Abstract
The research presented in this article follows up on several aspects of Gustav Jahoda’s long and fruitful career: (1) his early fieldwork on cognitive development in Africa, particularly in the area of spatial skills; (2) his interest in cross-cultural psychology as a research method; and (3) his insistence on bringing anthropology and psychology together. The topic of our research is the development of a so-called “geocentric” frame of spatial reference. This is a cognitive style, in which individuals describe and represent small-scale table-top space in terms of large-scale geographic dimensions. We explore the development with age of geocentric language and cognition, and the relationships between the two. We also explore the many environmental and socio-cultural variables that favor the use of this frame. We demonstrate how we untangled several of these variables by using a succession of within-society group comparisons, in several societies where a geocentric frame is in common usage (Bali, Indonesia, India, and Nepal). Our research program unfolds like a detective story, where one finding that is difficult to interpret because of several confounded variables leads to another quasi-experimental group comparison that suggests another hypothesis, which is then tested in a further session of field-work. In each case, we emphasize how important it was to have extensive linguistic and ethnographic knowledge before implementing psychological tests. The research design is not cross-cultural as such (we hardly ever perform comparisons between societies), but culturally sensitive within a series of societies; in other words, as Dasen and Jahoda (1986, p. 413) defined it, “cross-cultural developmental psychology is not just comparative: essentially it is an outlook that takes culture seriously.”
Keywords
Gustav Jahoda’s legacy
Gustav Jahoda has always been concerned with the validity and reliability of cross-cultural research, i.e., with methods and not only findings. For example, Frijda and Jahoda (1966) provided a thoughtful analysis of the methodological problems confronted in cross-cultural research, which, they wrote “is like virtue—everybody is in favour of it, but there are widely differing views as to what it is and ought to be” (p. 122). Among many suggestions, they point out that cross-cultural research should be done by “indigenous research assistants [trained] to the level where they can operate independently (…), but this is no real substitute for fully-fledged researchers within various cultures, able to conduct a complete project from the planning stage onward” (p. 120). The authors also criticise comparisons between only two groups and research carried out in locations chosen for convenience reasons rather than on theoretical grounds. Furthermore, “cross-cultural comparisons may have to be supplemented by intra-cultural comparisons” (p. 123).
Gustav Jahoda’s own early cross-cultural field-work covered a wide range of subjects, in social and developmental psychology, or combining the two, for example, in the study of the development of concepts of nationality and children’s ideas about economics (covered in this special issue by Markova and Jesuino). In the cognitive area, he dealt with visual illusions and pictorial representation and with spatial abilities. One of his main interests was to find out which factors influenced the performance on a standard psychological test, the Kohs blocks, taken by psychologists either as an assessment of spatial-perceptual skills or one of general intelligence. He focused in particular on orientations errors. Jahoda (1976) hypothesized that these could be linked to the concept of horizontality as assessed by Piaget, but the data suggested that the key factor could be psychological differentiation (field dependence/independence). This was disconfirmed in a later study (Jahoda, 1978), which assessed the impact of pattern difficulty, and led to the conclusion that “variations in the manner subjects perceived the nature of the task appeared as a major determinant of cross-cultural differences” (p. 45). Task demands (copying a model constructed with blocks with the model present, or only seen for 5 seconds, or from a photograph or a line drawing) were explored by Jahoda (1979), who concluded that Africans do not have a general disability in handling spatial relations, but experience difficulty mainly with two-dimensional representations.
In this study, and in Jahoda (1980), he raised the issue of sex or gender differences as they interact (or not) with ethnic/cultural differences and raised questions about environmental influences (such as gender socialization and stimulation by schooling) vs. ontogenetic changes such as hormonal levels, claiming that the data argued more in favor of the latter. This sequence of studies is interesting because Jahoda and his colleagues pursue one issue, cultural and sex differences in spatial skills, with each study remaining ambiguous in terms of conclusions, but leading to more questions, which are then followed up in subsequent research. Unfortunately, contrary to the advice he had given himself (e.g., in Frijda & Jahoda, 1966), in most of these studies “culture” is reduced to a comparison between Scottish and African samples from different countries (Ghana, Zimbabwe) without any justification for their selection other than the availability of researchers. Furthermore, much of the hypotheses regarding sex differences are based on the assumption of a stronger gender socialization in Scotland because boys are given technological toys, without a corresponding ethnographic observation of gender socialization in the corresponding African contexts.
