faithful, albeit selective, review of recent research in cultural psychology. We had to omit considerable detail on topics that have already been reviewed thoroughly in other recently published papers, of which there are many, especially on cross-cultural differences (e.g., Choi et al. 1999, Diener et al. 2003, Fiske et al. 1998, Heine et al. 1999, Nisbett & Norenzayan 2002, Nisbett et al. 2001, Triandis & Suh 2002). We devote more space to topics that have not been so thoroughly reviewed as of late.

A second goal is to consider together two substantial bodies...