CONCLUSIONS ON THE IMPORTANCE OF THE SOCIOCULTURAL CONTEXT We asserted in Chapter 1 that, to understand human behavior, it must be viewed in the sociocultural context in which it occurs. Having examined a variety of psychological topics, we can now ask whether we have demonstrated the validity of this assertion. By revisiting the Ecocultural Framework employed in this book, we can better appreciate how attending to the sociocultural context was repeatedly shown to be essential to the discipline of psychology. The Ecocultural Framework Revisited Illustrated in Figure 2.1 in Chapter 2, the ecocultural framework encompasses the processes of socialization and enculturation, to which we refer repeatedly in this book, as well as the concept of developmental niche, which we used in describing how early childhood development is environmentally influenced. In addition, the framework includes the process of acculturation, which was treated in detail in Chapter 11. The framework reminds us that culture (or the “man-made” part of the environment) is not all that matters. So does the natural environment, which shapes human behavior both indirectly (that is, through culture) and directly, as when ecological factors relate to biological characteristics of populations. The framework suggests that ecology influences cognitive behavior indirectly in ways illustrated in several chapters. The work linking the ecocultural context (degree of food accumulation) to cognitive style and cognitive development is particularly illustrative of the connections that are explicit in the framework. Berry’s research on Witkin’s psychological differentiation also illustrates the dynamic interaction 12 ISBN: 0-536-32545-6 Human Behavior in Global Perspective: An Introduction to Cross-Cultural Psychology, Second Edition, by Marshall H. Segall, Pierre R. Dasen, John W. Berry, and Ype Poortinga. Copyright © 1999, 1990 by Allyn and Bacon. A Peason Education Company. Conclusions 325 between theory building and empirical research. While Berry’s (1966) initial research design was based on an early version of the ecocultural framework, it evolved as a consequence of empirical findings into the version used in this book. While it was once thought that Witkin’s theory might be universal (Berry, 1976a; Witkin & Berry, 1975), it is now obvious that a cultural adaptation of the theory is needed (Berry, van de Koppel, Sénéchal, Annis, Bahuchet, Cavalli-Sforza, & Witkin, 1987; Mishra, Sinha, & Berry, 1996). This requires more research on the socialization practices that mediate the influence of group-level variables on individual cognitive functioning. The same observation holds for cultural differences in the development of concrete operations (Piaget, 1966) in the domains of quantification and space, reviewed in Chapter 5. Future research needs to document more fully the developmental niche, i.e., the social contexts, the childrearing practices, and the parental ethnotheories, that are relevant to cognitive development. We covered some of the research that provides this kind of documentation, but clearly more such research is needed. A research program that covers all aspects of the sequence portrayed in the ecocultural framework is still lacking. Only Berry’s long-term research program on psychological differentiation with individual subjects comes close to a complete design, although, as noted above, the socialization component requires more research. In Chapter 3, we related the ecocultural framework to the ideas inherent in the developmental niche and showed how both physical and social settings influence childrearing patterns. Starting with climate as the ecological constraint, Whiting (1981) was able to show that infant-carrying practices are related to the mean temperature during the coldest months of the year. Carrying infants in cradles predominates in cold climates, carrying them on the body (using arms, a sling, or a piece of clothing) is significantly more frequent in warm climates. The latter carrying technique is linked to other childrearing practices, such as the sleeping arrangement (the infant sleeps near the mother at night), the postpartum taboo (the rule of avoiding sexual intercourse for some months after the birth of a child), and late weaning, all of which contribute to a close infant–mother body contact and the predominance of female role models. We also saw in Chapter 9 how these features of childrearing practices may lead to a feminine sex identity, which, under some circumstances, may lead to problematic compensatory aggressive behavior in boys and young men. That ecological factors, both natural and human-made, influence the fundamental ways in which people everywhere perceive the world in which they live was revealed in some detail in Chapter 4, in the section on differences in susceptibility to visual illusions. In the same chapter, we saw that our very basic cognitive processes also vary in many ways across cultures, in a manner consistent with predictions subsumed by the ecocultural framework. These processes include categorization, memory, and problem solving. With respect to these cognitive activities, it is cultural factors, such as literacy and schooling, that seem to play the major role in the way these processes develop and are used. ISBN: 0-536-32545-6 Human Behavior in Global Perspective: An Introduction to Cross-Cultural Psychology, Second Edition, by Marshall H. Segall, Pierre R. Dasen, John W. Berry, and Ype Poortinga. Copyright © 1999, 1990 by Allyn and Bacon. A Peason Education Company. 