Cultural psychology

Summary

Cultural psychology is the study of how cultures reflect and shape their members' psychological processes. It is based on the premise that the mind and culture are inseparable and mutually constitutive. This means that people are shaped by their culture and their culture is also shaped by them. Cultural psychology aims to define culture, its nature, and its function, specifically concerning psychological phenomena. Gerd Baumann argues: "Culture is not a real thing, but an abstract analytical notion. In itself, it does not cause behavior but abstracts from it. It is thus neither normative nor predictive but a heuristic means towards explaining how people understand and act upon the world." As Richard Shweder, one of the major proponents of the field, writes, "Cultural psychology is the study of how cultural traditions and social practices regulate, express, and transform the human psyche. This results less in psychic unity for humankind than in ethnic divergences in mind, self, and emotion." Yoshihisa Kashima talks about cultural psychology in two senses, as a tradition and as a movement that emerged in the late 20th century. Cultural psychology as a tradition is traced back to Western Romanticism in the 19th century. Giambatista Vico and Herder are seen as important early inspirations in thinking about the influence of culture on people. Its institutional origin started with the publication of the Zeitschrift für Völkerpsychologie und Sprachwissenschaft, first published in 1860. Wundt took this concept and his volume on Völkerpsychologie is one of the earliest accounts of a cultural perspective within the discipline of psychology. He saw Völkerpsychologie as a cultural-developmental discipline that studied higher psychological processes in their social context. The proposed methods were comparative and historical analyses. Another early cultural framework is cultural-historical psychology which emerged in the 1920s. It is mostly associated with the Russian psychologists Vygotsky, Luria and Leont'ev.