Cross-Cultural Psychology Research and Applications

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).