326 Chapter 12 In Chapter 5, in which we dealt with intelligence and its development through childhood, the ecocultural framework helped us to understand that differences in manifest abilities reflect ecocultural differences in ways that make people’s particular modes of expressing intelligence appropriate to the settings in which they grow up. Many details of this phenomenon were presented in Chapter 6, in which we attended to the everyday ways in which people cope with mundane challenges, like calculating prices while selling in markets or shopping in supermarkets. From Chapter 7 onward, we studied the social, historical, economic, and political forces (all included in the ecocultural framework) that are linked to various aspects of human social behavior. In Chapter 7, diverse attitudes, beliefs, and value systems were shown to vary across cultures not randomly, but in ways that make sense given the cultural setting in which they developed. In this chapter, we reviewed a series of research paradigms that characterized cross-cultural research on motives and values over the past several decades, including achievement motivation and individualism/ collectivism (among others) and found it possible to incorporate them into our ecocultural framework. Chapter 8 dealt with matters of sex and gender, noting many behavioral differences that were related to differential socialization, which in turn was related to varying biological and social (including economic) roots. Our ways of expressing our sexual identity, even our ways of engaging in sexual behavior, were shown to be embedded in a sociocultural context, as our framework led us to expect. Aggression was shown in Chapter 9 to be better understood by viewing it in its sociocultural context, rather than as something that flows, as if through some instinctual hydraulic system, from inside the organism. The many cultural forces that operate either to encourage or impede aggressive behavior, including the content of the mass media, prevailing societal sanctions for aggression (including, and especially, punishments), and the availability of various kinds of role models, are the kinds of variables pointed to in the ecocultural framework. Chapter 10 led us through a discussion of intergroup behavior, including its most negative aspects, violent conflict and warfare. There we found that a central theme in the analysis of intergroup relations, namely, the tendency of peoples everywhere to be ethnocentric, is itself understandable as a reflection of the universal phenomena of socialization, and therefore subject to change via the manipulation of social and political variables, many of them potentially under the control of the leadership of any society. The topic of acculturation was covered in Chapter 11, in which it was treated as a second set of cultural influences on individuals exposed to the sociopolitical context that prevails in a culture other than their culture of origin, whenever they come into contact with another culture. In that chapter, the acculturation process was shown to be parallel to the cultural transmission process, comprising enculturation and socialization, which were highlighted in the ecocultural framework. Thus, over eleven chapters, as we ranged widely from topic to topic, the ecocultural framework was employed to assist us in explicating empirical findings and ISBN: 0-536-32545-6 Human Behavior in Global Perspective: An Introduction to Cross-Cultural Psychology, Second Edition, by Marshall H. Segall, Pierre R. Dasen, John W. Berry, and Ype Poortinga. Copyright © 1999, 1990 by Allyn and Bacon. A Peason Education Company. Conclusions 327 theoretical notions that characterize contemporary research in cross-cultural psychology. This booklength effort will have succeeded if readers now recognize that all human populations are, generally speaking, adapted to their ecological settings and that we can account for psychological differences and similarities across groups only by taking these ecological and cultural factors into account. As rapid social change or acculturation takes place, this adaptation may be temporarily disrupted, but even this phenomenon can be understood by viewing the ecocultural framework as a dynamic system. As Berry (1995) stressed: “It is essential to note that the term ecological refers to interactions between populations and features of the environment, rather than to a unidirectional determinism (from environment to culture)” (p. 375). Jahoda (1995) showed that the framework has strong roots in the history of Western thought from the Enlightenment onward, but he acknowledges that it is “a general framework cast in the form of a fairly complex model with feedback loops. It would of course be idle to pretend that such a sophisticated model, taking explicit account of interactions, had any direct predecessors” (pp. 14–15). Taking into account the newer definitions