Introduction to Cross-Cultural Psychology
Senior 6 · Psychology (Languages)
Introduction to Cross-Cultural Psychology
Lesson 3 of 4
25 min
English has one basic word for blue. Russian has two: goluboy for light blue and siniy for dark blue, and Russian speakers treat them as different colours, as English speakers treat pink and red. In 2007 Jonathan Winawer and colleagues showed Russian and English speakers three blue squares and asked which of the bottom two matched the top one. Russian speakers were faster when the two bottom squares fell on opposite sides of the goluboy–siniy boundary; English speakers showed no such advantage. When Russian speakers had to silently rehearse a string of numbers during the task, which keeps the language system busy, the advantage disappeared.
So the words a language offers seem to change, slightly and in the moment, how quickly its speakers tell colours apart. Does the language you speak shape how you think? And what happens to people, and to identity, when they live in several languages at once, as most Rwandans do?
Definition
Linguistic relativity: the idea that the language a person speaks influences how they perceive and think about the world. The strong version (linguistic determinism) says language fixes thought; the weak version says it nudges it. It is often called the Sapir–Whorf hypothesis.
Multilingualism: the use of more than one language by an individual or a society.
Code-switching: moving between two or more languages within one conversation.
Ethnocentrism: judging other cultures by the standards of one’s own, usually assuming one’s own is the norm or the best. Cultural relativism: trying to understand a practice in terms of the culture it belongs to.
Culture shock: the stress and disorientation people may feel when they move into an unfamiliar culture.
| Study | Finding | Status |
|---|---|---|
| Russian blues (Winawer and colleagues, 2007) | Two colour words speed up discrimination across the boundary. | Supports the weak version; the effect is small and disappears when language is kept busy. |
| Kuuk Thaayorre (Boroditsky and Gaby, 2010) | Speakers of this Australian Aboriginal language describe space by compass directions (“the cup is north of the plate”) and arranged picture sequences of time from east to west, whichever way they faced. | Supports the weak version; a single small community. |
| Mandarin and vertical time (Boroditsky, 2001) | Mandarin speakers were reported to think of time as vertical. | Later attempts (January and Kako, 2007; Chen, 2007) failed to replicate it. |
Most researchers now reject the strong version: people can think about things their language has no word for, and they can always invent words. The evidence supports a weak, measurable influence of language on attention, memory and speed.
Language carries identity: it signals where you are from, which groups you belong to and sometimes your social status (Unit 2). Bilinguals often report feeling like “a slightly different person” in each language. Nairán Ramírez-Esparza and colleagues (2006) gave Spanish–English bilinguals in the United States and Mexico the same personality questionnaire in each language. In English they described themselves as more extraverted, agreeable and conscientious than in Spanish, matching cultural differences between the two groups of monolingual speakers. This is called cultural frame switching: each language calls up the cultural norms that go with it. The psycholinguist François Grosjean puts it simply: a bilingual is not two monolinguals in one person.
Rwanda has four official languages: Kinyarwanda, the national language spoken by almost all Rwandans; English and French; and Kiswahili, made official in 2017. In 2008 the government decided that English would replace French as the main medium of instruction in schools. Many Rwandans therefore live in several languages each day: Kinyarwanda at home, English at school, Kiswahili at the market or across the border, French with older relatives or in church. Psychologically this raises questions you will meet again in Units 5 and 6: how languages are stored and kept apart in the brain, and whether switching between them helps or costs learners.
Cross-cultural misunderstandings usually follow a pattern: a person observes unfamiliar behaviour, interprets it through their own culture’s rules, makes a dispositional attribution (“he is rude”, “she is lazy”), and that attribution, repeated, becomes a stereotype about the whole group. Ethnocentrism makes this more likely; cultural relativism and asking, rather than assuming, make it less likely.
Moving to a new culture is often described with a U-curve: a happy “honeymoon”, then a crisis, then recovery and adjustment (Lysgaard, 1955; Oberg, 1960). But when Colleen Ward and colleagues (1998) followed Japanese students in New Zealand over their first year, difficulties were greatest at arrival and fell steadily, with no honeymoon.
Figure 1. The famous U-curve and the pattern Ward and colleagues actually found.
TED: “How Language Shapes the Way We Think”, Lera Boroditsky. Listen for the Kuuk Thaayorre example and for her claims about colour, and compare them with the replication evidence in this lesson.
Important
Evaluate linguistic relativity research. The best studies, like Winawer’s, use objective measures (reaction times) and controls (verbal interference) rather than asking people what they think. Even so, effects are small and short-lived, and some well-known claims, such as vertical time in Mandarin, failed to replicate. Popular talks sometimes present the strong version as fact; an A-level answer should separate the weak, supported claim from the strong, rejected one. Similarly, the U-curve of culture shock is widely taught but rests on weaker evidence than its popularity suggests.
Warning
Common mistake: writing that people cannot see a colour or understand an idea if their language has no word for it. That is the strong version of the hypothesis, which the evidence does not support.
Tip
Memory hook: the weak version “nudges”, the strong version “locks”. Evidence supports the nudge, not the lock.
Practice
Sources and credits
Written by Ganzaa: the text, the table, Figure 1 and the exercises.
