Introduction to Cross-Cultural Psychology
Senior 6 · Psychology (Languages)
Introduction to Cross-Cultural Psychology
Lesson 1 of 4
25 min
Figure 1. The Müller-Lyer illusion. Measure the two shafts with a ruler.
Most people who grew up in cities say Line B is longer, although the two are identical. In the early 1960s Marshall Segall, Donald Campbell and Melville Herskovits showed this figure and others to nearly 2,000 people in more than a dozen societies in Africa, the Philippines and the United States. Samples from American and European cities were the most fooled. Some groups, such as San foragers in the Kalahari, were fooled much less. The researchers suggested a carpentered-world explanation: people raised among rectangular buildings learn to read angled lines as corners seen in depth.
Whatever the explanation (later researchers have debated it), the finding raised an uncomfortable question. If even the way we see two lines can differ between groups, how much of what psychology textbooks call “human nature” is really the nature of people from one kind of society?
Definition
Culture: the shared beliefs, values, norms, practices, language and objects of a group, learned and passed from one generation to the next. Geert Hofstede called it “the collective programming of the mind”.
Cross-cultural psychology: the study of similarities and differences in behaviour and mental processes across cultural groups, and of how culture shapes them.
WEIRD: Western, Educated, Industrialised, Rich and Democratic; a label for the kind of societies most psychology participants have come from.
Etic approach: comparing cultures on concepts assumed to apply everywhere. Emic approach: studying a culture from the inside, using its own concepts.
In 2010 Joseph Henrich, Steven Heine and Ara Norenzayan reported that about 96% of participants in studies published in leading psychology journals came from Western industrialised countries, which hold only about 12% of the world’s population. They showed that on several measures, from visual illusions to fairness in economic games, WEIRD participants were often unusual compared with the rest of humanity. Cross-cultural psychology tests whether a finding is universal before it is presented as a fact about “people”.
The anthropologist Edward Hall compared culture to an iceberg. What can be seen above the water (dress, food, music, dance, festivals, language) is a small part. Below the waterline lie values, beliefs, ideas about time, respect, family roles and what counts as polite, which are learned so early that people treat them as simply “normal”.
Between 1967 and 1973 Geert Hofstede analysed more than 100,000 questionnaires from employees of the computer company IBM in over 50 countries. He identified dimensions on which national cultures differ; later work added two more.
| Dimension | Question it asks | How it shows in behaviour |
|---|---|---|
| Power distance | How far do less powerful people accept that power is unequally shared? | Where it is high, students rarely question a teacher in public. |
| Individualism vs collectivism | Do people see themselves first as individuals or as members of groups? | Collectivist: decisions about study or marriage involve the family. |
| Masculinity vs femininity (now often called achievement vs caring orientation) | Is success measured by competition and achievement, or by care and quality of life? | Whether ambition or modesty is praised at school. |
| Uncertainty avoidance | How uncomfortable are people with ambiguity? | Where it is high, people prefer clear rules and fixed timetables. |
| Long-term vs short-term orientation | Is the focus on future rewards or on tradition and the present? | Saving and persistence versus quick results. |
| Indulgence vs restraint | How freely may people enjoy life and have fun? | Attitudes to leisure and to showing happiness in public. |
Do dimensions predict behaviour? Rod Bond and Peter Smith (1996) combined 133 studies using Asch’s line-judging task in 17 countries. Conformity was higher in more collectivist countries, and in the United States it had fallen since the 1950s, which shows that culture changes over time too.
“10 minutes with Geert Hofstede on Power Distance”. Hofstede himself explains the dimension; note one example he gives of how power distance shows in families or schools.
Important
Evaluate the dimensions approach. Hofstede’s work gave psychologists a simple, testable way to compare cultures, and dimensions such as individualism–collectivism predict behaviour in many studies. But his data came from one company’s employees, mostly men, collected more than fifty years ago; a nation is not the same as a culture (urban and rural Rwandans, or older and younger generations, may differ more than two countries do); and a national score says nothing certain about any individual. His original data did not include Rwanda separately. Use dimensions as broad tendencies, never as labels for people.
Warning
Common mistake: writing “Rwandans are collectivist, so every Rwandan puts the group first.” A dimension describes an average tendency in a population. Applying it to an individual is a stereotype, the subject of a later lesson.
Tip
Memory hook for Hofstede: “People In Many Units Look Inward”: Power distance, Individualism, Masculinity, Uncertainty avoidance, Long-term orientation, Indulgence.
Practice
Sources and credits
Written by Ganzaa: the text, the table, Figure 1 and the exercises.
