Crisis? What crisis? Cross-cultural psychology’s appropriation of cultural psychology

Abstract

Whereas cross-cultural psychology and cultural psychology have been distinguished as separate projects for decades, talk about their possible collaboration is becoming increasingly common. Several scholars have described their differences as essentially non-oppositional and the latest Handbook of Cultural Psychology combines articles from both research traditions. This paper scrutinizes these consolidating efforts first by tracing historically how the two accounts of culture (cultural and cross-cultural) developed, and second, by examining whether their long-standing epistemological premises allow for the kind of collaboration advocated by some scholars. We argue that attempts to combine the disciplines come primarily from cross-cultural psychologists who appear increasingly challenged by cultural and indigenous psychological approaches. Attempts at a merger have been twofold: on the one hand, cross-cultural psychologists who seek to preserve the status of their discipline have expanded its scope to include cultural theorists; on the other hand, cross-cultural scholars persuaded by cultural theories are creating a new blend of ‘experimental cultural psychology’ that seeks to accommodate both programs. These proposals, in our view, exemplify a cross-cultural discipline in crisis, struggling to account for a growing cultural psychology. We conclude that the overlapping interests between cross-cultural and cultural scholars make this a propitious time for cross-disciplinary dialogue.

Keywords

Cultural psychology cross-cultural psychology crisis epistemology history

Cultural psychology and cross-cultural psychology have been distinguishable as separate projects for decades (and are sometimes distinguished from “indigenous psychology”). Yet, a possible collaboration between the two (sub)disciplines seems to be growing more acceptable. Scholars have recently described the differences between the disciplines as essentially non-oppositional (Dasen & Mishra, 2000) and as becoming increasingly blurred (van de Vijver, Chasiotis, & Breugelmans, 2011). More important, the latest Handbook of Cultural Psychology (Kitayama & Cohen, 2007) combines articles from both research traditions. So why the fuss; can’t we all get along?

Without in any way suggesting that cooperation is unwarranted, we believe it is helpful to clarify how we ended up with two accounts of culture in psychology (cross-cultural and cultural psychology). They represent two different research traditions that, from an epistemological perspective, are seemingly incommensurable, although some future integration remains a possibility.¹ To demonstrate this, our paper takes a historical view that begins in the 19th century, at a time when European scholars made their first proposals for a twofold psychological discipline: part experimental, part sociohistorical. We argue that American psychologists came to prioritize the former model at the expense of the latter, and with the rise of experimental psychology, the sociohistorical approach to psychological life was largely ignored until the later 20th century. The separation of these approaches is significant, we argue, for it marks the basic distinction between cross-cultural and cultural psychology. Cross-cultural psychology establishes itself in the 1970s as a division of mainstream, empirical psychology—as an enterprise in part committed to individualist explanations; whereas in the 1980s cultural psychologists sought to revive the sociocultural stream.²

In the second part of our paper, we scrutinize the recent attempts to consolidate cross-cultural and cultural psychologies. Our argument is that these attempts come primarily from cross-cultural psychologists who appear increasingly challenged by cultural and indigenous psychological approaches. Attempts at a merger have been twofold: on the one hand, cross-cultural psychologists who seek to preserve the status of their discipline have deliberately expanded its scope to accommodate cultural theorists; on the other hand, growing numbers of cross-cultural scholars persuaded by cultural theories are creating a new blend of ‘experimental cultural psychology’ (Gabrenya, 2009) that seeks to accommodate both programs. These proposals, in our view, exemplify a cross-cultural discipline in crisis, uncertain about just what the “cultural” in “cross-cultural” stands for and struggling to account for a growing cultural psychology.

We will argue that attempts at reconciliation are not likely to be successful, for they not only misconstrue but also undermine the cultural critique, perpetuating an individualist and Westernized psychology that ultimately adopts a veneer of culture but leaves deeper cultural questions outside of psychological research. Thus the new cultural program cannot resolve the problems of cross-cultural psychology, and what we are witnessing in these struggles is a cross-cultural discipline running its course. At the same time we agree with Marvakis and Papadopoulos (2002) that studies focusing only on specific, local aspects of culture, as sometimes occurs in cultural psychology, are also not helpful in addressing the place of culture in life. Or as Valsiner (2014) has noted, uninventive descriptions of cultural life can be as sterile as the empiricism they seek to replace. Hence cultural psychology is itself a work in progress.

The history of culture and psychological science

Early epistemologists proposed twofold psychologies

What a psychology would do and look like became an important question for early scholars who took on the task of organizing scientific knowledge. With the plethora of new disciplines arising in the 19th century, a corresponding need arose for a ‘structure of cognitive authority’ that could direct research among the disciplines (Fuller, 2002). It was at this time that scholars began introducing reductive terms (i.e. reducing chemical processes to physical ones, mental to physiological), in order to formulate basic rules that could adjudicate the knowledge claims of varied disciplines.

The dual composition of humans as both natural and sociocultural creatures complicated the first proposals for a psychological science. Whereas Enlightenment scholars prioritized a natural world order and sought to identify universal laws governing human nature in anatomical, biological, and physiological processes, Romantic thinkers deliberately challenged this mechanical determinism, arguing for a sociocultural understanding of human existence that unfolded via historical and not causal laws. In light of such oppositions, both Auguste Comte (who placed psychology in biology in his System) and John Stuart Mill envisioned twofold psychologies: first, a causal psychology that would employ experimental techniques to explore the physiological basis and universal laws governing mental states; second, a purposive psychology that could study subjective life as a sociohistorical and cultural process (Cahan & White, 1992, p. 224).³

In the early years of the 20th century, Wilhelm Wundt, the acclaimed ‘father of psychology’ worked out a parallel proposal that also envisioned a twofold psychological discipline. In his Outlines of Psychology (1897), Wundt defined psychology as a dual science aimed at understanding total experience, which involved studying psychophysical laws via experiment, and higher mental states (i.e. those involved in apperception) via naturalistic observation. The division of labor was necessary because effective experiments required a direct and reliable coordination of external conditions and immediate internal perception, and this could not be achieved with processes of thought or most affective processes (Danziger, 1990). Because the latter were socially constituted, they had to be addressed with historical, not experimental methods. An individual, experimental psychology alone could not explain higher mental phenomena, as these originated in collective modes of existence and cooperative practices that were not reducible to individual laws (Danziger, 1980).

