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Cultural psychology is the study of how cultures reflect and shape their members' psychological processes.[1]
It is based on the premise that the mind and culture are inseparable and mutually constitutive. The concept involves two propositions: firstly, that people are shaped by their culture, and secondly, that culture is shaped by its people.[2]
Cultural psychology aims to define culture, its nature, and its function concerning psychological phenomena. Gerd Baumann argues: "Culture is not a real thing, but an abstract analytical notion. In itself, it does not cause behavior but abstracts from it. It is thus neither normative nor predictive but a heuristic means towards explaining how people understand and act upon the world."[3]
As Richard Shweder, one of the major proponents of the field, writes, "Cultural psychology is the study of how cultural traditions and social practices regulate, express, and transform the human psyche. This results less in psychic unity for humankind than in ethnic divergences in mind, self, and emotion."[4]
- ^ Heine, S. J. (2011). Cultural Psychology. New York: W. W. Norton & Company.
- ^ Fiske, A.; Kitayama, S.; Markus, H.R.; & Nisbett, R.E. (1998). The cultural matrix of social psychology. In D. Gilbert & S. Fiske & G. Lindzey (Eds.), The Handbook of Social Psychology (4th ed., pp. 915–81). San Francisco: McGraw-Hill.
- ^ Baumann, Gerd (1997). Dominant and demiotic discourses of culture. Their Relevance to Multi-Ethnic Alliances. In: P. Werbner & T. Modood (Eds.), Debating cultural hybridity. Multicultural Identities and the Politics of Anti-Racism. London & New Jersey: Zed Books.
- ^ Shweder, Richard (1991). Thinking Through Cultures. Harvard University Press. ISBN 0-674-88415-9.