Personal Relationships Across Cultures

Robin Goodwin

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• eBook ISBN: 9781134795581
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: History & Theory in Psychology
• Index: Psychology

Is falling in love the same the world over? What makes a 'happy marriage' in different cultures? How does our society influence us in the way we raise our children? Is modern life incompatible with intimacy? In this innovative new text, Robin Goodwin challenges many of the established views on relationships by considering how different cultures view different relationships (love, marriage, friendship, the family, sexual relations). By discussing fundamental differences in values between cultures, alongside other key influences such as social class and education, he explores why these differences occur, and how different political and historical events have challenged existing patterns of relationships. Finally, drawing on research from all parts of the world, he considers how we can use this knowledge to help different communities across the globe cope with their most pressing relational challenges. Dr Robin Goodwin is Reader in Psychology in the Department of Human Sciences at Brunel University, London. He publishes widely on relationships and culture, and lectures about his work across the world.

1 The development of research into personal relationships across cultures

Introduction

To begin to understand how relationships vary across cultures, we need first to define our terms. As I will argue below, however, defining ‘relationship’ or ‘culture’ is more complex than we might at first imagine, and the kinds of definitions used reflect the type of research which has been conducted. I then go on to describe how particular Western conceptualisations of relationships have restricted the range of relationships examined, this narrowness of focus being just one of the reasons why we might benefit from a broader, more cross-cultural analysis. Unfortunately, this cross-cultural work in itself has often been simplistic in design, mimicking Western ideas and methods. Instead, I will argue that understanding personal relationships across cultures means looking at the nature of people's daily existence in the context of a whole range of historical, social and political factors.

Defining our terms: ‘personal relationships’ and ‘culture’

Personal relationships

What is a ‘personal relationship’? When relationship researchers present their considerations of personal relationships, they rarely define their terms. In one of the best-known definitions, Argyle and Henderson describe a personal relationship as a ‘regular social encounter over a period of time’ (Argyle and Henderson, 1985: 4). A personal relationship is usually seen as one of considerable duration (Kelley et al., 1983), involving a great degree of interdependence of emotions and thoughts (Berscheid, 1994; Kelley et al., 1983) and evolving through a negotiated set of disclosures (Altman and Taylor, 1973).

Unfortunately, such definitions omit perhaps the most critical feature of relationships in Eastern cultures – the centrality of role obligations (Yang, 1995). Such obligations do not necessarily relate to simple frequency of interaction: your relationship with a teacher in an Eastern culture, for example, may remain similar regardless of the number of the interactions you enjoy. Definitions which focus on interdependent thoughts and feelings also tend to neglect the perceptions of others outside of the relationship, ignoring the social stage upon which relationships are performed (Goffman, 1959). These others may play a central part in defining any interaction as a relationship: where there are strict prescriptions about pre-marital encounters, for example, any meeting between the sexes may be defined as a potentially dangerous ‘relationship’. Finally, more recent conceptualisations of relationships, particularly those emerging from the literature on social networks, have identified the role of ‘weak ties’ in linking individuals to other social networks. These may be potentially of great significance during certain pivotal life stages (Trickett and Buchanan, 1997). Reflecting my interest in the centrality of these cultural prescriptions and perceptions, I consider a personal relationship to be the interaction between two or more individuals located within the context of wider societal and cultural forces.

Culture and ethnicity

The definition of culture has been widely discussed, and forms a large part of most recent texts on cross-cultural psychology. Originally, culture meant producing or developing something (e.g. crops), and it was only in the eighteenth century that it became synonymous with the ‘educated’ person, in contrast to the ‘barbarian’ (Jahoda, 1992). It was not until the mid-nineteenth century that there was a recognition of a plurality of possible cultures (Jahoda, 1992).

Culture is not something we can reach out and touch, nor see or hear: it is something we must infer from the behaviour of others (Rohner, 1984). Some forty years ago, Kroeber and Kluckhorn (1952) identified more than 160 definitions of culture, and a wide number of definitions persist, much to the frustration of some, who have concluded that to search for an adequate definition of culture is fruitless (e.g. Segall, 1984). Looking across the definitions, it is clear that at least one part of culture is the learned meanings that are shared by a group (Rohner, 1984). These meanings are likely to have some coherence and organisation (Jahoda, 1992). Hofstede's (1994b: 5) definition reflects this notion of organisation in his use of a computing analogy: culture is defined as ‘the collective programming of the mind which distinguishes the members of one group or category of people from another’. Culture can also be defined as the human-made part of the environment (e.g. 1948; Moghaddam et al., 1993), a definition which alerts us to the significance of considering cultural products such as houses and other artefacts in defining a culture (Cole, 1990; Jahoda, 1984). Finally, and important for the analysis of relationships and relationship ideas, is the notion that culture is something that is transmitted across time, although, of course, cultural messages may be modified from generation to generation (Jahoda, 1992; Rohner, 1984). This is important because culture can then be seen as a kind of ‘social reference point’ which helps guide the actions of whole generations of families.