As is well known, Wundt supplemented his experimental psychology with an extensive sociohistorical psychology or Völkerpsychologie, which comprised a breadth of ethnographic data and explained the lawful development of higher mental phenomena through cultural participation (Wundt, 1921 [1900]). The two projects were seen as complementary. In his Völkerpsychologie Wundt hoped to examine those “psychic processes that form the most basic foundation for the development of collective humankind and of the development of shared mental products” (p. 1). But as Danziger (1983) has noted, Wundt’s failure to invest himself in the question of voluntary human action cost him dearly in analytic power. Although a powerful system in its own right, particularly as it looked to connect social traditions with individual action, it remained not only a historical failure but a failure that should have been a lesson for the new social psychology. For to base a social psychology exclusively on non-voluntary behavioral principles was equally likely to fail, as the remainder of the 20th century has arguably demonstrated.

Wundt’s Völkerpsychologie was never realized, since American psychologists—even those who studied under Wundt’s supervision in Leipzig—opted for an individual psychology based in experimentation.⁴ Historians have long noted (Danziger, 1979; Leary, 1987) that whereas an experimental psychology could not succeed immediately in Germany given Wundt’s belief that experimental psychology was an adjunct to philosophy, American psychologists created the discipline in a different institutional and social milieu, and instead had to defend their discipline not to philosophers, but to administrators, boards of overseers, businessmen, and politicians. As the latter sought to solve social and institutional problems, psychologists became less interested in understanding experience as a historical and sociocultural process and more concerned with explaining experience with universal laws said to predict action, and eventually behavior (Leary, 1987). Notably, an alternative sociohistorical psychology did develop in Russia in the 1920s and 1930s with Vygotsky and his followers, but it too declined following World War II (WWII) (Toomela, 2012; Valsiner & van der Veer, 2000); we return to this below.

In a progressive America undergoing significant institutional transformations, psychologists sought to establish their discipline as both scientifically valid and socially relevant. In the first decades of the 20th century, American psychologists defended two divergent styles of investigative practices. On the one hand, ‘basic’ experimentalists determined to make psychology a natural science drew upon the German scientific tradition and insisted on the use of controlled, single-subject, laboratory experiments to test universal laws of human functioning. On the other hand, ‘applied’ psychologists emphasized a socially relevant psychology and advanced Galton’s mental testing strategies to generate social knowledge relevant for addressing varied social problems. Thus there were at least two kinds of research practices, the one testing individual subjects reacting to lab conditions, and the other examining populations surveyed statistically (Danziger, 1990; Herman, 1995).

Bureaucratically administered institutions in 20th century America, especially in education and the jurisdiction of social deviance, pressed for comprehensive categorizing processes, which in turn motivated a more unified psychology grounded in statistical research practices. Experimentalists then moved away from single-subject research into a reliance on group statistics (Danziger, 1990; Halpin & Stam, 2006; Porter, 1995); whereas applied psychologists began to reinterpret statistical regularities as expressions of universal psychological laws. Specifically, intraindividual variability was equated with statistical error, and with this blurring of statistical and actual reality, mean outcome calculations were declared to access basic psychological laws (Danziger, 1990).

As both quantifiable and socially relevant, aggregate statistical approaches provided the collective methods necessary for integrating varied research approaches, turning the focus away from the study of human experience as well as its social constitution. Further, a growing behaviorism dismissed an internal psychological life completely, proposing an ‘even more exact’ science of human behavior rather than consciousness (Watson, 1913). This was well received by progressively minded scholars, and over time narrowed the psychological project significantly, as researchers turned to studies of selected animal species deemed analogs of basic human functioning (Stam & Kalmanovitch, 1998; Valsiner & van der Veer, 2000).

Even with a renewed interest in mental life after WWII, the dominant streams of social scientists prioritized the operations of underlying laws. Shweder (1991) refers to this as the ‘spirit of Platonism’ (pp. 92–93), which plagued the cognitive revolution and spread across both psychological and anthropological disciplines. Platonism meant that “for the most part, content got set aside in favor of process, the particular in favor of the general, the substantive in favor of the abstract and the formal” (Shweder, 1991, p. 93). Most reputable psychological research thus aimed at identifying the laws of an abstract mind through formal models. Anthropologists in turn documented ethnographically the diversity of exotic human institutions, practices, and beliefs without taking any interest in the person (Shweder, 1991, p. 95). The exclusionary aims of the disciplines in many ways prevented the possibility of an interdisciplinary, person-centered sociocultural psychology (Shweder, 2007; Shweder & Sullivan, 1993). Instead, culture entered the psychological scene as an external and measurable variable affecting an abstractly conceived, universal mind.

Enter cross-cultural psychology as a corrective to the mainstream: 1960s to 1990s

In the 1960s, cross-cultural psychology developed as a subdiscipline of general psychology meant to correct the ethnocentricism in the dominant stream.⁵ To prevent psychology from becoming an exclusively Western project, cross-cultural psychologists sought to test the universality of psychological laws via cultural-comparative studies. Defining their discipline via its comparative method (Jahoda & Krewer, 1997; Segall, Lonner, & Berry, 1998), cross-cultural researchers extended the individualist framework and statistical techniques that constituted general psychology, studying culture as an external variable that caused variability in individual behavior. The idea was to determine how much of this variability culture was responsible for so that universal laws of human functioning could be approximated more precisely (Triandis, Malpass, & Davidson, 1973).

