As noted in Chapter 1, there is much more to a cross-cultural study than collecting data in two countries and comparing the results. Long ago Campbell (1970) warned that two-group comparisons usually are not interpretable: there are too many factors to which an observed difference can be attributed, including a lack of equivalence (cultural bias). In various chapters in Part I we have seen examples of competing interpretations of differences in behaviors across cultures. In the present chapter the scope for interpretation of cross-cultural data will be explored further. Both “culture” and “behavior” are somewhat abstract and diffuse concepts that are not accessible to scientific analysis without further specification. The process of specification is guided by the methods and research questions that are selected by researchers as well as by their theoretical and metatheoretical orientations. Usually method and theory are linked and this is the reason why we have combined them in the present chapter.

The first three sections refer back to the three themes and associated theoretical positions that we outlined in Chapter 1. In the first section we elaborate on the distinction between culture as external context and culture as internal to the person (internal context).

This appendix contains short answers to those footnotes that are in the form of a question. They have been deliberately placed away from the questions so as to encourage the reader to formulate their own response, as they would be expected to do in a supervision or tutorial, before seeking confirmation. It should be remembered that the questions, typically requiring only brief answers, are normally designed to test whether a particular point in the main text, which may in itself be a relatively small one, has been correctly grasped. Thus some answers may seem trivial to the reader – if they do, so much the better!

Within cross-cultural psychology it is important to understand the biological, as well as the cultural, bases of behavior. The focus is usually on the sociocultural environment and how it interacts with behavior; this may lead to an unbalanced view. Despite this joint importance, biological aspects are still emphasized rather rarely. Often, biology and culture are seen as opposites; what is labeled as cultural is not biological and what is labeled as biological is not cultural. As we mentioned in Chapter 1, and will describe in more detail here, the two are intricately related in a non-dichotomous way. In the ecocultural framework presented in Figure 1.1 we have included biological adaptation and genetic transmission among the concepts that have to be taken into consideration in cross-cultural psychology. For the understanding of behavior, its similarities as well as its cultural variations, the study of the biological basis is as essential as the analysis of sociocultural context.

In the first and second sections of this chapter we give a brief overview of some core concepts of the Darwinian theory of natural and sexual selection. The third section deals with evolutionary-based theories and methods to study animal and human behavior.

The field of anthropology is extremely varied, ranging from cultural and social anthropology, to biological and physical anthropology, and to linguistic and psychological anthropology. In this chapter, we emphasize cultural and social anthropology because it has provided a substantial foundation for cross-cultural psychology. However, some of the other fields of the discipline are considered in Chapters 8 and 11.

The core concept of culture has been part of psychology for over a century. The work of Rivers (1901) on perception in New Guinea and of Wundt (1913) on Völkerpsychologie were in essence examinations of how culture and behavior are related. More recently the concept of culture was identified as one of the core ideas in the history of international psychology (Pawlik and d'Ydewalle, 2006), and was portrayed there by Berry and Triandis (2006).

The term “culture” has appeared frequently in earlier chapters, with the general meaning provided in Chapter 1: “the shared way of life of a group of people.” Also in Chapter 1, we outlined three themes which are intimately rooted in the concept of culture: culture as internal or external to the person (where culture can be found and studied); relativism–universalism (whether people from different cultures can be validly compared); and the psychological organization of cultural differences (whether culture can serve as a way of drawing behavior together into general patterns).

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.

All scientists will know the importance of experiment and observation and, equally, be aware that the results of some experiments depend to a degree on chance. For example, in an experiment to measure the heights of a random sample of people, we would not be in the least surprised if all the heights were found to be different; but, if the experiment were repeated often enough, we would expect to find some sort of regularity in the results. Statistics, which is the subject of the following chapter, is concerned with the analysis of real experimental data of this sort. In this chapter, however, we discuss probability, which, to a pure mathematician, is an entirely theoretical subject based on axioms and deductions from them. Although this axiomatic approach to probability is important, and we discuss it briefly, a treatment more in keeping with its eventual applications in statistics is adopted here.

We first discuss the terminology required, with particular reference to the convenient graphical representation of experimental results as Venn diagrams. The concepts of random variables and distributions of random variables are then introduced. It is here that the connection with statistics is made; we assert that the results of many experiments are random variables and that those results have some sort of regularity, which is represented by a distribution.

Differential equations are the group of equations that contain derivatives. Chapters 6–11 discuss a variety of differential equations, starting in this chapter with those ordinary differential equations (ODEs) that have closed-form solutions. As its name suggests, an ODE contains only ordinary derivatives (no partial derivatives) and describes the relationship between these derivatives of the dependent variable, usually called y, with respect to the independent variable, usually called x. The solution to such an ODE is therefore a function of x and is written y(x). For an ODE to have a closed-form solution, it must be possible to express y(x) in terms of the standard elementary functions such as x2, exp x, ln x, sin x, etc. The solutions of some differential equations cannot, however, be written in closed form, but only as an infinite series that carry no special names; these are discussed in Chapter 7.

Ordinary differential equations may be separated conveniently into different categories according to their general characteristics. The primary grouping adopted here is by the order of the equation. The order of an ODE is simply the order of the highest derivative it contains. Thus equations containing dy/dx, but no higher derivatives, are called first order, those containing d2y/dx2 are called second order and so on.

Ordinary differential equations may be classified further according to degree. The degree of an ODE is the power to which the highest-order derivative is raised, after the equation has been rationalized to contain only integer powers of derivatives.

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.