Mapping Cross-Cultural Psychology Models and Methods Onto Societal Challenges

According to the levels of analysis (LOAs) perspective, the various disciplines of science have usually been situated primarily on one major level. One approach to the LOAs perspective begins with the biological level and moves outward in a concentric circle to the intra-psychic, individual, interpersonal, group, societal, and species level. For example, psychology has usually adopted an individual LOA where the locus of cognition, emotion, motivation, and behavior is assumed to emanate from the individual. As such, we study the antecedents and consequences of self-esteem, self-efficacy, locus of control, and other personality traits. In the United States, this individual LOA is so pervasive that some social psychologists in Europe have criticized our social psychology as not social at all because we tend to study social cognition (i.e., how an individual views his or her social world) rather than interactions between persons or within groups. Psychiatry, however, tends to focus on the biological LOA where problems are attributed to disturbances within the biological sphere (e.g., depression or obsessive-compulsive disorders as primarily brain disorders), and therefore, their interventions are targeted at that level. Moving in the opposite direction of LOA, sociology tends to examine higher LOAs as the causal locus of problems such as social stratification, social class, and social mobility across classes.

Kashima’s (2016) “survey of the meta-theoretical landscape of culture and psychology” seeks to integrate the two levels in which cross-cultural psychology is cross-situated, namely, the individual level and the societal level. A key element of the LOAs perspective is that we need to identify the correct level in which the problem resides to target our intervention at that level. For example, if schizophrenia is primarily a brain disorder, talk therapy will be of limited value until the brain chemistry of the patient is corrected to enable him (usually male) to benefit from the latter form of intervention.

I found Kashima’s (2016) meta-theoretical analysis insightful, well articulated, and it enables us to stretch our conceptualization of the role of cross-cultural psychology in solving societal problems such as the climatic threats, health threats, and natural threats he discussed. I believe one particularly valuable contribution of Kashima’s article is that it encourages us to think across multiple LOAs because social problems tend not to be restricted to a single LOA. However, I do wonder whether cross-cultural psychology is currently more situated in the individual LOA (i.e., psychology) than the societal LOA (i.e., culture).

Whereas I found Kashima’s 30,000-foot macro-perspective on the recent mega-trends facing cross-cultural psychology quite stimulating, I am also hard press to identify how we can use such an analysis to undertake social changes at the cultural level (i.e., changing a culture) in contrast to undertaking social changes at the individual LOA (i.e., psychological change). Although the climatic, health, and natural threats facing humankind are indeed important, as psychologists, I believe that we are best equipped to study the psychological mechanisms and the psychological threats underlying these societal challenges. I believe that we are still struggling with how to conceptualize and understand psychological change at the individual level; in my assessment, we simply lack the conceptual and methodological tools for studying social change at the cultural level. For example, we have only recently developed the statistical methods for conducting dyadic analysis (e.g., Kenny, Kashy, & Cook, 2006). For me, the link between the individual LOA and the cultural (i.e., group) LOA is to use a bottom-up approach, namely, to study and intervene at the psychological level, which will gradually result in larger social changes over time. Therefore, my commentary will focus on how we can study psychological mechanisms across cultures in addressing these societal challenges.

Some examples of these psychological challenges and threats include extremism and psychological polarization within societies, from increasing individualism in the West to the rise of radical Islam in the Middle-East. One recent example of the confluence of these two developments is the decision of a certain right-wing group in Texas to hold a competition on drawing cartoon depictions of the Prophet Mohamed as an extreme expression of their individual rights and on some level to bait the radical Islamic faction into action. Other examples of psychological threats from extremism and polarization include the tension between to the top 1% versus the 99% of the economic strata of society. A contemporary political polarization that may have unintended military repercussions is Russia’s annexation of Crimea and their involvement in the civil war in Ukraine and the associated military build-up by NATO in Eastern European countries. In our own backyard of psychology, we have the continuing tension between bias in psychological science or what Henreich, Heine, and Norenzayan (2010) had called WEIRD science (much of our so-called universal laws of human behavior have been built on a restricted sample from Western Educated Industrialized Rich Democracies) and the rallying cry from developing nations for Indigenous psychologies (Kim, Yang, & Hwang, 2010). What are the cross-cultural psychological mechanisms at play in these challenges and threats? If culture is the cause of some of the major societal problems, then we need to identify the psychological mechanisms operating within and across cultures that mediate the relationship between culture and social problems.