Whereas until the late 1960s most cross-cultural studies were published in social psychological journals, by the early 1970s, John Berry, Walter Lonner, Harry Triandis, and others established a number of specifically cross-cultural publication outlets, most notably, the Journal of Cross-Cultural Psychology (JCCP; established in 1970). In 1972, the International Association for Cross-Cultural Psychology (IACCP) held its first meeting in Hong Kong, and by the mid-1970s, cross-cultural psychology was very much ‘on the map’ in terms of its institutional and publications outlets (Lonner, 1994).

In 1980, a breadth of cross-cultural research was published in the voluminous Handbook of Cross-Cultural Psychology, with the aim of the discipline reaffirmed: “to test the generality of psychological laws” (Triandis, 1980, p. 3). While the Handbook encompasses an assortment of research approaches, most were concerned with the cross-cultural relevance of varied personality facets, attitudes, and beliefs, as well as cross-cultural tests of Piagetian principles (Jahoda, 1980). At this time, Jahoda identifies two dominant disciplinary themes: (a) attempts to test the universality of theories originating in Western cultures by putting them to the cross-cultural test, and (b) efforts to create research approaches designed specifically to make sense of differences and similarities.⁶ For the most part however, researchers sought the applicability of varied psychological generalizations as means for uncovering principles universal across both cultures and time. Others also noted the discipline’s uninterrupted focus on documenting cross-cultural differences (Triandis, 1980), as well as the minimal concern for understanding how research results fit within broader theoretical schemes specific to cross-cultural contexts (Lambert, 1980).⁷

Similar trends continued over the next few decades, as research remained focused on testing the generalizability of psychological laws using the research framework of mainstream psychology. In the first textbook dedicated to the field (Berry, Poortinga, Marshall, & Dasen, 1992), cross-cultural psychology ascribed three goals: The first and most significant is to test the generality of existing theories of mind by comparing the responses of different cultural groups on standardized measures of psychological processes. Because this first goal may only yield knowledge from the researchers’ perspective however, a second goal—to explore and discover other cultures—ensures that researchers keep their “eyes open for novel aspects of behavior” (p. 3). Finally, should researchers find themselves in need of taking this second step, their third goal is to integrate the knowledge gained from the first two and with this “generate a more nearly universal psychology” valid for a greater number of cultures.⁸ In a recent paper, Berry (2013) reiterated these goals.

Along these lines, several prominent research models have emerged. Berry’s (2004) “ecocultural model” treats culture as series of variables existing both at population and individual levels, which interact with other variables to determine diversity in individual behavior. For Triandis (2002), cultural differences are measured and analyzed into unique configurations of “cultural syndromes” (i.e. complexity, tightness, individualism, and collectivism) that act as formal dimensions along which varied cultures can be organized. Since the 1980s, the comparative framework of individualism/collectivism has come to dominate research in the field, as it has successfully linked a broad array of differences discovered mostly via psychometric testing (see Kim, Triandis, Kagitçibasi, Choi, & Yoon, 1994).⁹ Psychometric testing in turn has become the leading research method in the field (Breuwers, van Hemert, Breugelmans, & van de Vijver, 2004), with its standard process involving the following: researchers administer batteries of tests or tasks to varying cultural groups, after which they factor analyze the correlations between the items using statistical analyses, and based on their results they offer interpretations about differences and similarities between the groups studied.

Thus cross-cultural psychology arose as a division of mainstream psychology that deliberately extended the mainstream research framework to test the universality of psychological principles. This project became the target of increased criticism in the 1980s however, as alternative ways of thinking about culture and psychology gained momentum. Specifically, aligning themselves with the sociohistorical tradition of the German Geisteswisschenschaften and Völkerpsychologie, a new group of scholars rejected an individualist psychology and instead insisted on a cultural psychology that studied psychological phenomena as socioculturally constituted.

Psychology’s minor sociocultural current

Outside of psychology’s dominant, individualist stream, beginning with 19th century continental Europe (Germany, France, Austria), a minor current of sociohistorical psychological approaches developed (see Valsiner & van der Veer, 2000 for a extensive history). Early clinical research on hypnosis and related areas disclosed unconscious and subconscious dimensions of mental life that described the mind less as a fixed, unitary phenomenon and more as an end result of complex incoming and outgoing stimuli. In Vienna, Freud’s well-known psychoanalytic approaches articulated a socially constituted unconscious, whereas in Paris, Janet integrated varied clinical findings into an influential sociogenetic theory of mind. Their work influenced a number of American psychologists, including James Mark Baldwin, William James, John Dewey, and George Hebert Mead, all of whom articulated unique social understandings of psychological life (Valsiner & van der Veer, 2000). Further, in early 20th century Russia, Vygotsky and his disciples developed diverse research methods to understand universal ‘structural-systemic principles’ of human development (Toomela, 2012; Valsiner & van der Veer, 2000). Yet, for the vast majority of the 20th century, sociogenetic thinkers stood in relatively weak social and political positions, with their ideas overshadowed by pragmatist and behaviorist frameworks (Cahan & White, 2002).

