Cultural Psychology

A Perspective on Psychological Functioning and Social Reform

Carl Ratner

• Publisher: Psychology Press
• Year: 2006
• eBook ISBN: 9781135602437
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: Social Psychology
• Index: Psychology

Carl Ratner's new book deepens our understanding of psychology by emphasizing the role that cultural factors, such as social institutions, artifacts, and cultural concepts play in psychological functioning. The author demonstrates the impact of culture on stimulating and structuring emotion, personality, perception, cognition, memory, sexuality, and mental illness. Examples from interdisciplinary social science research illuminate a sophisticated dialectical relationship between cultural factors and psychological phenomena.

Written in an engaging style, the book articulates a new theory, "macro cultural psychology", and a qualitative methodology for investigating the cultural origins, characteristics, and functions of psychological phenomena. Ratner explains how this cultural perspective can be used to enhance psychological growth, illuminate directions for social reform, and how social reform can enhance psychological functioning, and vice versa.
Cultural Psychology critically examines several prominent psychological approaches including social constructionism, feminism, hermeneutics, psychobiology, evolutionary, cross-cultural, ecological, and mainstream psychology. The book articulates a theory of macro culture that emphasizes the political dimension of culture and psychology.

Intended for students, researchers, and practitioners in psychology, education, psychotherapy, history, sociology, anthropology, linguistics, philosophy, and policy makers and practitioners in public health and social service who are interested in understanding cultural aspects of psychology. The book is an appropriate text for courses in cross-cultural or community psychology, social work, social theory, and critical thinking.

I
Psychology, Culture, Politics, Science

1
Introduction to Macro Cultural Psychology

In order to advance psychological science and social reform, we are going to explore the cultural nature of mind. This means more than describing psychological variations in different cultures. It also means more than associating cultural variables and psychological variables. Exploring the cultural nature of mind means explaining why and how these variations and associations occur. It means explaining why and how the mind originates in cultural processes and factors, is organized by them, embodies them in its form and content, and functions to support them. Like all scientific theories, a cultural theory of psychology strives to elucidate unobservable principles, processes, elements, relationships, and dynamics that underlie observable phenomena.

Macro cultural psychology is a radical reconceptualization of psychology. Its revising of conventional psychological theory is inspired and justified by other impertinent scientific reconceptualizations such as Galileo’s view of our galaxy, Darwin’s view of evolution, the atomic theory of matter, and Einstein’s theory of time.

Reconceptualizing the mind as cultural involves emphasizing new cultural-psychological features, functions, factors, processes, principles, relationships, explanatory constructs, and methodology. These are introduced here and explained throughout the book. Let us begin by illustrating the distinctive orientations of mainstream psychology and macro cultural psychology.

Mainstream Psychology Versus Macro Cultural Psychology

Most approaches to psychology regard it as an individual, universal, or natural phenomenon. All three of these perspectives overlook and obscure cultural issues.

The individualistic emphasis is paramount in mainstream psychotherapy. Furedi (2004) explained how therapy recapitulates and promotes the individualism of our age:

Today, Western culture makes sense of the experience of social isolation through interpreting behavior through the highly individualized idiom of therapeutic discourse. Our culture has fostered a climate where the internal world of the individual has become the site where the problems of society are raised and where it is perceived they need to be resolved …. Social problems are frequently recast as individual ones that have no direct connection to the social realm. One of the consequences of this decline of the sociological imagination is a growing tendency to redefine public issues as the private problems of the individuals. This mood is vividly captured through the individualized idiom of therapy.

(pp. 24–25)

The decline of the sociological imagination is also evident in, and reinforced by, mainstream academic psychology. A recent review of research on aggression (in the prestigious Annual Review of Psychology) states: “Infants manifest frustration and rage.” “During the second and third years of life, behavioral signs of temper tantrums and aggression toward adults and peers can be observed ….” “In early childhood, conflict is inevitable ….” “Gender differences in levels of aggression become marked in the years between the third and sixth birthdays …” (Loeber & Hay, 1997, p. 375). These descriptions give the impression that aggression is a natural phenomenon that follows developmental laws. Behavior simply appears on its own: “More serious violence tends to increase with age, especially during adolescence.” “Most violence appears to erupt in youths who have been aggressive earlier in life” (pp. 381, 384, emphasis added).