In 1988, he provided a critical summary of cross-cultural research on that topic (Jahoda, 1988), including his own work, in which he regrets the piecemeal, non-comparable and non-cumulative character of most of this research. He argues for a research program that would consist of “large-scale experimental studies that cover a wide age span, from childhood into late adolescence” (pp. 153–154), “and this, obviously, in a cross-cultural design, because socialization practices, in particular, are likely to be uniform in a single society” (p. 152). He thought, in particular, of training studies that could be carried out through experimental school programs.
Another topic that has occupied Gustav Jahoda throughout his career is the relationship between anthropological and psychological research. In a major volume (Jahoda, 1982), he not only retraces the history of those disciplines and their interactions but strongly argues that the two, while conflicting at times in their methods, can be very fruitfully combined.
A recent example of such fruitful interdisciplinary interaction is the research project “Person, space and memory in the contemporary Pacific” headed by Wassmann. A volume concerning theories of mind was edited by Wassmann, Träuble, and Funke (2013) with a foreword by Jahoda (2013). Five interdisciplinary research teams have investigated five Pacific societies; the leading research question was when children in these five different cultures come to assign mental states to others and the role of cultural impact in this development. In some Pacific societies, there is a concept of “opacity of minds,” i.e., that it is impossible to know what goes on in another person’s mind. Children are socialized accordingly to hide aspects of the self from others. In the epilogue to this book, Wassmann and Funke (2013) conclude that theories of mind are, like the rest of cognition, best formulated as a cognitive style: “In other words: The cognitive competence exists, yet, and this is decisive, due to cultural reasons it can be made visible only at a later stage or can be entirely unwanted” (p. 241).
Wassmann and Funke (2013) also discuss several methodological issues of such interdisciplinary research, including its problems, and state that “by no means should a division of tasks leave the content to cultural anthropology and the method to psychology” (p. 250). Another survey of the methodological interface between psychology and anthropology was produced by Mishra and Dasen (2007), and a detailed discussion, focusing on the collaborative research carried out over the years by Wassmann and Dasen, appears in Dasen (2017).
In the main part of this paper, we describe a research project that follows up very closely, we believe, on the pioneer work of Gustav Jahoda. The topic of the research is spatial cognition, studied developmentally, and we examine the impact of a variety of socio-cultural and personal variables similar to those Jahoda was interested in. Our research program consists of a series of interlocking field studies, each answering some questions but leading to others. The locations and samples have been chosen in order to provide the opportunity not only of studying variables of interest, but to “un-confound” variables that are inextricably linked in research limited to one particular society (or several similar societies, such as Western industrial countries). 1 In each field site, we were careful to collect extensive ethnographic and linguistic information as a basis for the psychological methods. However, this fit with Gustav Jahoda’s ideas and interests was not explicit when we planned and carried out the project; it comes more as an afterthought. We therefore choose to report the study without explicit reference to Jahoda, but will come back to discussing the links in a final section.
Un-confounding variables
Cross-cultural psychology as a research method sometimes allows this un-confounding of variables. For example, in developmental psychology, because most children go to school and move through a similar curriculum at about the same ages, it is impossible to distinguish the variables of chronological age (maturation) and the effects of schooling. We therefore need to find a social context in which some children go to school and others do not. This used to be fairly common in many parts of the world, although access to education was often linked itself to other variables (gender, income, rural vs. urban settings, etc.). In our research program, as we will see below, we were still able to use this strategy in India and Nepal in the last decade of the 20th century, but we later turned to comparing different types of schooling. Comparing groups as they occur naturally is called “quasi-experimental” because individuals are not assigned to these groups at random, a basic requirement in experimental psychology. The groups to be compared are carefully chosen so as to differ, as much as possible, only on the variable of interest. The advantage of the method, compared to experimental research, is its ecological validity.
In our research program (Dasen & Mishra, 2010), we used the quasi-experimental strategy repeatedly in order to tease out the various eco-cultural, social, and linguistic variables that influence the development of a particular spatial cognitive style, the geocentric frame of reference (FoR), to be described below. We start with the puzzling results of some research we carried out in Bali (Indonesia) in 1994, where we found a very precocious development of this geocentric frame, followed by an increase of the egocentric one. Because we worked with one single (and rather small) sample, it was not clear whether this result represented a stage reversal (in Piagetian terms—and this would have been a scoop!), or whether the increase with age of the egocentric frame was linked to the confounded factors of schooling in Indonesian and increasing urban contact. Follow-up research in India, Nepal, and again in Bali, comparing various sub-groups within each cultural area (schooled and un-schooled, urban and rural, bilingualism with English or Indonesian, different types of schooling) allows us to tease out the various factors and their interactions.