Although WWII revived interest in social influences on mental phenomena, it was not until the 1980s, largely after a rediscovery of Soviet psychology from the first half of the 20th century, that sociogenetic themes reemerged in American psychology.¹⁰ Largely through the efforts of Micheal Cole, English translations of sociohistorically oriented Soviet scholars, including Vygotsky, Luria, Leontiev, and Bakhtin revived sociocultural themes (Cole, 1996; Valsiner & van der Veer, 2000). Cole (1995) himself relinquished his cross-cultural training and developed alternative research approaches that avoided traditional comparative testing and instead studied the cultural contexts within and through which learning and thinking took place. In the 1980s, Soviet psychology inspired other American psychologists, including Werstch and Rogoff, as well as motivated a special interest in activity-based theories. Within the context of American psychology, these theories carried an implicit connection with Dewey’s pragmatism and, through their increasing popularity, demonstrated a growing need for an attack on the positivist and individualist assumptions of mainstream psychology (Valsiner & van der Veer, 2000).¹¹

Notably, since the 1960s parallel transformations were taking place in anthropology, as a minor stream of scholars opposed to a positivist anthropology developed methods for addressing psychological functioning as culturally constituted. Among the group members were D’Andrade, Geertz, Kleinman, and Sapir. Although their work became largely associated with the discipline of psychological anthropology (Hsu, 1961), these scholars fostered critical, interdisciplinary contexts that were integral for generating a separate discipline of cultural psychology—including new academic programs, conferences, and departments at seminal institutions (Shweder & Sullivan, 1993).

Enter cultural psychology

By the late 1980s, noticeable transformations in intellectual interests were taking place in both psychology and anthropology and the expression ‘cultural psychology’ was gaining currency (Shweder & Sullivan, 1993). In 1991, Shweder concentrated these efforts in an influential manifesto for cultural psychology that gave legitimacy to the discipline.¹² Therein he differentiated cultural psychology from general psychology, cross-cultural psychology, psychological anthropology, and ethnopsychology. Whereas the first three are plagued by Platonist assumptions of a universal mind (what Shweder also refers to as ‘a central processing mechanism’), ethnopsychology is not concerned with psychological functions whatsoever, as it observes only social practices. In contrast, cultural psychology does not abstract from psychological life the existence of a fixed, universal, and interior mind that operates according to its own interior logic. Rather, mind and culture are mutually constitutive and as such cannot be studied separately from one another. As Shweder states famously (and repeatedly), for cultural psychology, “mind and culture make each other up” (p. 88). Thus the object of study for cultural psychology is neither an abstract mind nor an abstract cultural system but the diversity in ‘ways of life,’ ‘symbolic states,’ or ‘mentalities’ that are always and inseparably cultural and mental (Shweder, 1999). In the first article devoted to cultural psychology in the Annual Review of Psychology, Shweder and Sullivan (1993) summarize the discipline’s aims as follows: “Cultural psychology is, first of all, a designation for the comparative study of the way culture and psyche make each other up. Second, it is a label for a practical, empirical, and philosophical project designed to reassess the uniformitarian principle of psychic unity and aimed at the development of a credible theory of psychological pluralism. Third, it is a summons to reconsider the methods and procedures for studying mental states and psychological processes across languages and cultures” (p. 499).

For a nascent cultural psychology fighting against the pervasive idea of a universal, abstract mind, Shweder (1991) proposed the aim: “to find ways to talk about culture and psyche so that neither is by nature intrinsic or extrinsic to the other” (p. 100). In 1995, Jaan Valsiner founded Culture & Psychology in order to create an interdisciplinary ‘meeting place’ for such cultural advances,¹³ and this journal has become the primary publication outlet for the discipline. Earlier, journals such as Theory & Psychology and Feminism & Psychology provided an important forum for the critical scrutiny of disciplinary tenants as well as the advancement of theory-based research. On the anthropological side, Ethos as well as Culture, Medicine and Psychiatry also advance research in cultural psychology.

Over the last few decades, cultural psychology has developed into a complex field that includes a plurality of research approaches: sociohistorical perspectives (e.g. Cole, 1995), semiotic mediation theory (Valsiner, 2007), symbolic action theory (Boesch, 1991), dialogical approaches (Hermans & Hermans-Konopka, 2010), hermeneutic approaches (Bruner, 1990, 2008; Richardson, Fowers, & Guignon, 1999), enactivism (Baerveldt & Verheggen, 2012), macro-cultural psychology (Ratner, 2012), as well as others (Magnusson & Marecek, 2012; Voestermans & Verheggen, 2013). Recently this diversity has been summarized in The Oxford Handbook of Culture and Psychology (Valsiner, 2012).

Despite the variability in their particular orientations and focuses, these approaches oppose mainstream psychology on the basis of distinct epistemological assumptions that articulate the inseparability between psychological and sociocultural phenomena. Kirschner and Martin (2010) summarize these assumptions as follows: First, sociocultural theories challenge individualistic epistemological divisions between selves and others, self and society, and individuals and culture, and instead they frame psychological functions as “emerging out of ‘otherness,’ and as enduringly permeated by it” (p. 7). From a social epistemological position, all psychological phenomena are relational processes unfolding with and via others, as well as through more enduring cultural symbols, traditions, and the power relations within society. This implies that the very contents of psychological life are sociocultural and historical artifacts that have been appropriated from particular others and the social world at large; further, to study psychological phenomena means to study how social, political, and cultural contexts come to determine varied psychological life.

Second, while the sociocultural world invariably constitutes the possibilities for selfhood, human agents ‘choose’ different ways of living and transform cultural meanings by interpreting them in distinctive ways. Agency takes place as persons take up and reconfigure cultural meanings and practices in order to create uniquely meaningful lives; and since we do not make up our worlds but navigate and negotiate our way through them, sociocultural theorists view humans not as self-determining but self-interpreting beings.

Finally, given the first two principles, all knowledge is necessarily situated and perspectival. Cultural researchers thus do not seek ‘objective,’ cause–effect models that predict and control behavior but instead aim toward increasingly adequate, historical understandings of how psychological phenomena unfold in context. Further, because cultural psychology is itself constituted by mixed contexts, research is recognized as a form of practice that cannot be separated from its practical and moral effects. In Shweder’s words,

Cultural psychology is the study 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. Cultural psychology is the study of the ways subject and object, self and other, psyche and culture, person and context, figure and ground, practitioner and practice, live together, require each other, and dynamically, dialectically, and jointly make each other up (1991, p. 73).