When the authors mention conditions that might exacerbate aggression, they limit these to (a) temperamental differences, low intelligence, and attention deficit, which make it difficult for some children to find nonaggressive solutions to interpersonal dilemmas; (b) parental maltreatment, which includes rejecting children, coercing them, behaving aggressively toward them, and favoring other siblings; (c) having deviant peer friends, and being rejected by peers; and (d) “Stressful life events.”

The review never once mentions specific cultural practices, concepts, and artifacts that promote aggression. It never mentions the fact that watching violent television and movie programs contributes significantly to violent beliefs, emotions, and behavior (Anderson et al., 2003). It never mentions cultural differences in the prevalence of aggression (Flannery & Marcus, 2003; Fromm, 1973; Nisbett & Cohen, 1996); or the fact that conditions that foster violence—such as exposure to familial violence, the incidence of crime within one’s neighborhood, and contact with aggressive peers—are related to social class (Evans, 2004, p. 78; cf. Olson, 1981; Pelton, 1994). Of course, some psychologists are more sensitive to cultural influences on aggression. However, these are usually construed as peripheral to “basic” psychological processes. This means that cultural factors affect slight variations in the incidence of aggression, but these do not challenge the essential universality of aggression as a natural human behavior based in biopsychological mechanisms akin to those in animals.

Actually, cultural factors and processes are central to aggression. Robarchek (1977) reported its virtual absence among the Semai people, a primarily hunting and gathering people in Malaysia. Frustration, unfulfilled desire, and anger, which lead to aggression, are carefully prevented by the social organization of needs and interpersonal interactions, described as follows:

1. Desires are satisfied whenever possible. Eating, drinking, dancing, bathing, and sex are enjoyed until the point of satiety because being unfulfilled can make people destructive.
2. Food is shared so that no one will be unfulfilled about food.
3. Requests for almost anything are typically granted so that the requester’s desire will be fulfilled. If someone makes even a passing reference to an object, the owner will offer it to him.
4. Requests are made sparingly and they are tailored to increase the likelihood of being honored. In this way, the requester reduces his chances of being frustrated.
5. Individuals are very responsible about keeping promises, such as keeping appointments. This reduces the frustration of others around them. People try to promise only what they can deliver, and they usually do so. Heavy punishments are meted out for transgressions such as failing to keep appointments.

These cultural measures are so effective that in 3 months, not one fight or serious argument occurred in this village of more than 200 members—this, despite the fact that drinking alcohol is common, with half the men in the village becoming drunk every evening.

The social organization of needs and interpersonal relations is clearly central to the occurrence of aggression. Aggression does not follow a natural developmental trajectory as mainstream psychologists believe.

All psychological phenomena depend on the way life is socially organized. The irritation that an American adolescent feels toward her parents is a good illustration. It appears to be a personal feeling directed at a unique set of parents in a private household. However, it is actually a common feeling that almost all American adolescents experience. It is a cultural phenomenon. It is fostered by the social organization of life; it is a necessary emotion for participating in this socially organized life. Adolescent irritation at parents is engendered by characteristics of American social institutions, concepts, and artifacts. Specifically, adolescence is a time when dependent children make the transition to independent individuals. Adolescents are not simply becoming adults; they are becoming particular kinds of adults suited to participate in capitalist society, which emphasizes individual autonomy, self-interest, and change. This individualism drives adolescents to develop their individuality in opposition to their parents. If they remained attached to their parents’ influence, they would be ill-suited to asserting themselves as consumers and employees. To succeed in the culture, adolescents must rebel against their parents, socially and psychologically.