Trompenaars (1993), whose work on cultural values I will be discussing several times during this text, combines many of these definitions of culture by suggesting that culture can be seen as ‘layered’, with the outside layer being the ‘explicit culture’ (the ‘observable reality’ of language, food, buildings, houses etc.), the middle layer consisting of norms and values, and the core layer comprising assumptions which represent the most basic ways in which groups organise themselves to deal with their environment (allowing them to deal, for example, with the threat of flood or earthquake). This means that culture (and, by implication, cultural values) is not a random set of shared meanings, but is the way in which particular societies have come to deal with particular problems, usually resulting from environmental challenges. This emphasis on the ecological factors important in shaping cultures is considered in Chapter 2.

How might definitions of culture and ethnicity differ? In this book I recognise the overlap between culture and ethnicity by using the definition of ethnicity employed by Wilkinson (1987: 185) in her work on minority ethnic groups in North America:

an ethnic group is a group of people who are of the same nationality or ancestry and who enact a shared culture and lifestyles.

Of course, people can feel differently attached to their ethnic group, as Wilkinson herself acknowledges and as the work on acculturation (discussed in Chapter 2) clearly shows, and this may have a considerable impact on who they meet and marry, and on the nature of these relationships. Nevertheless, it is always important to remember that others may define these individuals in terms of their ethnicity even when the individuals themselves would rather they did not, and that individuals will often react in terms of their ethnic groups across an array of situations (Berry, 1997).

In this text I will be reporting primarily on how social scientists have characterised the relationship behaviour and feelings of a particular geographically defined group. As Smith and Bond (1998) have noted, much of the research reported gives little detail beyond the name of the country where the work has been conducted, with ‘country’ being seen as analogous to ‘culture’. While I, of course, recognise that this is unsatisfactory in some cases (particularly where there may be a marked differences between the ‘cultures’ in a particular country, such as is the case of different religious groups in India) I have relied on the author(s) of the research cited to identify potential differences in the cultural background of the populations they are investigating. Where this is obviously problematic, I have alerted the reader to other possible interpretations of the findings reported.

The Western study of personal relationships: a very brief history

When histories of social psychology are written, many writers cite the famous words of Ebbinghaus (1908: 1): ‘Psychology has had a long past but only a brief history’. Much the same can be said about the study of personal relationships, with ‘the long past’ beginning with the Ancient Greeks, and the ‘brief history’ really only beginning in the 1970s but accelerating in terms of the volume of output in the late 1980s and 1990s. The result is that what was seen until recently as a slightly unsavoury area for scientific investigation is now a major theme for research and features prominently in the most prestigious psychological journals. Here I give a flavour of some of the work on relationship formation and continuation; far more detailed accounts of contemporary Western work can be found in the large number of relationships texts now available (such as the Sage Series on Close Relationships), and in the two large Handbooks of Personal Relationships edited by Steve Duck (first and second edition, 1988 and 1997).

Some of the earliest writings on personal relationships are attributed to Aristotle (Berscheid and Walster, 1978). Aristotle discussed a number of topics which have become influential in recent research on relationship formation, including the relationship between receiving rewards and attraction, the role of physical attractiveness in mate preferences, and the idea that we find attractive those who are similar to us (cited in Berscheid and Walster, 1978). Although the ideals of love found in Shakespeare and later romantic literary figures are sometimes misinterpreted as reflecting the longevity of love-based attraction in Western cultures, in reality notions of ‘courtly love’, as practised among the political elite during the Middle Ages, had little relationship to the dominant practices of marital arrangement, which were largely ordained by pragmatic dictates of politics and economics (Ingoldsby, 1995a). Themes of romantic love from Shakespeare and his contemporaries were therefore examples of wish fulfilment rather than actual behaviour for the period (Murstein, 1986), reflecting a disparity between desire and actuality evident in many contemporary societies around the world.

More ‘modern’ speculations about mate selection and partner choice really only began in the mid-nineteenth century (Murstein, 1986), with greater mate choice arising in part from the increased mobility following industrialisation. O.S. Fowler's (1859) recommendations (cited in Murstein, 1980: 781) are relatively typical of this period:

Wherein, and as far as you are what you ought to be, marry one like yourself; but wherein and as far as you have any marked excesses of defects, marry those unlike yourself in these objectionable particulars.