Taken together, cultural psychologists oppose individualist assumptions that regard individuals separately from others and from the social and natural world, and instead they maintain a social epistemology that assumes selves and others constitute one another and the world. This social/individual dichotomy is artificial in the first instance, created to manage disciplinary boundaries and aggregationist research strategies. It functions to emphasize individually based explanations of a sort, namely those that make up psychology’s variables and functional explanations that focus not on persons but on aggregated parts of persons. By rejecting such a position, cultural research focuses on the rich and varied ways in which sociohistorically positioned persons actively respond to and engage with others in particular contexts, creating new meanings in turn. Importantly, research studies themselves take varied forms, depending on the questions and focuses of interest. This means that cultural psychologists do not have a single research ‘method’ shared by all, but rather, a shared understanding of the psychological world as socially constituted. That is, there is no fixed method but a concern with methodologies more generally (Ingleby, 2000; Valsiner, 2014).

Cross-cultural and cultural psychology: Basic differences

We can now see more clearly how the cultural position differs fundamentally from that of cross-cultural psychology. As an extension of mainstream psychology, the cross-cultural discipline maintains an individualist epistemology that imagines individuals as autonomous, cognitive agents who share a universal human nature that can be discovered using scientific methods. The social world is external to this basic nature, affecting it from the outside. In this framework, the aim of psychological science is to find the most accurate measures for determining universally valid truths, or as Berry (2013) has it, a global psychology based “on a universalist vision” (p. 55). In practice this means conducting experiments (ideally) and psychometric testing (more frequently), followed up by statistical analyses. Importantly, from the individualist stance, cross-cultural research methods are regarded separately from theory just as theory is separated from empirical reality (Fuller, 2002). That is, methods serve as tools that collect objective empirical data, whereas theories refer to the ‘pure’ universal laws that are distinguishable and deducible from variable empirical reality. The statistical techniques of mainstream psychology reflect this understanding in that they ‘extract’ aggregated means from qualitative variability and take these as expressive of basic universal laws.¹⁴

Taking a social rather than individualist epistemological approach, cultural psychologists advance a very different position. Because human life develops and gains form through cultural meanings and traditions, there is no universal human being that can be known outside of culture. Social epistemology begins from the premise that there is but one world and that many people experience it differently (Fuller, 2002). From here the problem of knowledge is not to identify absolute truths but to understand how varieties of perception and action are possible. Accordingly, instead of extracting universal principles from empirical cases, cultural scholars identify within them theoretically relevant findings. Theoretical and empirical dimensions are regarded as mutually constitutive: theory informs the disclosure of empirical reality and empirical reality provides the possibilities for theory. Thus for cultural psychologists, theory and method are not meaningfully distinguishable, for they are integrated in the practice of theoretically informed research. Moreover, by recognizing their role in the construction of research findings, researchers do not claim universal knowledge and instead turn toward situated knowledge, ethics, and politics (Bruner, 2008; Kirschner & Martin, 2010; Magnusson & Marecek, 2012). Scientific inquiry itself is regarded as a historically situated, social practice carrying practical effects and implications that require reflexive consideration.¹⁵

Interestingly, despite cultural psychologists’ deliberate attempts to dissociate themselves from the individualist and experimental approach shared by mainstream and cross-cultural psychology, over the last few decades, cross-cultural psychologists have progressively broadened their discipline to incorporate the work of cultural psychology. What is more, in recent years a growing number of social psychologists appear to have adopted the name ‘cultural psychology’ as an umbrella term for research that continues to bear strong resemblance with cross-cultural approaches. In our view, these developments require clarification since they misconstrue the incommensurability between the two disciplines. We develop this position in the second part of our paper.

When cross-cultural psychology encounters cultural adversity

The rise of cultural approaches in the 1980s caused a stir in cross-cultural psychology. As articulated by Shweder, cultural psychology posed a threat to cross-cultural psychology. Debates about the name of the discipline’s primary association, the IACCP, soon came to permeate presidential addresses, IACCP conference sessions, journal publications (Davidson, 1994); and they were officially tabled by the discipline’s founding members in the Cross-Cultural Psychology Bulletin in the early 1990s (see Lonner, 1992 for the first entry in the debate). At this time, the major proponents of discipline (e.g. Berry, Lonner, Segall) defended its original name on the basis of two aligned arguments: first, ‘cross-cultural’ was considered broad enough to include the whole spectrum of research approaches (cultural approaches included) whose mutual goal was ‘to take culture seriously’ (Dasen, 1993; Diaz-Guerrero, 1993); second, the title of the association itself was deemed irrelevant, for what mattered was the (broad) activities to which it referred (Dasen, 1993; Segall, 1993). Whereas the first of these arguments dismisses the implications of cultural critiques, the latter undermines the implications of ownership and control that lie implicit in association titles. Yet, even when they were voiced by the presumed leaders of the discipline, these positions failed to settle increasing disputes over the nature and scope of cross-cultural psychology.

The emergence of cultural psychological theories has over the last few decades led to divided positions among cross-cultural psychologists. Staunch defenders of the field—represented primarily by cross-cultural psychology’s founding members—have resisted the significance of cultural critiques and instead subverted them under the banner of an expanded cross-cultural program. At the same time, a growing group of cross-cultural scholars has adopted cultural psychological theory and appropriated the ‘cultural’ label to advance a new kind of experimental discipline (e.g. Kitayama & Cohen, 2007). As we trace these developments, we hope to show that the cross-cultural discipline may be uncertain about its status, and that the new cultural psychology cannot resolve cross-cultural psychology’s problems.