Pressure to do this comes in the form of ideology to be an independent person. It also comes from commercial pressures to make purchasing decisions (Cook, 2004). It also comes from legal statutes allowing adolescents the right to drive cars, which endows them with enormous independence and weakens social ties to parents. An adolescent’s psychology is also cultivated by public images of adolescents striving to assert their individuality against authority figures. These images appear in movies, television, advertisements, and friends’ behavior.

An adolescent’s irritation at her parents is not an individual feeling governed by idiosyncratic or biological processes. It is a cultural phenomenon that encompasses almost all adolescents in America because of the way that their lives are structured by social institution, cultural concepts, and artifacts. It is a cultural phenomenon that incarnates many aspects of adolescents’ social position in a particular society. It would not exist in a society of different cultural factors. Piaget (1993) expressed this point as follows:

The boy begins at [11–13 years old] to feel himself more and more on the same level as adolescents and to free himself inwardly from adult constraint …. There can be no doubt that this phenomenon is peculiar to our civilization, and therefore falls under the Durkheimian scheme …. [In contrast] in so-called primitive communities, adolescence is the age of initiation, therefore of the strongest moral constraint, and the individual, as he grows older, becomes more and more dependent.

(p. 99)

Piaget agreed with Durkheim that in small, localized societies, each social unit is a closed system and individuals tend to behave homogeneously, in accordance with stable customs. As societies develop more intense division of labor, it “differentiates individuals from one another psychologically and gives rise to individualism and to the formation of personalities in the true sense. Individual heteronomy and autonomy would thus seem to be in direct correlation with the morphology and the functioning of the group as a whole” (Piaget, 1932, p. 97).

This is the perspective that we develop under the rubric of macro cultural psychology. It emphasizes that psychology is cultivated by the manner in which people socially organize their lives. This is why psychology varies in different cultures. Psychology is part of culture, and culture is embedded within psychology; it is not simply an external structure or context. Macro cultural psychology recognizes that every individual is both unique and a cultural player (a socius, as Baldwin termed it). However, it is concerned with cultural patterns of psychological reactions that the individual enacts in common with many other individuals through participating together in broad social norms, concepts, and artifacts. “Cultural psychology is the study of the way cultural traditions and social practices regulate, express, transform, and permute the human psyche, resulting less in psychic unity for humankind than in ethnic divergences in mind, self, and emotion.” “In the language of cultural psychology there are no pure psychological laws, just as there are no unreconstructed or unmediated stimulus events …. Cultural psychology signals an end to the purely psychological in psychology” (Shweder, 1990, pp. 1, 24).

Culture Comprises the Explanatory Constructs of Psychological Phenomena

The reorientation from a psychological to a cultural explanation of behavior was expressed by Durkheim (1951) in his analysis of suicide:

Since suicide is an individual action affecting the individual only, it must seemingly depend exclusively on individual factors, thus belonging to psychology alone. Is not the suicide’s resolve usually explained by his temperament, character, antecedents, and private history? …

If, instead of seeing in them only separate occurrences, unrelated and to be separately studied, the suicides committed in a given society during a given period of time are taken as a whole, it appears that this total is not simply a sum of independent units, a collective total, but is itself a new fact sui generis, with its own unity, individuality, and consequently its own nature—a nature, furthermore, dominantly social.

(p. 46)

Durkheim argues that suicide has a social character despite the fact that it is conducted by separate individuals. The social character is the reason that a given number of individuals in particular cultural groups (ethnic, gender, class, nationality) in a particular era commit suicide.

Durkheim (1897/1951) pointed out a vital fact that attests to the cultural basis of suicide: “The individuals making up a society change from year to year, yet the number of suicides is the same so long as the society itself does not change” (p. 307). This fact indicates that “the victim’s acts which at first seem to express only his personal temperament are really the supplement and prolongation of a social condition” (p. 299). There must be social forces that impel a regular number of unrelated individuals to commit suicide every year. Personal factors cannot explain this regularity because they are idiosyncratic and coincidental (p. 305). “Today’s population has not learned from yesterday’s the size of the contribution it must make to suicide; nevertheless, it will make one of identical size with that of the past, unless circumstances change” (p. 308). Social pressures and conditions are obviously at work in suicide even though it only afflicts a small proportion of the population (p. 300).