of culture, as reviewed in Chapter 1, in which there is a “coconstruction” between culture and mind, it is indeed the feedback loops that need to be further documented. This book, it should now be obvious, advocates that all social scientists, psychologists especially, take culture seriously into account when attempting to understand human behavior. This has been a self-evident proposition to all whose work is covered in this introductory text on cross-cultural psychology and its many constituent parts—cultural psychology, ethnopsychology, societal psychology, and la psychologie interculturelle—and the closely related disciplines of psychological anthropology and comparative anthropology. CROSS-CULTURAL PSYCHOLOGY VIS-À-VIS GENERAL PSYCHOLOGY Cross-cultural psychology is unabashedly muticultural and maximally inclusive. In contrast, psychology in general continues to ignore culture as a source of influence on human behavior, and still takes little account of theories or data from other than Euro-American cultures. Recently, however, several introductory psychology texts made solid attempts to rectify this situation (Sternberg, 1995; Wade & Tavris, 1996; Westen, 1996) and we anticipate more of the same in the new millennium (as ethnocentrically measured on the Western, Christian calendar). Cross-cultural psychology, as our discussions of methodology tried to show, comprises many ways of studying culture as an important context for human psychological development and behavior. Cultural psychology offers one approach for focusing on culture as integral to all psychological functioning, with culture and psychology viewed as “mutually constitutive phenomena” (Miller, 1997). Cross-cultural ISBN: 0-536-32545-6 Human Behavior in Global Perspective: An Introduction to Cross-Cultural Psychology, Second Edition, by Marshall H. Segall, Pierre R. Dasen, John W. Berry, and Ype Poortinga. Copyright © 1999, 1990 by Allyn and Bacon. A Peason Education Company. 328 Chapter 12 psychology consists mostly of diverse forms of comparative research (often explicitly and always at least implicitly) in order to discern the influence of various cultural factors, many of them related to ethnicity, on those forms of development and behavior. Recalling the famous early definition of culture by the anthropologist Herskovits “Culture is the man-made part of the environment” (Herskovits, 1948, p. 17), crosscultural researchers occasionally seek as well the influence of individuals’ behavior on ever-changing culture. When doing so, the independent and dependent variables are interchanged; their status is reversible, depending on the design of any particular study. We have consistently argued in this book that a comparative research enterprise is difficult partly because all psychologists necessarily carry their own culturally-based perspectives with them when studying in other cultures. In its early days, cross-cultural psychology was marked by some conceptual and methodological weaknesses; for example, there was, far too often, a naive application of EuroAmerican theoretical notions to research conducted in other settings. During much of its history, cross-cultural psychology’s typical research project consisted of taking a favorite test to some exotic place, comparing the obtained results with those of the homeland “norms,” and thereby “discovering a cultural difference” that either remained unexplained or was fitted with some post hoc interpretations selected uncritically from among many uncontrolled alternatives. Often, in a vague and circular fashion, the difference was merely attributed to “culture.” We have reiterated in this textbook that this “imposed etic” approach was doomed to yield uninterpretable “cross-cultural” differences. This “safari-style” research was typically carried out by psychologists from Western countries on leave from their home universities, doing short-term fieldwork, or through correspondence with a colleague in a foreign country. As this book will have made plain, we do not advocate this kind of research and we believe that enhanced publication standards will eliminate it. Although more sophisticated aspects of cross-cultural methodology are dealt with in Berry and colleagues (1992, soon to appear in a revised second edition), and in Berry and associates (1997), throughout this book we pointed out questions of method in connection with particular studies. But we lacked enough space to describe, for every study, exactly how it was carried out. All of the included studies, in our judgment, contribute valuable knowledge, but not all of them are beyond criticism. Indeed, cross-cultural research is so difficult to carry out that there almost always remains some point of contention, some uncontrolled variable, or some doubt because the study was done with a small number of subjects, or no other researcher has attempted to replicate it. In other words, cross-cultural research tends to be “soft,” in comparison with the “hard” data of experimental psychology. General psychology sometimes simply ignores cross-cultural psychology because of this characteristic. We think that this is a mistake. Alternative methods always have tradeoffs. We are ready to weigh experimental