A longstanding and fundamental interest of cross-cultural psychology has been the application of the findings of the field to the improvement of both the life circumstances and the quality of life of people everywhere. While the chapters in Part III introduce several new topics of human behavior, they also build upon and apply the findings that were outlined in the first two parts of the book. In a world of increasing interconnections among cultural populations, the three related phenomena of acculturation, intercultural relations and intercultural communication have become substantial parts of the field. The application of research from these domains aims to improve the personal and collective outcomes of such global contact, and to avoid the conflicts that can so often result. Psychology has long been a contributor to the two basic institutions of work and health within cultures. The cross-cultural contribution has been to establish both cultural variations and some basic commonalities that allow international organizations to better understand and serve people in their areas of activity. In a final chapter, we examine ways to promote psychology as a culturally appropriate discipline, where all concepts, methods, findings and applications take the various cultural contexts and meanings into account. Our goal is to encourage psychology to draw upon all the materials that are now available from cross-cultural psychology (and that are sampled in this book), and to promote their inclusion in the scientific and professional training of psychologists and in the daily work that they carry out.

When seeking to understand and explain human behavior across differing populations, there is a need to be informed by concepts and findings from two disciplines beyond psychology that have influenced the development of cross-cultural psychology. First, cultural anthropology has contributed the concept of culture and the ethnographic methods used to study cultural phenomena. It has also examined relationships between culture and behavior, developing its own subdisciplines of psychological anthropology and cognitive anthropology. Second, human biology has also provided important concepts and methods for examining the development and display of behavior in varying contexts. This contribution has been especially important with the rise of the field of evolutionary biology in recent years. Taken together, these two disciplines provide a basis for our claim to be both a cultural science and a natural science. In addition to the conceptual and methodological contributions from these two cognate disciplines, cross-cultural psychology has developed a range of theoretical and practical ways to examine the relationships between context and behavior. The three perspectives presented in the first chapter of the book (culture comparative, cultural and indigenous) are further examined and elaborated. Some basic methodological requirements for making valid comparisons of data from different cultural populations are also explained. These theoretical and methodological principles are necessary in order to take into account both individual and group differences, and to provide the basis for the comparative search for psychological universals.

The earlier editions of this text (Berry, Poortinga, Segall and Dasen, 1992, 2002 were accompanied by another textbook written by the same four authors: Human behavior in global perspective: An introduction to cross-cultural psychology (Segall, Dasen, Berry and Poortinga, 1990, 1999). That text was intended to meet the needs of students who had little prior exposure to psychology or anthropology. However, for the third edition of the present text, there is no longer a parallel book to present these complementary materials. As a result, some of the issues and findings from this other text have been reflected into this edition.

Since the publication of the first edition of this textbook in 1992 (and of the second edition in 2002), there has been massive growth and diversification in the examination of the relationships between cultural and behavioral phenomena. There has been substantial growth in the comparative examination of culture–behavior relationships, which has been traditionally known as cross-cultural psychology. Some other developments have focussed on these relationships within cultures, where the concept of cultural psychology has been resurrected and redefined. Another development has been the rise of interest in indigenous psychology, where local, culturally important perspectives on the study of behavior have been advanced. A third development has been the concern with issues of cultural diversity in many culturally plural societies.

Conventional wisdom would have it that cross-cultural differences in perception are of minor significance. The universal similarities in the anatomy and the physiology of the sensory organs and the nervous system make it likely that sensory impressions and their transmission through the perceptual apparatus are invariant across cultures. In this chapter we shall show that while there are common processes in sensation and perception, there are substantial differences in the outcomes of these processes, and that there can be cross-cultural differences even in the way very simple figures are being perceived. This chapter reviews research mainly from a period before cross-cultural psychology became focussed on sociocultural variables. As argued in Chapter 1, we consider the ecological environment as an important aspect of human functioning in context; we see the topics discussed in this chapter as important for understanding human behavior and its ecocultural and sociocultural variations.

The first section gives a brief review of historical roots of contemporary cross-cultural psychology of perception. This is followed by a section on studies of sensory functions. Then we turn to perception in a more strict sense. When contrasted with sensation, perception implies stimulus selection and other forms of active engagement of the organism. Extensive research, mainly conducted in the 1960s and 1970s, concerns the perception of patterns and pictures.

