Abstract
During my tenure as Editor of the Journal of Cross-Cultural Psychology, in an early issue of each new year of the journal we have had an invited paper, and this year is no exception. These invited papers have often been provocative examinations of what culture is and how it impacts various aspects of psychology.
For the first of these invited papers, Heidi Keller reviewed the attachment literature, a topic central to developmental psychology and recently also in social psychology. She identified cultural differences that have routinely been ignored in mainstream attachment research which centers around the notion of a child developing psychological autonomy which is adaptive in the Western middle-class setting. Heidi pointed out that cultural beliefs may differ in the majority non-Western world where autonomy may not be valued, and as a result, much of attachment theory must be revised to account for cultural differences in parenting styles and child development goals.
Similarly, in a later invited paper based on his Presidential Address at the International Association for Cross-Cultural Psychology (IACCP) conference in Reims, France, Yoshihisa Kashima identified the important role of culture in many of our present-day concerns—globalization of the world economy, climate change by human technology, intergroup conflicts resulting from large-scale migration, and religious differences. He noted that cultural differences in these important domains may lead to critical misunderstandings and culture clashes. Along with Yoshi’s invited paper, I asked Evert Van de Vliert, Frederick Leong, and Vassilis Saraglou to share commentaries to expand the discussion of the current cultural global concerns and the role of culture.
These two previous invited papers laid the foundation for the current one which grew from the recent 5th IACCP Latin America Regional Conference in San Jose, Costa Rica. At that conference, the audience was captivated by Nandita Chaudhary’s keynote address, “Why There Can Be No Psychology without Culture: Building and Rebuilding Science from the Perspective of the Global South.” In her keynote, using primarily examples from India, she extended the critique of behavioral science research as being primarily based upon findings from Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, and Democratic (WEIRD) societies (Henrich et al., 2010). In their WEIRD critique, Henrich and colleagues note that there is an implicit assumption in such research that there is little variation across human populations, so WEIRD subjects are as representative of the species as is any other population. However, after examination across a number of domains (e.g., visual perception, cooperation, spatial reasoning, categorization, moral reasoning, self-concepts), Henrich and colleagues found little support for the universality of behavioral phenomena based on research with WEIRD samples.
After hearing her keynote and recognizing the powerful message, I invited Nandita to expand her keynote for an invited paper for the Journal of Cross-Cultural Psychology, and she requested a colleague, Sujata Sriram, to join her. In their invited paper, they point out how the WEIRD, “international model” of psychology has led to numerous problems, particularly in Indian psychology. They note that universalism based on the centrality of WEIRD research has had some serious consequences such as hierarchical collaborations among Western and non-Western colleagues, reliance upon Western-derived data and findings as universal and superior to locally derived research and conceptualizations of phenomena, and the devaluing of local traditions and indigenous perspectives. Their invited paper maintains that with the ever expanding connections between scientists around the world, the centrality of culture in psychological phenomena should be recognized, studied, and understood more clearly than in days past.
As maintained in this invited paper, and in previous ones, long-standing theories must change, especially when dealing with concerns in our ever expanding global world. In short, the international model of psychology should become culturally international.