文化心理学概述.doc

Cultural Psychology 1Cultural PsychologySteven J. HeineUniversity of British ColumbiaPlease address correspondence to Steven J. Heine 2136 West Mall, University of British Columbia Vancouver, BC, V6T 1Z4 Canada Tel: (604) 822-6908. Fax (604) 822-6923 E-mail: heine@psych.ubc.caCultural Psychology 2IntroductionImagine what it must have been like. About 8 million years ago, rustling about the savannas of East Africa, there lived a family of apes. They had their ape-like concerns, struggling to get enough food, avoid the lions, negotiate the power hierarchy in their troupe, groom themselves, and take care of their offspring. Their lives would have looked awfully ordinary if we could see them now, and it is doubtful that there would have been any signs of the things that would happen to their descendants. Some of the descendants of those apes would evolve into what we recognize today as the species of chimpanzees and bonobos – clever apes living in small pockets of the jungles of central Africa. Some of the other descendants of these apes would evolve into a species whose members have gone on to populate the furthest reaches of the planet, split the atom, paint the Sistine Chapel, and invent the iPhone. What factors have determined the different trajectories of these biologically similar species? Much of the answer to this question has to do with culture.Humans are a cultural species. That is, we depend critically on cultural learning in virtually all aspects of our lives. Whether we’re trying to manage our resources, woo a mate, protect our family, enhance our status, or form a political alliance – goals that are pursued by people in all cultures – we do so in culturally particular ways (Richerson it often represents an unusual sample. The results of studies conducted on American undergraduates are frequently outliers within the context of an international database for many of the key domains in the behavioral sciences (Henrich, Heine, 2) people from Western industrialized societies demonstrate more pronounced responses than those from non-Western societies; 3) Americans show yet more extreme responses than other Westerners; and 4) the responses of contemporary American college students are even further different than those of non-college educated American adults (Henrich et al., in press). We have termed samples of American college students “WEIRD samples” (i.e., they are samples of Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, and Democratic societies), as the results from these samples are frequently (but not always) statistical outliers for many of the phenomena that psychologists study. What do the unusual responses of such WEIRD samples mean for social psychologists? Do they mean that we need to avoid studying American undergrads? Definitely not! There have always been and continue to be many good reasons for American researchers to study the most convenient samples for them as this allows researchers to test hypotheses about the nature of psychological phenomena, understand how these phenomena relate to each other, identify underlying mechanisms, and reveal the situations in which these phenomena occur – that is, Cultural Psychology 6studying WEIRD samples is not a problem for most of what social psychologists have always been interested in doing (for more discussion of this point see Mook, 1983). However, often psychologists are interested in generalizing far beyond their samples, and constructing universal theories. This goal is hindered when researchers rely solely on a database that is limited to a narrow and somewhat unrepresentative slice of human diversity (see Norenzayan rather, the process of becoming a self is contingent on people interacting with and seizing meanings from their cultural environments. Since people are exposed to very different cultural experiences around the world, it follows that they will come to develop different kinds of self-concepts. As Clifford Geertz (1973) famously asserted, “we all begin with the natural equipment to live a thousand kinds of life but end in the end having lived only one” (p. 45). Evidence for the cultural foundation of the self-concept comes from a number of sources. For example, many studies have assessed the structure of people’s self-concepts by having people freely describe aspects of themselves using the Twenty Statements Test (Kuhn Triandis, 1989) has been related to a wide variety of different psychological processes. For example, cultural variation in independence and interdependence has been linked to cultural differences in motivations for uniqueness (e.g., Kim Heider, 1958; Swann, Wenzlaff, Krull, however, much of this research has targeted cultural samples in which independent self-concepts predominate. This fact matters because the independent self is viewed as a relatively bounded and autonomous entity, complete in and of itself, that is perceived to exist separately from others and t。