In the late 1990s, Segall, Lonner, and Berry (1998) tried to silence the IACCP’s ‘name issue’ in a review article published in the American Psychologist. Therein they recount the story of their discipline within which they include a ‘quiet’ debate about the name of the association, “bubbling up only in the 1990s … but a better name for the enterprise than ‘cross-cultural psychology’ never emerged” (pp. 1101–1102). Consistent with this account, the authors maintain that “what cross-cultural psychology is called is not nearly as important as what it does—to ensure that the broadest range of psychological topics be explored within the broadest possible spectrum of ethnicity and culture and by diverse methodologies” (p. 1102). By elaborating the scope of their discipline, the authors could subvert cultural approaches under a dominant cross-cultural model, and with time this strategy grew especially necessary, for cultural psychologists grew in numbers both in and outside of cross-cultural psychology.

The gradual construction of a broad cross-cultural psychology can be traced in the successive volumes of Cross-Cultural Psychology: Research and Applications—one of the discipline’s principal textbooks. In the first version (Berry et al., 1992), the authors define cross-cultural psychology as a project primarily concerned with testing universal psychological laws in different cultures and ethnic groups using comparative psychological methods. Minimal attention is given to cultural psychology, which is discussed primarily as an underdeveloped challenge to the dominant cross-cultural stream. In the second, 2002 edition however, cultural psychology is introduced as one of the “three major traditions of thinking in cross-cultural psychology” (Berry, Poortinga, Marshall, & Dasen, 2002, p. 2), which, along with indigenous psychology and culture-comparative approaches, may be reconciled into a single disciplinary project. In an effort toward reconciliation, the authors argue that the ‘variable level of analysis’ (recognized by cross-cultural psychologists) need not be incompatible with the cultural view when the latter is treated as an “exploratory phase in a research effort that should consist of both exploration and verification” (p. 236). That is, the qualitative research of cultural psychologists may be seen as fulfilling the second major aim of the discipline, namely exploration and discovery (see above). To fulfill the final aim however—that is, to integrate findings toward a universal psychology—cultural psychological research must still be scrutinized and translated into objective relations between independent and dependent variables.¹⁶

Such an integrated program was never realized and in its stead disputes between cross-cultural and cultural perspectives continued. In 1998, a ‘Theory and Method’ series was introduced in the Cross-Cultural Psychology Bulletin to address “a time of conceptual challenge as cultural research engages increasingly with core issues of theory and method” (Miller, 1998, p. 7). Aiming toward “a greater understanding of the contrasting assumptions, goals, and methodological commitments informing the multiple theoretical perspectives represented in cultural approaches to psychology” (p. 7, emphases added),¹⁷ the series from the outset became a forum for debating the differing assumptions of ‘empirical’ cross-cultural and ‘interpretive’ cultural perspectives (Kashima, 1998). Interestingly, most of the series’ contributors defended cultural psychological perspectives (Lillard, 1999; Ratner, 2000; Yamaguchi, 2002). Lillard’s (1999) defense of Cole’s cultural psychology is especially revealing: “the resurgence of interest in cultural psychology at this point in the history of the [cross-cultural] discipline may well be due to a sense of the dominant paradigm possibly having (for the time being) run its course” (p. 27). Outside of the ‘Theory and Method’ series, the Cross-Cultural Psychology Bulletin grew populated by research projects and stories from varied theoretical perspectives (cross-cultural and cultural included), revealing a mixed constitution of readers and affiliates of the discipline.¹⁸

By the time of the third and most recent version of the textbook (Berry, Poortinga, Breugelmans, Chasiotis, & Sam, 2011), the authors could no longer deny cultural psychology its distinctive research perspective. Consequently, the cross-cultural discipline expanded yet again, and is now regarded as a multifaceted enterprise made up of three central ‘interpretive positions’: the culture-comparative, the cultural, and the indigenous. Most striking is the fact that theoretical attempts to reconcile these disciplines have been abandoned, as they appear to be no longer necessary. The authors maintain that cultural psychologists themselves have turned away from ‘a fairly strict relativism’ and now accept ‘culture-comparative research’ that assumes universal aspects of human behavior (p. 298). Whereas the former (“fairly strict relativist”) approach is supported with references to Shweder, the more recent developments are based upon the latest Handbook of Cultural Psychology (Kitayama & Cohen, 2007)¹⁹—which now merits scrutiny.

In our view, what the authors refer to by citing Kitayama and Cohen (2007) is not a conciliatory effort on the part of cultural scholars but a severing movement on the part of cross-cultural psychologists. This distinction is important because it points not to the growing success but the growing inadequacy of the cross-cultural program in light of a strengthening cultural critique. The contributors to Kitayama and Cohen’s Handbook represent a growing number of cross-cultural scholars who are openly associating themselves with the cultural program—and not the other way around.

We do not mean to create disciplinary boundaries, divisions of argumentation, or maintain artificial sub-disciplinary units. Instead, a false consensus conflates the two approaches and threatens to confuse the very distinctions upon which they were founded. Indeed, we argue that the new cultural psychology, remains individualist and universalist, and in this sense fails to salvage cross-cultural psychology from cultural critiques. Furthermore it perpetuates the misinterpretation of cultural psychological work by cross-cultural psychologists.

In the introductory chapter to the Handbook, Markus and Hamedani (2007) identify the members of the discipline “by their appreciation for the interdependence of the individual with the social, the material, and the historical, and by their view of people as active meaning makers and world makers” (p. 7). Further, cultural psychologists are said to follow well-known sociocultural theorists (including Wundt and Shweder) who oppose static understandings of culture (either as a set of internal traits, external norms, or predetermined sets of people) and study “how psychological process[es] may be implicitly and explicitly shaped by the worlds, contexts, or cultural systems that people inhabit” (p. 11). So far, so good.