Cross-cultural research on work and organizations is a large and active field that cannot be represented in scope and depth within a single chapter. We have selected topics with a clear history of cross-cultural psychological research. Several other topics could have been included (e.g., Bhagat and Steers, 2009; Gelfand, Erez and Aycan, 2007; Smith, Peterson and Thomas, 2008). Still, this chapter should provide you with an overview of major topics in cross-cultural research on work and organizations.

This chapter is organized in a hierarchical fashion from countries via organizations to individual-level variables. The first section discusses structural characteristics of organizations as they are found in various societies. The second section deals with organizational culture, which is based on the presumption that a work organization can be conceived of as a culture, on a smaller scale but otherwise in a similar sense as a societal culture. Next to organizational culture a more psychological concept is mentioned, namely organizational climate. The third section deals with values, a widely studied topic not only in cross-cultural organizational research, but also in the business and management literature. Although values are essentially psychological characteristics of individuals, much research has also dealt with values at the levels of countries (see Chapter 4), and work organizations. The fourth section focusses on managers, who are central to the functioning of work organizations.

Personality research is concerned with feelings, thoughts and behaviors that are typical of a person and distinguish that person from others. Personality in this sense is the outcome of a lifelong process of interaction between an organism and the ecocultural and sociocultural environment. The effects of these external factors make it likely that there are systematic differences in the person-typical behavior of people who have been brought up in different cultures. Thus, it is not surprising that many traditions in personality research have been extended cross-culturally.

A dominant theme in personality research concerns the question of how person-typical behavior can be explained in terms of more permanent psychological dispositions, and what could be the nature of such dispositions. A global distinction can be made between psychodynamic theories, trait theories and social-cognitive theories. The psychodynamic tradition which has the oldest and widest roots is presented on the Internet with Chapter 10 (Additional Topics, Chapter 10). Most research in this tradition, which goes by the name of psychological anthropology (formerly called culture-and-personality), has been carried out by cultural anthropologists with a psychoanalytic orientation.

In this chapter we first discuss research on relatively stable characteristics, referred to as personality traits. In trait theories the emphasis is on individual dispositions that are consistent across time and situations.

In the ecocultural framework (Figure 1.1), two major sources of influence on the development and display of behavior were postulated: ecological and sociopolitical. The latter involves contact with other cultures and sets in motion the process of acculturation. This chapter examines some core aspects of this process and some of its outcomes. Related to acculturation psychology is a field that has come to be known as intercultural psychology. These two branches of psychology are sometimes examined together because they both involve intercultural contact. However, they are clearly distinguishable: in acculturation, the focus is on how individuals change in order to live side by side with persons of different cultural backgrounds; and in intercultural work the focus is on how the two parties relate to each other. We are devoting separate chapters to these issues. In Chapter 14, intercultural relations are examined, and a further chapter (Chapter 15) is devoted to an important aspect of both acculturation and intercultural psychologies: intercultural communication.

In this chapter, we will first discuss the concept of acculturation and the different kinds of people undergoing acculturation. We also present a framework for understanding and studying acculturation.

This chapter focusses on health in relation to cultural context. It begins with an introduction to some conceptual issues including some definitions of central terms, how health problems can be compared, and a brief overview over how culture and health may be related. The chapter also examines possible links between culture and mental illness (psychopathologies), and how different societies attempt to relieve mental health suffering and problems (psychotherapies). The chapter also focusses on positive mental health, health behavior from the point of view of the United Nations Millennium Development Goals and how ecology and population may be related to health.

Health has been defined by the World Health Organization (WHO) as “a state of complete physical, mental and social well-being, and not just the absence of disease or infirmity” (WHO, 1948). However, studies have shown that the very concept of health differs across cultures (Helman, 2008). From a western point of view, health is often conceptualized in a biomedical model, where health is seen in terms of disease. Disease in turn is seen as originating from a specific and identifiable cause within, or arriving from outside, the body. Views from other cultures regard health as an imbalance either between negative (yin) and positive (yang) forces as in the case of Chinese medicine, or elemental ingredients (bhutas) and waste products from food (vayu, pitta and kaph) in Indian Ayurvedic medicine.

This chapter seeks to portray comparative research and applications in the field of intercultural relations. It begins with an examination of the concept of intercultural strategies, which is parallel to that of acculturation strategies introduced in Chapter 13. One of these strategies (multiculturalism) is both contested theoretically and examined empirically; some of these ideas and findings are then presented. The chapter continues with a presentation of some core theories and concepts, and illustrates them with selected research and applications across cultures.