Spatial language and frames of reference (FoR): The geocentric vs. egocentric cognitive style
According to Levinson (2003), three frames of reference can be used to describe the location of objects in a restricted, so-called table-top space: intrinsic, egocentric (sometimes called relative), and geocentric (also called absolute or allocentric). This corresponds roughly to what Piaget and Inhelder (1956) termed topological, projective, and Euclidean space, or according to Taylor and Tversky (1996), space centered on the object, on the person, and on the environment. In the intrinsic/topological frame, which seems to be universal and develops very early in children (cf. Jahoda, Deregowski, & Sinha, 1974), objects are situated in reference to each other (next to, near, inside, to the nose of the car, etc.). The egocentric frame uses the point of view of the speaker, using mainly right and left, and is favored in many languages, including Indo-European, Japanese, and Indonesian. The geocentric frame makes use of distant geographic features (to the mountain/sea; uphill/downhill) or coordinates (cardinal directions NSEW) to speak about local table space, including inside a room. In Bali, for example, Bahasa Indonesian tends to use the egocentric frame: “put the knife to the right and the fork to the left of the plate,” which might be translated in traditional Balinese as “Put the knife to the mountain and the fork to the sea.”
Most languages allow the use of all three frames of reference, but show a preference for one or the other. This is why we speak of a “cognitive style”: all cognitive processes are potentially available, but a series of personal and contextual circumstances determine which frame is more likely to be chosen. Thus, in Euro-American societies, the geocentric frame is often used for travel over large distances but never spontaneously inside of a room. Levinson (2003) and his team of anthropological linguists have found a number of languages in which the preference for the geocentric frame is very strong. This preference is evident not only in the vocabulary but also in non-verbal cognition. Levinson’s team has designed a number of tests that allow to determine which frame of reference is being used for spatial representation (which is what we call spatial encoding).
To give an example, in the test called “Animals in a row,” the informant is presented with three toy animals aligned on a table, all three looking in the same direction. The experimenter says “Look at these animals. You will have to remember them and put them in the same way on the other table,” the second table being placed at some distance and with a rotation of 180°. If the animals were looking right on the first table, and the informant aligns them also to the right after turning around, s/he is probably using the egocentric FoR. If s/he makes them look to the left, s/he has more likely encoded the situation in the geocentric mode: “The animals looked to the mountain on the first table, they also look to the mountain on the second.”
In our research, we have systematically used this test along with two others also devised by Levinson (2003) and his team, “Chips” and “Steve’s Maze.” In the former, the experimenter shows a card with two geometric shapes, for example a small circle above a larger one, and asks the informant to find the same card among a choice of four (each with a different orientation) on the second table, after a 180° or 90° rotation. In the latter, the informant is shown an outline map with an incomplete path on the first table, and a choice of complementary paths on the second (one representing an egocentric solution, one a geocentric one, and a third irrelevant option). Each test consists of at least five items; the score being the proportion of items in which a particular FoR is used. Furthermore, we systematically used three spatial language elicitation tasks, also inspired by the work of Levinson’s (2003) team. In all the locations, the tasks had the same format, although local adaptations were made (e.g., in the familiarity of the toy animals). Extensive pre-testing was carried out to ascertain the appropriateness of the tasks and the instructions, always presented in the informants’ preferred language. The details of the methodology can be found in Dasen and Mishra (2010).
First study in Bali, 1994
In Bali, the traditional orientation system (KKKK) uses two orthogonal axes: Kaja, to the mountain, and Kelod, to the sea, as the main axis, and Kangin/Kauh at 90°. The latter terms are difficult to translate. In the South of the island, Gunung Agung, the central volcano (and dwelling place of the gods) is situated North and the sea South, Kangin is where the sun rises, and Kauh were it sets. As one moves around the island, Kaja keeps to be directed to the central mountain, until Kaja and Kelod are completely reversed on the North coast of Bali. The axis Kangin/Kauh follows suit, hence detached from the rising or setting sun, until suddenly, between two villages on the NE coast, the two terms are reversed. Hence, the Balinese KKKK orientation system is clearly geocentric, but, contrary to compass cardinal directions, it is adapted to the local topography.