Yet, in their subsequent explanation of the major research frameworks in the field, Markus and Hamedani (2007) demonstrate how such sociocultural postulates are not assumed in most of these approaches, and even when they are theoretically recognized, they are not integrated into research practices. The authors list five major ‘sociocultural’ frameworks: dimensional, ecocultural, dynamic constructivist, cognitive toolkit, and sociocultural models. Whereas the first two simply are traditional cross-cultural perspectives (put forward by Triandis and Berry, respectively), the dynamic constructivist approach assigns culture only an intermittent influence on cognitive information processing. The cognitive toolkit and sociocultural models approach appear to bear the closest resemblance to cultural psychological scholarship in that both admit that psychological phenomena are constituted in and through culture. Yet, upon further scrutiny, this admission appears nominal only, as researchers working from these perspectives nonetheless rely on experimental and psychometric research approaches that individualize and turn culture, once again, into one of so many variables. Mind pre-exists culture on this view, and whatever else culture may do, it does not essentially shape mind.

Overall, in our reading of the Handbook, we have found most of its research to be focused on testing the generality of intellectual processes across groups (especially Eastern vs. Western groups) using mainstream (especially psychometric) practices.²⁰ Thus, despite identifying with cultural psychology, the contributors do not extend its theoretical premises into their research practice. Instead, explanations of psychological phenomena are grasped via abstract, variable-based frameworks that not only separate mind from culture but also relate them through causal laws. In this way the new cultural psychology retains the individualism of general psychology and falls short of representing a genuinely cultural framework. As we have discussed extensively above, cultural psychology opposes individualist assumptions and instead maintains a social epistemology based on which it studies psychological life as sociohistorically constituted.

In our view, while new cultural psychologists appear willing to grant the explanatory power of (genuine) cultural psychological theories, by keeping with mainstream methods and their statistical analyses, the new discipline does not escape the individualism that it claims to be overcoming. Individualist assumptions are inherent to aggregate, statistical research methods that operate on their basis. Already by definition these methods cannot generate genuinely social explanations, a problem also acknowledged by Markus and Hamedani (2007). Moreover, we have argued that aggregate research approaches ultimately bypass the question of individual variance, since they focus on population means and deviations. For a genuinely cultural psychology, variable individual experience constitutes the central question of interest: it is at the level of experience that psyche and culture constitute one another. Accordingly, cultural psychologists turn their attention toward regularities that can be found within the actual practices of situated persons.

The latter point helps explain why earlier attempts at consolidating cultural psychology with cross-cultural psychology (Berry et al., 2002)—which treated the former as a ‘qualitative method’ or component within a larger experimental project—were misguided: they undermined the implications of a social epistemological position that eschews the abstract empirical work of aggregate statistical constructions. Against such conciliatory positions, we argue that cultural psychology is not a qualitative method whose findings are to be supplanted by ‘objective’ statistical analyses. Rather, cultural psychology defines an exhaustive epistemological program that employs mixed approaches for conducting theoretically informed research.

Not only cross-cultural psychologists but the new wave of experimental cultural psychologists have failed to appreciate the implications of the social epistemology that constitutes the sociocultural tradition. As we have argued, the latter refers to a historical tradition that advances a sociocultural understanding of the human world and therefore dismisses research that attempts to atomize this picture into interactions among abstract variables. Yet it is clear that the cultural critique has agitated cross-cultural psychology, disconcerting its most adamant proponents and generating a new stream of scholars dispirited by the limited explanations of the mainstream program.

Recently, Gabrenya (2009) investigated what he sensed to be a decades-long ennui among IACCP conference attendees who feel that they no longer ‘fit in’ the discipline; are annoyed with the repetition of the same old ideas; and are frustrated with the ‘inner clique’ that seems to dominate the Association (p. 13). Gabrenya explains that while the IACCP seems to be doing well in some respects (e.g. membership numbers, resources, conferences), “we also experience high year-to-year turnover, conspicuous individuals stop attending conferences, and our overall size has not kept up with the increased popularity of cultural studies in Psychology” (p. 13). His survey reveals a growing diversity and emergent critiques within the field. First, when asked to identify with the major research perspectives, 49% of respondents identified with cultural psychology, whereas 69% claimed a high identification with cross-cultural psychology and 24% with indigenous psychology (p. 14–15).²¹ Second, critiques of the discipline shared a common thread: “a call for a broader approach to cultural studies and greater inclusiveness, the latter usually point[ing] to the newer community that is collectively known as ‘cultural psychology’ ” (p. 16).²² Gabrenya found that “low quality science” was the most frequent criticism (addressed by 25% of respondents), followed by “narrow theoretical and methodological approaches (mainly clinging to old ideas and ignoring newer qualitative methods), JCCP’s narrow publication policies, and weak research overall” (p. 18).

Overall, Gabrenya (2009) identifies significant internal disagreements within the cross-cultural field, all of which are associated with the disruption created by cultural theories. However, it is both premature and inaccurate to think of these developments as indicative of the dominance of a sociocultural tradition. Not only do cultural psychologists still represent a minority view in the psychological field, but, as we have shown, their commitment to a sociocultural psychology is also subject to dispute.

Gabrenya (2009) also distinguishes two groups of cultural psychologists: “those who advocate for some form of social constructivist or Völkerpsychologie metatheory, qualitative research, single-culture studies, and field research; and those who employ traditional experimental psychology methods, regardless of metatheoretical or epistemological orientation” (p. 21). Yet, he finds that these distinctions are not clear among members of the IACCP. When asked what is meant by ‘cultural psychology,’ survey respondents saw the cultural field “as more relativist, qualitative, and deeply theoretical” than the “somewhat more applied” (p. 21) cross-cultural psychology. However, when asked to identify three prominent cultural psychologists, respondents named the following scholars in order of frequency: Shweder, Cole, Kitayama, Valsiner, Heine, and Markus. Gabrenya interprets these findings as follows:

… it seems that IACCP members see cultural psychology primarily in terms of the Shweder wing but tend to assimilate the active leaders to a common perspective. I fear that an insufficiently articulated view of cultural psychology poses a problem for understanding the relationship between IACCP and cultural psychology and resolving their differences (p. 21).