The study of intercultural relations can be viewed as a core part of cross-cultural psychology. It shares with the subfield of acculturation a focus on psychological phenomena that result from contact among cultural groups and their individual members. And like acculturation, intercultural relations research examines the ways in which people work out their lives while living together in culturally plural societies (Brewer, 2007; Sam and Berry, 2006; Ward, 2008). The various kinds of groups that share social space in plural societies have been described in Chapter 13 (including immigrants, refugees, ethnocultural groups, sojouners and indigenous peoples). However, somewhat different from acculturation, intercultural relations phenomena can take place without firsthand contact; they can be rooted in awareness from prior historical contact or from contemporary telecommunications.

The field of cross-cultural psychology can be briefly described as the study of the relationships between cultural context and human behavior. The latter includes both overt behavior (observable actions and responses) and covert behavior (thoughts, beliefs, meanings). As we shall discuss later in more detail, there are rather different interpretations even of this broad description, associated with different schools of scientific research. Most researchers studying behavior across cultures argue that differences in overt and covert behavior should be seen as culturally shaped reflections of common psychological functions and processes. In other words, they are postulating a “psychic unity” of the human species (e.g., Jahoda, 1992). This is the position adopted by the authors of this text. Other researchers, often belonging to a school referred to as cultural psychology, emphasize that psychological functioning is essentially different across cultural regions of the world. For example, Kitayama, Duffy and Uchida (2007, p. 139) argue that different “modes of being” are found in various cultures. Sometimes the two approaches are even presented as two distinct fields of science.

In this book we use the label “cross-cultural psychology” as the overarching name for the field. More specific terms, such as cultural psychology, culture-comparative psychology and indigenous psychology will be used when it is necessary to distinguish orientations within this broader field. The common designation is justified by the shared assumption that culture is an important contributor to the development and display of human behavior.

With an initial knowledge of the goals, concepts and methods of cross-cultural psychology that were presented in the introductory chapter, this first part of the book seeks to display research findings on the range of psychological domains that have been examined across cultures. The background materials of Chapter 1 should provide the reader with some basis for understanding and critically appraising the research being described in Part I. The order of the chapters has been arranged to begin with a portrayal of human development in infancy and childhood, then continuing into adulthood and older age. The six chapters that follow present some of the core findings from some decades of research into social behavior, personality, cognition, emotion, language and perception. This sequence of topics attempts to illustrate the varying degree of cultural influences on the display of human behavior. In keeping with the perspective of moderate universalism mentioned in Chapter 1, there is a search for cultural variation in development and display of behavior, as well as for possible commonalities in the underlying psychological processes.

This chapter deals with what has become the most popular research domain in cross-cultural psychology, namely that of social behavior. We start the chapter by discussing various ideas about the relationships between social context and social behavior that have been put forward in cross-cultural psychology and adjacent fields. This is to give you a taste of the breadth of the field and to put the next section in perspective. We then move to the topic of values, which is arguably the dominant topic in contemporary cross-cultural studies of social behavior. After this, we discuss studies on cultural differences in social cognition and behavior as well as their implications for universality or relativism of social psychological phenomena. The last section deals with different notions of culture as a social psychological construct. We end the chapter with a general discussion. In addition, on the Internet you can find a section on the important, but somewhat understudied area of cultural variation in gender differences in social behavior (Additional Topics, Chapter 4).

If you take at random a recent publication of a cross-cultural study, it is most likely to be about social perception, cognition or behavior. This has not always been the case. In the early days of cross-cultural psychology, studies in perception and cognition were much more frequent.

This chapter begins Part II of the book, in which we explore quantum computation in detail. The chapter develops the fundamental principles of quantum computation, and establishes the basic building blocks for quantum circuits, a universal language for describing sophisticated quantum computations. The two fundamental quantum algorithms known to date are constructed from these circuits in the following two chapters. Chapter 5 presents the quantum Fourier transform and its applications to phase estimation, order-finding and factoring. Chapter 6 describes the quantum search algorithm, and its applications to database search, counting and speedup of solutions to NP-complete problems. Chapter 7 concludes Part II with a discussion of how quantum computation may one day be experimentally realized. Two other topics of great interest for quantum computation, quantum noise and quantum error-correction, are deferred until Part III of the book, in view of their wide interest also outside quantum computation.