Wassmann and Dasen (1996, 1998) first established the local use of the orientation system by studying it in different locations, on the coast and inside of the island. We also studied the spontaneous spatial language in everyday situations, such as when playing games or when adults give instructions to children. We then elicited spatial language more systematically by using some of Levinson’s methods. We did find that the Balinese linguistic preference was for geocentric terms, egocentric ones being restricted to body parts, except in urban areas, where they are also used to give directions. By first establishing in detail what people do, and what they say, and this in various segments of the population we were following the methodological rules we had established in previous collaborative research in Papua New-Guinea between Wassmann, the anthropologist, and Dasen the psychologist (Wassmann & Dasen, 1994a, 1994b). In particular, more constraining situations, such as tasks or tests—which are almost inevitable in most psychological research—are to be used only once their ecological validity can be established through such ethnographic and linguistic documentation.
In this first study, we used Animals and Steve’s Maze with a sample of 38 children (4 to 14 years old) and adults. Results are presented in Table 1.
Percentage of geocentric encoding in Bali (1994).
Geocentric encoding is stronger on Animals than on Steve’s Maze. Such task specificity is an interesting finding in itself. According to the strong linguistic relativism proposed by Levinson (2003), individuals speaking a language where the geocentric FoR is preferred should use this frame systematically in all situations. In a weaker form of linguistic relativism such as our theory of cognitive styles, the choice of a FoR may be linked to the test situation, and in particular on how easy it is to encode a particular display linguistically. For Animals, it is easy to encode “All animals look to the mountain” while on Steve’s Maze, one has to remember the shape of the missing path, which is much more iconic, and is often remembered by tracing the shape with a finger.
Looking at the choice of FoR with age, the overall impression is that young children (aged 4–8 years) start with 100% geocentric encoding, which then remains the predominant mode, but with an increase of the egocentric frame. Does this represent a reversal of the Piagetian stages, with an early development of Euclidean (geocentric) space, followed only later by projective (egocentric) components? This would be a remarkable finding, because in all of the cross-cultural research using Piaget’s theory, differences in the rates of development are often reported, but never any reversal of stages, a conclusion that has not changed since the review by Dasen and Heron (1981).
However, there are several methodological problems with this first study. Steve’s Maze proved to be impossible to use reliably with the very young children. Even with Animals, the task had sometimes to be simplified, reducing it to two toy animals. Generally speaking, it is very difficult to use such tests reliably at that age, not only in Bali, but everywhere, including in Geneva schools (cf. Dasen & Mishra, 2010). However, if we cannot be confident about the results in this age group, the precocity of geocentric encoding becomes questionable and the increase of egocentric encoding with age less striking. If we nevertheless try to interpret this age trend, it could be due to the increased influence of schooling (which, in Bali, uses Bahasa Indonesian, which favors egocentric references) and/or the increasing contact with urban life, where egocentric references are used more frequently.
First study in India and Nepal, 1999–2000
We therefore found ourselves in the situation where different confounded variables could explain the results. Furthermore, the sample was really very small, even though the data collection had kept us busy for several weeks. Clearly, the research had to be replicated with larger samples and more numerous language elicitation and non-verbal encoding tasks. To do this in Bali was not possible at that time, but a second large scale research program was set up in India with Ramesh Mishra and in Nepal with Shanta Niraula. Keeping to the large age range of 4 to 14 years, we were able to test 191 children in a village in India, 178 in the city of Benares, and 176 in a village in Nepal, each sample being stratified with equal numbers of boys and girls, and schooled and completely unschooled children. In this part of India, the dominant orientation system is based on cardinal directions (NSEW), which is used almost exclusively in rural areas, while in the city, egocentric references are used as well, particularly when giving directions. In rural Nepal, the common orientation system is based on two sectors of 180°, uphill and downhill, more precision being given by using local landmarks.
The details of the procedures and the results have been published in Dasen and Mishra (2010). In a few words, what we found was an overall preference for the geocentric FoR, with an increase of its use over age in all sub-groups, its use becoming almost exclusive after age 9 in rural samples, while a quarter of the city children choose egocentric references. Hence, there is no evidence of a reversal of stages, although one might evoke a specific path of development in which the geocentric FoR does appear early. There were no gender differences, nor any marked differences between schooled and unschooled children. Clearly, the acquisition of spatial frames in language and in cognition occurs in daily life and the family circle, and is not dependent on schooling. The only difference brought about by schooling was in rural Nepal, where the older schooled children would use the cardinal directions taught in school instead of the traditional system.