In terms of mapping cross-cultural psychology onto social problems, I believe that Triandis’ (2008) recent work on self-deception as psychological mechanisms underlying extremism is a good example. He provides a convincing case that it is cultural tightness (vs. cultural looseness) within a culture that often leads to cognitive simplicity among its members. This in turn produces that dichotomous thinking that leads to greater self-deception to maintain the binary cognitive schema. For example, it is young Muslim educated in the narrow confines of their Madrasa (as contrasted with other more open schooling system) who develop a binary thinking style of strict and faithful Islam versus all others as infidels. It is within this world of radical simplistic religious thinking that is trying to maintain the traditional bygone systems of proper behavior that Malala Yousafzai was shot in the face for advocating educational opportunities for young girls.

My emphasis on psychological mechanisms when mapping cross-cultural psychology models and methods onto societal problems comes from the persistent problem of using the wrong LOA. In a chapter outlining various research methods for cross-cultural clinical psychology, Leong and Kalibatseva (2013) noted that when studying of culture, race, and ethnicity, psychologists have tended to conflate demography with psychology. In using culture, race, and ethnicity as the causal and independent variables in our research design, we have inadvertently generated findings that suffer from a “Black box problem.”

According to Leong and Kalibatseva (2013), one conceptualization of the “Black box problem” in psychological research criticizes the use of broad social categories (such as race and ethnicity) to represent homogeneous groups that do not warrant further decomposition. These groups are implicitly assumed to represent reality, and the operationalization of the group variable is assumed to be sufficient as an explanatory construct. For example, the strong correlation between being Black and being a Democrat ignores the possibility that it may be social class that moderates the relationship between race and political party affiliation.

Within the field of psychology, there has been an ongoing controversy regarding the use of culture, race, and ethnicity as a demographic and not a psychological variable (Leong & Kalibatseva, 2013). Although having its origins in biology and genetics, some have argued that race and ethnicity are currently political and social constructions with complex ramifications. According to these scholars, using culture, race, and ethnicity as a demographic variable to serve as a proxy for such biological and genetic grouping of humans will result in over-generalizations at best and gross misrepresentations at worst. Psychologists have therefore varied in their level of critique in using race and ethnicity as predictor variables (Leong & Kalibatseva, 2013).

To address this problem, I have recommended a disentangling approach to the study of culture, race, and ethnicity. The basic premise of this approach is that demography is a poor proxy for psychology. Culture, race, and ethnicity are essentially demographic variables that are often used by sociologists at a different LOA. An empirical example of this disentangling approach is our study of immigrant mental health (Leong, Park, & Kalibatseva, 2013).

Leong and Kalibatseva (2013) reviewed some of the previous arguments for such a disentangling approach to the study of culture, race, and ethnicity. For example, they cited Matthews (1989) who noted that whereas socio-demographic variables can often serve as important marker variables, it is equally important not to conflate them with underlying causal mechanisms. For example, although rare, some men have been diagnosed with breast cancer, and it is a mistake to view breast cancer solely as a gender disease affecting women. In other words, we need to study the causal mechanisms underlying the metastatic process in the breast that tends to affect not only mainly women but also some men. Hence, we need to counter the tendency to over-generalize from a correlation (e.g., between race/ethnicity and a particular mental health problem) to a causal inference (Leong & Kalibatseva, 2013). Demographic variables, such as race, ethnicity, and gender, can serve as a quick indicator of risk factors but we need to differentiate between such social indicators versus psychological determinants of psychopathology (Leong & Kalibatseva, 2013).

