Research in culture and psychology: past lessons and future challenges

Abstract

Since the dawn of psychology as a science, conceptual and methodological questions have accompanied research at the intersection of culture and psychology. We review some of these questions using two dominant concepts—independent versus interdependent social orientation and analytic versus holistic cognitive style. Studying the relationship between culture and psychology can be difficult due to sampling restrictions and response biases. Since these challenges have been mastered, a wealth of research has accumulated on how culture influences cognition, emotion, and the self. Building on this work, we outline a set of new challenges for culture and psychology. Such challenges include questions about conceptual clarity, within-cultural and subcultural variations (e.g., variations due to social class), differentiation and integration of processes at the group versus individual level of analysis, modeling of how cultural processes unfold over time, and integration of insights from etic and emic methodological approaches. We review emerging work addressing these challenges, proposing that future research on culture and psychology is more exciting than ever. WIREs Cogn Sci 2014, 5:1–14. doi: 10.1002/wcs.1267 This article is categorized under: Cognitive Biology > Genes and Environment Psychology > Theory and Methods Neuroscience > Cognition