Second study in Bali, 2002
In 2002, Wassmann and Dasen were able to organise a large scale replication study in Bali, with access to schools, and two main samples (4 to 12 years) in the North of the island, 72 children in a small city and 98 in a nearby village. We also returned briefly to the location of the first study, testing 33 children aged 4 to 8 years.
At what age do the Balinese children learn to use the traditional (KKKK) orientation system, and the cardinal points system (NSEW) taught in school? We simply asked the children, first outside and then inside of a school room, “Show me Kaja” or “Show me North,” and so on, going through all eight possibilities as well as the egocentric references (right, left, in front, behind). In the village, the traditional system is used correctly even at age 4, which confirms the precocity of this acquisition found in our first study. The cardinal directions in Bahasa Indonesian are learned progressively, and are used correctly by age 9. In the city, the learning of both systems occurs concurrently, but is much slower, and is still not systematically correct at age 11–12 years.
A similar difference between the urban and rural samples is found on three spatial encoding tasks. The results are presented in Figure 1.
Percentage of geocentric encoding (“R-A gradient”) on three tasks, Animals (four animals), Chips and Steve’s Maze, urban and rural samples.
The urban/rural difference is quite systematic for all three tasks and all age groups. The results also confirm the task specificity, with Chips eliciting most geocentric encoding. For Animals 2 and Chips, geocentric encoding increases with age, while it decreases on Steve’s Maze.
Why is a geocentric system more functional in a rural setting? In this particular case, the village was located on the mountain slope, so both the mountain top and the sea were clearly visible and much easier to locate than in the city. But the rural/urban difference was also found in India. Generally speaking, in a city, and unless the streets are organized at right angles and aligned on the geocentric system, it is easier to think of turning right or left. Note that the Balinese often combine both frames: “Turn left, towards the mountain.” Furthermore, the traditional Balinese orientation system is linked to the traditional and religious world view, where everything, from the orientation of temples to the organisation of individual houses, as well as religious and domestic rituals, are oriented in the KKKK system. The respect for these traditions is greater in rural than urban areas. But again, some variables are confounded, because urban families also tend to have a higher socio-economic level, more formal education, more contact with the media of newspapers and television, and are more likely to speak Bahasa Indonesian.
In our second study in Bali, we were able to tease some of these variables apart. While all Balinese children are schooled in Bahasa Indonesian, and are therefore bilingual with Balinese, some have a preference for one language or the other. In the village, all children except three spoke Balinese in their family environments, while for 15 children (21%) in the city, it was Indonesian. On our testing sessions, we gave them the choice: 19% preferred the school language, 53% Balinese, and 28% a mixture of the two. This variable of language preference is correlated with the urban/rural split (r=0.67, p < 0.01), but can nevertheless be extracted in statistical analyses. Thus, the children who prefer Balinese and speak it at home are those who, from the age of 4, have a perfect command of the KKKK system, use geocentric language systematically and correctly, and tend to prefer geocentric encoding. Those who prefer Indonesian tend to use intrinsic and egocentric terms from 4 to 8 years, and only start to use geocentric references after the age of 9.
Structural equation modeling (Amos) on our data shows a coherent picture in which a virtual variable of “traditional culture” combines the urban/rural contact, language preference, knowledge of the traditional orientation system, and socio-economic indicators. It is the main variable, together with age, that determines the use of geocentric language and encoding. The importance of traditional Balinese culture is further shown by the fact that very young children in the remote location of our first study did show even more geocentric encoding (on Animals), although the percentage was below the 100% found in 1994.
Second study in India and Nepal, 2002–2004
To further tease out relevant eco-cultural variables, we continued research in India and Nepal. In the city of Benares, we tested 155 pupils of Sanskrit schools and 221 in a Hindi school, in the age range 11 to 15. The Hindi school was a semi-private school in which Hindi is used as the language of instruction, English being taught as a second language. The curriculum follows state government prescriptions. The Sanskrit schools train boys (and one of them girls) in Sanskrit language. The curriculum also includes history, geography, literature, etc. and in particular Hindu religion, including a variety of rituals, meditation and yoga. Some of the pupils are expected to become priests. Sanskrit has the particularity of using ten named cardinal directions, and many of the rituals are strictly oriented according to this geocentric system.
As expected, school type (Sanskrit vs. Hindi) turned out to be the strongest predictor of geocentric language and encoding, confirming the impact of traditional religious practices (Vajpayee, Dasen, & Mishra, 2008). Note that, in quasi-experimental research, variables often remain linked. In this case, the Sanskrit pupils tended to come from rural areas before attending these specialized schools, so the rural/urban dimension returns as a contributing variable. In this part of the study (as well as in the next one in Kathmandu), we explored relationships with several other variables, among which other cognitive aspects of spatial ability, which we cannot detail here (see Dasen & Mishra, 2010).