We have made a comparable claim in this paper, and others have done this elsewhere (e.g. Christopher, Wendt, Marecek, & Goodman, 2014; Cole, 1996; Marvakis & Papadopoulos, 2002; Ratner, 2000). That is, we have argued that cross-cultural and cultural psychology represent two distinct research traditions with deeply rooted epistemological differences. For this reason, a consilience between the disciplines seems premature, as they are largely incommensurable. We see the new ‘hybrid’ cultural psychology as a direct outcome of this growing struggle, representing an attempt to preserve the mainstream view while aligning itself with the strength of cultural theory. Yet, because it perpetuates the individualist program—and ultimately leaves culture outside of psychology—the project is likely to fail.

Conclusions

That cross-cultural and cultural psychology appear to have carved up the world differently and conceived of their work along entirely different lines does not seem to matter a great deal to some. There are two related issues here: First, perhaps as several commentators have noted, it is the actual research that matters, not whether it is labeled cross-cultural or cultural psychology. Second, these could be considered institutional questions—“cross-cultural psychology” was an acceptable label for those attempting to institutionalize their existence within the psychology departments of the 1970s and 1980s in North American and European universities. Attempting to overcome psychology’s “culture-blindness” was a laudable goal of early cross-cultural psychologists whose context was the emergence of cognitive psychology and the individualism and mechanism of information processing psychology as well as the cultural upheavals of the 1960s and 1970s. It became a recognizable feature of some psychology departments that one might wish to carry out “cross-cultural” research to investigate the extent to which known phenomena might also be relevant to other “populations” of “subjects.” Furthermore, by claiming that there is a universal psychology to be had, albeit one that needs to be modified by a certain cultural sensitivity, cross-cultural psychologists never threatened the overall intellectual project of a universal, individualist, experimental psychology. As a historical anomaly then, why question what is merely a passing problem of institutional identification?

That this is not just a matter of labeling or institutional affiliation alone should, by now, be abundantly clear. The work of people such as Michael Cole, Jean Lave, Ole Dreier, Jaan Valsiner, and Richard Shweder, among many others, seriously challenged the hegemony of a discipline of psychology that seeks to find its epistemological and methodological center in a science of psychology that Wilhelm Wundt had already warned was limited in its ability to inform us of the major features of human life beyond sensory and perceptual capacities. As a general descriptor, “cultural” in cultural psychology is not particularly useful insofar as culture is a polysemic term. One reviewer of this paper asked, “which is the ‘true’ concept of culture?” We don’t disagree with Shweder (2001, p. 3153) that the standard, post WWII anthropological accounts of culture are good reference points for understanding the concept,

One can summarize the standard view by saying that ‘culture’ refers to community-specific ideas about what is true, good, beautiful, and efficient. To be ‘cultural’ those ideas about truth, goodness, beauty, and efficiency must be socially inherited and customary. To be ‘cultural’ those socially inherited and customary ideas must be embodied and/or enacted meanings; they must actually be constitutive of (and thereby revealed in) a way of life.

Voestermans and Verheggen’s (2013) recent foray into cultural psychology likewise takes up this problem, namely the question of culture not as label or metaphor but as a descriptor of what relational and expressive bodies do. And constituting a way of life through relational and expressive practices includes what Valsiner (2000) calls the process of distancing, the use of semiotic devices to reflexively evaluate past and present. What each of these positions avoids is the category mistake of treating culture as an “independent variable” that is overlaid on a universal psychology. A psychology that is rooted in a technology or technologies will in the first instance be concerned only with the propagation of whatever types of knowledge those technologies produce. Whether it is personality traits (are there extraverts everywhere in the world?) or functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) (what brain structures are used when one thinks about one’s local deity?), the purpose is to generate universal conceptions of human action. Naturally, such techniques have their place—we do not propose that they be abandoned or that they are not useful. But it is their universalizing elements that preclude understanding cultural phenomena in the first instance.

The difficult work is explicating just how we might begin to unpack the layers of culture, on the one hand, and psychology on the other hand so that a viable structure can be derived from the research problems at hand (Valsiner, 2014). The overlapping interests between cross-cultural and cultural psychologists make this a propitious time for cross-disciplinary dialogue on these issues. It is also time to move on from a notion that a universal psychology is a required starting point to understand the diverse and profound ways that people actually live on this planet and to recognize that the diversity of forms of life that constitute human cultures manifests itself in psychologies worthy of our understanding without an a priori scientism to blinker us.

Footnotes

Acknowledgments

We would like to thank the members of the Western Canadian Theoretical Psychology Conference for their helpful comments on an early version of this manuscript.

Declaration of Conflicting Interests

The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Funding

The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Notes

Author biographies

Basia D Ellis is a Postdoctoral Fellow in the Department of Comparative Human Development at the University of Chicago, IL. She received her doctoral degree in Social and Theoretical Psychology from the University of Calgary, Canada. Broadly speaking, she is interested in subjectivity as an embodied, sociocultural, political process. Her research employs critical and cultural psychological perspectives along with ethnographic methods to study the everyday lives of ‘illegal’ migrants in Canada and the United States.

Henderikus J Stam is a Professor in both the Theory and Clinical programs at the University of Calgary. He is founding and current editor of Theory & Psychology and the President of the Society for the History of Psychology (Division 26 of the American Psychological Association). His research has focused on the foundational problems of psychology and the 20th century history of the discipline. Email: stam@ucalgary.ca.

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