Actually, personal factors could be involved in suicide. However, they would have to be socially generated in regular demographic patterns to provide the stable demography of suicide. In this case, cultural factors ultimately explain suicide, although indirectly by generating a social demographic pattern of temperaments (and other personal factors) that interact with a pattern of social conditions to yield the demography of suicide.

Durkheim’s point, that seemingly individual behavior is actually a social fact, was endorsed by Kroeber and other structuralists. The point applies to psychological phenomena in general. All psychological phenomena are culturally organized and distributed. They all evidence quantitative and qualitative variations across cultural groups and historical eras. Rates of suicide vary dramatically throughout the world (China having the highest suicide rate in the world); perception of optical illusions is culturally variable, with Americans tending to misperceive the Muller–Lyer illusion (overestimating one of the lines by 20%) whereas certain African peoples do not; color perception is culturally variable, with Americans perceiving blue and green as different colors whereas many premodern people perceive them as similar; sound perception is culturally organized, with Japanese people unable to distinguish “l” from “r” sounds whereas Americans can; memory is culturally organized, as adult females and individuals from Western cultures have an earlier age of first memory, and have longer and more detailed memories of their childhood, than do adult males and individuals from Asian cultures (Fivush & Nelson, 2004, p. 573); Kpelle people have great difficulty remembering separate facts apart from a context, whereas Westerners easily recall them; individuals who live in the culture of highland New Guinea cannot conceive of themselves apart from their social structure, whereas Americans regard themselves as unique, independent individuals; mental illness manifests quantitative and qualitative variations among cultural groups—there is a 10-fold increase in risk for depression across generations in the United States (using diagnostic interviews on randomly selected adolescents, of those born in 1972–1974, 7.2% had experienced a severe depression, in contrast to 4.5% of older adolescents born in 1968–1971; Diener & Seligman, 2004, pp. 16–17). The quality of childhood is different for American middle-class children, peasant children in the Middle Ages, and poor children in Brazil whom Scheper-Hughes studied (cf. Ratner, 1991, pp. 86–87). The psychology of womanhood and manhood similarly varies dramatically across ethnic groups, millennia, and classes. Culture even affects brain structure. Animal sounds and human voices are localized in the verbal hemisphere of Japanese brains, but in the nonverbal hemisphere of Western brains. Western music and Japanese music are processed in the nonverbal hemispheres of Western brains, whereas Japanese brains process Japanese music in the verbal hemisphere and Western music in the nonverbal hemisphere. Japanese individuals who are raised in the West manifest the Western brain structure, and Westerners who are raised in Japan manifest the Japanese brain structure (Ratner, 1997, p. 119).

Cultural factors underlie and predict psychological phenomena more so than personal factors do. The job market, unemployment, and gender predict mental illness better than any personal factor does. Social class predicts domestic violence, educational achievement, linguistic development, parent–child interactions, mental illness, and IQ better than personal factors. Gender and social class predict eating disorders better than personal, psychological attributes do. Anorexia and bulimia are more common among American middle-class women than among other groups of people (Polivy & Herman, 2002; Ratner, 2002, pp. 39–40, 49–50).

Of course, personal factors do affect psychology, however not as robustly as macro factors do. As Vygotsky (1997a) said, “The social moment in consciousness is primary in time as well as in fact. The individual aspect ...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• Part I: Psychology, Culture, Politics, Science
• Part II: Principles of Macro Cultural Psychology
• Part III: Applications of Macro Cultural Psychology to Research Methodology, Social Reform, and Personal Growth
• References
• Endnotes
• Author Index
• Subject Index