In Nepal, we pursued the question of bilingualism, in particular the situation where the school language seems to favor the egocentric frame. We tested 400 pupils aged 4 to 12 in Kathmandu, half of the sample in government schools where teaching occurs in Nepali (which favors the geocentric frame of cardinal directions), and half in private schools where English is the language of instruction. This study again confirmed the contrast between rural and urban environments: in Kathmandu, children do use some egocentric spatial language whereas none was found in the previous study in a Nepalese village. However, with age, the use of geocentric language increases, and so does geocentric encoding.
Following our results in Bali on the example of Bahasa Indonesian, we expected that the pupils taught in English would use more egocentric language and cognition but our hypothesis was disconfirmed: In fact, the pupils in the English medium schools produced more and not less geocentric encoding. This puzzling result could be explained (albeit post-hoc!) by the fact that the curriculum is essentially identical in all schools; even in the English-medium schools, cardinal directions are explicitly taught. The teachers themselves being native Nepali speakers, with English only as a second language, seem to convey the geocentric orientation system in the same way as those teaching in Nepali. Another contributing factor may be that the families that send their children to private schools tend to be of higher socio-economic strata, and these families tend to spend more time on Hindu religious rituals in the home—in which, as we know from the research in Sanskrit schools, cardinal directions are important.
Geneva, Switzerland
Note that, so far, we have only used comparisons between sub-groups within geographical and cultural regions and no comparisons between wide-ranging cultures or countries, as is usual in cross-cultural psychology. No doubt we could have compared the results in Bali, India and Nepal more directly, because our research tools were sufficiently standardized, on the one hand, but also locally adapted to insure their eco-cultural validity. In fact, what we have is a series of intra-cultural studies, the sub-groups being selected each time according to the research questions we were trying to answer. Curiosity however led us to carry out the same study in Geneva, Switzerland, where the school language is French, although 45 out of the sample of 75 children (aged 4 to 12) were themselves bilingual with other mainly European languages. In Geneva, it was no surprise to find that the FoR is completely egocentric for both language and cognition, with no marked age trend (and no impact of bilingualism). In a way, this result could be interpreted as demonstrating the complete absence of a cognitive process in a particular cultural context. We still prefer an interpretation in terms of cognitive styles, i.e., that this exclusive use of the egocentric FoR is culturally determined, while the use of a geocentric one remains possible. This is demonstrated by research in France conducted by Troadec (e.g., Troadec, Martinot, & Cottereau-Reiss, 2002; Courrèges & Troadec, 2009) who finds that French children can be induced to use allocentric references either by suggesting them in the instructions, or through training procedures.
Discussion
We conclude from this series of studies that the geocentric FoR does appear very early (4–5 years in our studies, but it could be earlier—we did not have the techniques to test younger children), in particular situations where the traditional culture fosters it through the language addressed to children and daily routines, including religious practices. This we found in particular in the rural areas of Bali, India, and Nepal. Instead of interpreting this as a reversal of stages, we prefer to speak of a particular developmental path. In the same cultural groups, city life and various acculturative features favor the intrinsic and egocentric FoR for children up to about age 8, followed by an increase with age of the geocentric FoR.
Compared to our first study in Bali, subsequent quasi-experimental studies in various cultural contexts have allowed us to un-confound some of the eco-cultural, social and individual variables that determine which FoR is given a preference. In other words, seeing the egocentric vs. geocentric FoR as a cognitive style, each extremity of this style being stressed in different circumstances.
We believe that this research program corresponds to what Jahoda (1988) asked for in terms of a series of cumulative studies, with comparable methods. We carried out these studies in different cultural settings, nevertheless avoiding wide-span comparisons. In fact, studying the development of the geocentric FoR would be simply impossible by staying in the European or North-American cultures (as shown by its absence in our study in Geneva). In each of the locations, we started with extensive linguistic and ethnographic enquiries, and we made sure that the psychological instruments we finally used were indeed locally appropriate. Hence, we believe that our research has not only taken into account the methodological principles Jahoda had established for cross-cultural psychology, but it may be situated in the field of the type of “cultural psychology” that had his preference in later years, or, as we phrase it in the title, culture sensitive psychology.
Footnotes
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) disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article: The research was mainly funded by the Swiss National Science Foundation.