control against the advantages to be gained from greater external validity, the possibility of increasing the variance in a crucial ISBN: 0-536-32545-6 Human Behavior in Global Perspective: An Introduction to Cross-Cultural Psychology, Second Edition, by Marshall H. Segall, Pierre R. Dasen, John W. Berry, and Ype Poortinga. Copyright © 1999, 1990 by Allyn and Bacon. A Peason Education Company. Conclusions 329 variable, or the ability to unconfound variables that are always linked in single societies. We are not saying that methodological rigor is unimportant; we are saying that one cannot always have it both ways, and that one occasionally has to make a choice, for example between experimental control and external validity. Although we have not tried in this book to teach how to do cross-cultural research, we hope to have enabled students to assess cross-cultural studies critically. Theoretical Orientations within Cross-Cultural Psychology We suggested here that someday a universal psychology might emerge but, we now emphasize, universality can never be assumed in advance. Every psychological theory that pretends to describe a general law should be put to empirical crosscultural test. We are particularly concerned about the time lag between developing theories in general psychology and putting them to this cross-cultural test. While this has been done extensively for some theories, such as Piaget’s, many of the more recent theories in the domain of cognition (those related to cognitive science and artificial intelligence) or in social psychology, claim to be universal without any attempt to demonstrate it. Even socioculturally oriented theories (neo-Piagetian, Vygotskyan) are often not systematically taken out of their initial Euro-American context. In the francophone tradition of “intercultural” research, the emphasis is so much on studying only migrants in multicultural societies that comparative cross-cultural studies are almost completely neglected. Theories like Camilleri’s “identity strategies” (Camilleri & Malewska-Peyre, 1997) are implicitly claimed to be generalizable, but are based almost exclusively on research with North African migrants in France, a rather specific social and political context (Dasen & Ogay, n.d.). Similarly, Berry’s acculturation processes reviewed in Chapter 11 have been developed mainly on the basis of research in Canada and the United States, and have only recently started to be adapted to other contexts such as Europe (Berry & Sam, 1997). Hence, even research within a cross-cultural approach needs more extensive comparative replication. Early in this text, we reviewed polar theoretical orientations in cross-cultural psychology—absolutism and relativism—and noted that few cross-cultural psychologists are at either pole. We saw that most strike a balance, borrowing from both poles. Cross-cultural psychologists expect both biological and cultural factors to influence human behavior, but, like relativists, assume that the role of culture in producing human variation both within and across groups (especially across groups) is substantial. We allow for similarities due to specieswide basic processes, as the absolutists stress, but consider the existence of specieswide processes subject to empirical demonstration. This kind of “universalism” assumes that basic human characteristics are common to all members of the species, and that culture influences the development and display of them. ISBN: 0-536-32545-6 Human Behavior in Global Perspective: An Introduction to Cross-Cultural Psychology, Second Edition, by Marshall H. Segall, Pierre R. Dasen, John W. Berry, and Ype Poortinga. Copyright © 1999, 1990 by Allyn and Bacon. A Peason Education Company. 330 Chapter 12 PRACTICAL IMPLICATIONS OF CROSS-CULTURAL RESEARCH We saw in this text that, beyond its historical links with general psychology, crosscultural psychology has influences originating in anthropology, sociology, history, and political science, among others. As social scientists, willing to settle for truth in context, both historical and cultural context, cross-cultural psychologists take the world as it is and the people in it, as they are or, at least, as they perceive them to be, while trying not to express culturally rooted value judgments. In the process, they endeavor to give all human beings the respect and understanding they deserve. While following, in this respect, anthropology’s basic principle of cultural relativism, cross-cultural psychologists need not deny their own attitudes and values and those of their own society. Also, they may well seek to place their research explicitly in a political context, in which they wish to serve the people they are studying. Because cross-cultural psychologists often do research in settings where human problems are so dramatically visible, they can hardly pursue only “pure” science. Even in technologically developed nations we are often confronted by an uneven distribution, across ethnic groups, of well-being on the one hand and various kinds of distress on the other. So cross-cultural psychology lends itself not merely to discussions of scholarly findings but to their social implications as well. In the present text, for example, we