For a cross cross-cultural example, Leong and Kalibatseva (2013) cited Betancourt and Lopez (1993) who found that studies have relied on presumed cultural and social features of a particular racial group to explain differences in racial groupings, a demographic variable, despite there being conceptual confusion in defining these features. They noted that

cross-cultural researchers who study cultural differences frequently fail to identify the specific aspects of culture and related variables that are thought to influence behavior . . . we learn that cultural group, race, or ethnicity may be related to a given psychological phenomenon, but we learn little about the specific elements of these group variables that contribute to the proposed relationship. (Betancourt & Lopez, 1993, p. 629)

To resolve this problem, they proposed that both mainstream and cross-cultural investigators identify and measure directly the cultural element in a particular group of interest that is hypothesized to influence behavior. They noted that when culture (or race and ethnicity) is defined in terms of these psychologically relevant elements (e.g., values, beliefs, and acculturation), it becomes more amenable to measurement and “the relationship between these cultural elements to psychological phenomena can [therefore] be directly assessed” (Betancourt & Lopez, 1993, p. 630).

Finally Leong and Kalibatseva (2013) referred to a debate regarding research on diversity and leadership published in the American Psychologist where Klein and Wang (2010) questioned the value of the review articles in terms of their primary focus on race and ethnicity as “surface-level diversity” as opposed to the “deep-level diversity” approach advancing in organizational psychology. In essence, the Klein and Wang commentary is echoing the observations and recommendations of the earlier authors with the distinction that we need to move beyond the use of surface-level diversity conceptualization, such as using culture, race, and ethnicity as a demographic variable without further delineation of underlying psychological processes and mechanism. Deep-level diversity, however, seeks to identify and unpack these psychological processes and mechanisms (Leong & Kalibatseva, 2013). Cross-cultural psychological research also needs to move beyond using culture, race, and ethnicity as demographic variables and begin to undertake deep-level research that delves into the psychological processes and mechanisms that may be moderating or mediating the relationship between culture and social problems such as religious extremism or the widening gap between the poor and the rich around the world.

Kashima’s integration of the individual and societal LOA to advance cross-cultural psychology can also benefit from the recent development of the science of complexity. This emerging science of complexity is well represented in books such as Mitchell Waldrop’s (1992) Complexity: The Emerging Science at the Edge of Order and Chaos. The underlying message within this science of complexity, although there is no one theory, is that we are often dealing with complex adaptive systems.

In an article introducing an integrative and multi-dimensional model of cross-cultural psychotherapy, Leong (1996) had described the value of the new perspective provided by science of complexity. According to this new science, the focus is on complex adaptive systems, which are characterized by a number of features. Typically a complex system is composed of a large number of independent or semi-independent components, which we shall call agents: From the point of modeling, it may be necessary to treat the agents as diverse or they may be similar and treatable as essentially identical. The dynamical behavior of the agents, their interactions with each other, is typically highly non-linear, for example, the essential features of the environment in which the agents exist are normally determined in large part by their actions and states of other agents. Therefore, it is not possible to understand the system by superimposing the properties of individual components as this system may display emergent macroscopic features not readily predictable from the structure and character of the interactions of the individual agents. The attributes of complex adaptive systems include the fact that they are often non-linear, multivariate, non-equilibrium, open, multiple equilibria, pattern forming, information processing, adapting, evolving, co-evolving, self-organizing, and exhibiting emergence (Leong, 1996).

As pointed out by Leong (1996), whereas this new emerging science of complexity tends to focus on large adaptive systems such as star systems, organizations, or even economies, it was proposed by Leong that an individual is also a complex adaptive system and that this complex adaptive system consists precisely of the three levels or components that Kluckhohn and Murray (1950) had observed many, many years ago, namely, the universal, the group, and the individual unique elements. These elements interact in a dynamic, non-linear, multivariate, open, pattern forming, and a co-evolving process. Each of these three dimensions and their subdimensions according to the science of complexity interact in a very dynamic and non-linear fashion (Leong, 1996). I believe that this science of complexity provides a valuable conceptual framework for studying cross-cultural psychological phenomena across LOAs and across time as advocated by Kashima.