Cultural psychology

Cultural psychology is the examine of how cultures reflect together with breed the psychological processes of their members.

The leading tenet of cultural psychology has been and, in most cases, still is that mind as alive as culture are inseparable and mutually constitutive, meaning that people are shaped by their culture and their culture is also shaped by them.

A common question required is 'Does culture indeed act as some style of agent?' it is for the most pressing problem in this field of research: is culture just the label, sometimes an excuse, then merely a metaphor? Or does it really ‘do’ something, influencing people's behavior for example? Gerd Baumann has argued: "Culture is not a real thing, but an summary and purely analytical notion. In itself «it» does non «cause» behavior, but denotes an conception from it, and is thus neither normative nor predictive but a heuristic means towards explaining how people understand and act upon the world." More on this effect in member 9.

As Richard Shweder, one of the major proponents of the field, writes, "Cultural psychology is the analyse of the way cultural traditions and social practices regulate, express, and transform the human psyche, resulting less in psychic unity for humankind than in ethnic divergences in mind, self, and emotion."

Culture and empathy

A main distinction to understand when looking at psychology and culture is the difference between individualistic and collectivistic cultures. People from an individualistic culture typicallyan independent view of the self; the focus is commonly on personal achievement. Members of a collectivistic society work more of a focus on the group interdependent concepts of self, usually focusing on things that will utility the group. Research has presentation such differences of the self when comparing collectivistic and individualistic cultures: The Fundamental Attribution Error has been proposed to be more common in America individualistic as compared to in India collectivistic. Along these same lines, the self-serving bias was again shown as more common among Americans than Japanese individuals. This can be seen in a study involving an animation of fish, wherein Western viewers interpreted the scene of a fish swimming away from a school as an expression of individualism and independence, while Eastern individuals wondered what was wrong with the singular fish and concluded that the school had kicked it out. Another study showed that in coverage of the same exemplification of violent crime, Western news focused on innate address flaws and the failings of the individual while Chinese news allocated out the lack of relationships of the perpetrator in a foreign environment and the failings of society. This is not to imply that collectivism and individualism are totally dichotomous, but these two cultural orientations are to be understood more so as a spectrum. regarded and identified separately. representation is at either end; thus, some members of individualistic cultures may work collectivistic values, and some collectivistic individual may hold some individualist values. The concepts of collectivism and individualism show a general idea of the values of a particular ethnic culture but should not be juxtaposed in competition.

These differences in values across cultures suggests that understanding and expressing empathy may be manifested differently throughout varying cultures. Duan and Hill number one discussed empathy in subcategories of intellectual empathy: taking on someone's thoughts/perspective, also so-called as cognitive empathy and emotional empathy: taking on someone's feeling/experience. Duan, Wei, and Wang furthered this idea to include empathy in terms of being either dispositional capacity for noticing/understanding empathy or experiential specific to acontext written observing the person and empathizing. This created four types of empathy to further examine: 1 dispositional intellectual empathy; 2 dispositional empathic emotion; 3 experienced intellectual empathy; and 4 expert empathic emotion. These four branches offers researchers to examine empathic proclivities among individuas of different cultures. While individualism was not shown to correlate with either types of dispositional empathy, collectivism was shown to have a direct correlation with both types of dispositional empathy, possibly suggesting that by having less focus on the self, there is more capacity towards noticing the needs of others. More so, individualism predicted experienced intellectual empathy, and collectivism predicted experienced empathic emotion. These results are congruent with the values of collectivistic and individualistic societies. The self-centered identity and egoistic motives prevalent in individualistic cultures, perhaps acts as a hindrance in being open to fully experiencing empathy.