saw that there are differences between identifiable groups in performance in many different domains, including in some classical measures of “intellectual competence,” but we showed the inherent faults of such measures, and we called attention to the many other variables that correlate both with membership in the various groups compared (e.g., income and wealth) and with performance. Accordingly, cross-cultural psychology can support in a compelling way policies that are designed to enhance the equality of opportunity and oppose vigorously the use of test measures as selection devices into experiences that prepare people for subsequent opportunities to improve their lot in life. Cross-cultural research on gender that we reviewed in Chapter 8 has also resulted in socially applicable findings. There we showed the core finding to be the cultural embeddedness of all gender-related phenomena, from sex differences in behavior to relations between the sexes. Understanding traditional gender roles as rooted in economic, religious, political, and other cultural forces, does not support the continuation of any policies or programs that permit discrimination against either one of the sexes. Also, a form of behavior that is so unforgivably common in many societies—spouse battering, rape, and male bullying of females—might be reduced were we better able to articulate the relationship of such behaviors to culturally based “common wisdom” concerning how men ought to behave toward women. In this respect, as was shown elsewhere in this book as well, the vicious cycle of beliefs in superiority and inferiority, and the use of such beliefs to justify continuing discriminatory practices, might ISBN: 0-536-32545-6 Human Behavior in Global Perspective: An Introduction to Cross-Cultural Psychology, Second Edition, by Marshall H. Segall, Pierre R. Dasen, John W. Berry, and Ype Poortinga. Copyright © 1999, 1990 by Allyn and Bacon. A Peason Education Company. Conclusions 331 be broken were we to break the stranglehold of outmoded beliefs about the basis of differences between groups. Intergroup relations is arguably the single most important domain in which cross-cultural psychology has important ideas, theories, and facts to contribute, many of which were covered in Chapter 10. Our primary contribution to efforts to deal with the twentieth-century record of holocaust, genocide, interethnic warfare and terrorism (a history that promises to continue well into the twenty-first century), is a generalization, perhaps our highest order generalization, namely, the notion that culture is the primary shaper and molder of everyone’s behavior. In the very beginning of this book, in Chapter 1, we underscored our conviction that differences traditionally attributed to “race,” which by definition makes those differences seem biologically determined and hence immutable, are now known to be cultural and hence changeable by policies that attempt to eliminate disadvantages suffered to date by various cultural groups. These are the very groups that we traditionally have thought of as “races,” differentially blessed or damned by their nature to be among the haves or among the have-nots. If cross-cultural psychology should chip away at this prevailing misconception of human diversity rooted in “race,” our discipline will have made a very significant social contribution. SUMMARY AND FUTURE DIRECTIONS We have covered a lot of territory in this book, the main point of which has been that “culture” and all that it implies with respect to human development, thought, and behavior should be central, not peripheral, in psychological theory and research. As noted by Segall, Lonner, and Berry (1998), cross-cultural psychology has become an increasingly important part of modern psychology. Fortunately, over roughly the past thirty years, many books, journals, and scholarly organizations have come to take culture seriously. Standing out is the three-volume second edition of the Handbook of CrossCultural Psychology (Berry et al., 1997), which informed much of the present text. The scope of the cross-cultural effort in psychology is also reflected in the dozens of other recent books in the field (e.g., Berry et al., 1992; Gardiner, Mutter, & Kosmitzki, 1997; Matsumoto, 1996; and Smith & Bond, 1993, 1994). Among several scholarly and professional organizations, within and adjacent to psychology, with an international or cross-cultural focus, the International Association for Cross-Cultural Psychology (IACCP) remains at the center of the enterprise’s growth and development. Since its inaugural meeting in Hong Kong in 1972, IACCP has held international congresses every two years and a host of regional congresses in nearly every part of the world. To celebrate its twenty-fifth anniversary, IACCP held its first ever international congress to take place in the United States, in 1998, ISBN: 0-536-32545-6 Human Behavior in Global Perspective: An Introduction to Cross-Cultural Psychology, Second Edition, by Marshall H. Segall, Pierre R. Dasen, John W. Berry, and Ype Poortinga. Copyright © 1999, 1990 by Allyn and Bacon. A Peason Education Company. 332 Chapter 12 on the campus of Western Washington University in Bellingham, Washington. Some 350 scholars from over 50 nations attended. Looking to the Future of Cross-Cultural Psychology We have tried to show in this book that we need cross-cultural research that is carried out with a profound knowledge of the cultural context, a cross-cultural psychology that spends as much effort on specifying the (independent) cultural variables as it does attending to the (dependent) psychological outcome measures. Such a research program usually requires extensive and long-term fieldwork, and an interdisciplinary approach between anthropologists and psychologists. We have covered in this volume several such large-scale efforts by expatriate psychologists. Such major research efforts needed extensive funding and this is more difficult to secure than it was during some earlier periods. For this reason, as well as others linked to the ethics and politics of cross-cultural research, we anticipate the following trends: 1. There will be less research carried out by itinerant expatriates, and more research carried out by psychologists working in their own societies. The Western psychologists who used to travel afar will spend more time studying cultural subgroups within their own society; massive migration movements and the development of multicultural societies favor this trend. Increasingly, there are psychologists in all parts of the world able to carry out research within their own cultural framework. For some time, psychologists in third world universities have tended to copy the models they had learned during their studies in the West. It takes courage to slough off the leading paradigms in scientific psychology, even if they are obviously inappropriate to a culturally sensitive psychology. In recent years, however, several research programs have developed more appropriate paradigms. A few examples of research by psychologists working in their own lands on problems of local relevance and with concepts and instruments rooted in their own cultures have been included in this book. The future, we hope, will provide many more examples. 2. Thanks in part to the ability to communicate internationally via the Internet, there will be more truly collaborative research efforts between psychologists of different countries. These would not be limited to projects designed, funded, and directed from the West, and therefore dominated by the Western researcher, but research designed and carried out by partners of equal status and power. In the meantime, there will still be Ph.D. students from non-Western countries studying at Western institutions and carrying out their fieldwork in their own society. This form of research can be very valuable, if only the supervisors are at least informed in crosscultural psychology. 3. As a consequence of the trends outlined above, cross-cultural research is likely to become more applied. On the one hand, funding for so-called pure research is becoming tighter, and on the other hand many researchers, and especially those working within their own societies, are becoming more aware of the importance of ISBN: 0-536-32545-6 Human Behavior in Global Perspective: An Introduction to Cross-Cultural Psychology, Second Edition, by Marshall H. Segall, Pierre R. Dasen, John W. Berry, and Ype Poortinga. Copyright © 1999, 1990 by Allyn and Bacon. A Peason Education Company. Conclusions 333 contributing to the solutions of major social problems that have local manifestations. Psychology in general, and cross-cultural psychology in particular, have not yet realized their potential in this respect, and are still likely to be ignored by policy makers. This is, we think, due to two reasons: (1) the public image of psychology as a helping profession is linked to clinical psychology or psychoanalysis, or as a technique restricted to testing; (2) the ignorance of most of mainstream psychology of the social and cultural variables that impinge on individual behavior and that would make scientific psychology more relevant to social policy. The cross-cultural approach, as a scientific method, should help to improve the image and the impact of psychology. These three trends combined should influence the future of cross-cultural psychology in the following ways: There will be a movement away from a mainly theory-testing discipline. Research will tend to focus more on single societies, while still taking sociocultural variables seriously, either by comparing subgroups or through studying individual differences and correlates rather than relying on means across samples. Research will also become more truly interdisciplinary, combining biological, sociological, anthropological, and psychological methods and paradigms. Cross-cultural psychology has grown into a thriving intellectual enterprise circa 2000. This leads us to conclude this introductory text with a paradox: Cross-cultural psychology will be shown to have succeeded when it disappears. For, when the whole field of psychology becomes truly international and genuinely intercultural, in other words, when it becomes truly a science of human behavior, cross-cultural psychology will have achieved its aims and become redundant. This introductory textbook has tried to move us a bit closer to that paradoxical achievement.