While this may seem quite reasonable (who wants an imperfect partner?), these prescriptions may seem a little optimistic in the real world of the ‘dating marketplace’. ‘Deficits’ such as low social class or poor reputation were likely to influence potential suitors and, as we shall see in Chapter 3, are still important features of mate selection across the world.

It was not until the beginning of the present century that more systematic, theory-based attempts were made to understand personal relationships. Freud was primarily concerned with the abnormal development of object-choice (1910), and later with the tendency to debase the loved object (1912). He suggested two types of love: ‘anaclictic’ or ‘attachment’ love (based on the early infantile prototype) and ‘narcissistic’ love, which represents the seeking out of the individual's own ego in others (1914). He also offered a brief account of the idealisation of love, although this was developed more by later psychoanalysts such as Theodor Reik (1941). Reik saw love as the result of discontent arising from a failure to fulfil our ego-ideal. It is notable that the psychoanalysts’ emphasis on need-fulfilment, and their eagerness to trace the origins of partner choice to early maternal interactions, have re-emerged in more recent and influential research into attachment theory (e.g. Shaver et al., 1988).

Another influential psychoanalyst, Erich Fromm (1956), considered relationships to be the ‘exchange of resources’ (or ‘packets of qualities’; 1956: 2), a viewpoint that was to become influential among the more experimental researchers of the 1970s (see Chapter 4 for a discussion of exchange principles). In his book ‘The Art of Loving’, Fromm claims (1956: 3):

Two people fall in love when they feel they have found the best object available on the market, considering the limitations of their own exchange values.

Experimental psychological research in the early years of this century was little concerned with the field of personal relationships, although some early studies did compare established partners on an array of different measures, including intelligence (e.g. Schooley, 1936), appearance (e.g. Pearson and Lee, 1903) and opinions and attitudes (e.g. Schuster and Elderton, 1906). After the Second World War, Robert Winch made a series of important attempts to re-examine the issue of need fulfilment (e.g. Winch, 1955, 1958), while Donn Byrne (1971) developed an extensive programme of research systematically examining the concept that ‘similars attract’. These contributors are sometimes pitted against one another through the misconception that, while Winch often saw ‘opposites attracting’ (with the ‘opposites’ being patterns of needs which Winch saw as complementing one another), Byrne propagated the familiar saw that ‘birds of a feather flock together’. In fact, this opposition was a misconception: both Byrne and Winch were suggesting that it is those couplings that are reinforcing to the individuals involved that are likely to succeed. Both writers have attracted strong criticism on both methodological and theoretical grounds: Winch has been criticised, for example, for misinterpreting his own statistical results (e.g. Tharp, 1963), and many point to the artificiality of Byrne's experimental paradigm, where individuals are forced to rate their attraction to a stranger they have never met, purely on the basis of rather contrived attitudinal statements (e.g. Duck, 1986). Perhaps most significant for the rest of this book, such early work was premised on a simple assumption: that the formation (and to some extent, maintenance) of a personal relationship resulted from the sum total of individual attributes or needs, thus neglecting the wider influence of culture and society at large (Duck et al., 1997). As I will argue, this assumption is a reflection of the individualist bias of much North American research, and can be challenged as inappropriate even for this society.

The study of personal relationships today

It would be nice to claim that now, several decades later, the field has moved on to such an extent that complex multilevel models of relationships, which explicitly allow for the impact of culture and aspects of the social structure, now dominate the area. Certainly some things have improved: methods are generally much more rigorous, especially since the development of user-friendly computer packages which include multivariate techniques. As a result, researchers are now able to overcome one old methodological criticism in the study of attraction by looking at both the unique and the combined effects of independent variables, although they are still very much preoccupied with variables which examine individual differences. Alongside this, relationships have begun to be conceptualised less as the simple amalgamation of the particular characteristics of those involved and more as phenomena which evolve through interactions (e.g. Sprecher and Duck, 1994) and which involve more complex ‘chains’ of communication (Kelley et al., 1983). There has been an increase in longitudinal studies (Berscheid, 1994), although these still form a minority of published studies, and there is a greater recognition that the couple should be studied as a dyad, rather than as two isolated individuals (Kenny, 1988).

Consistent with this, the range of topics of study has expanded too, so that the old focus on initial ‘interpersonal attraction’ which previously dominated the field (Huston and Levinger, 1978) has extended to the study of complete relationship progression, from early courtship patterns (e.g. Huston et al., 1981) to breakdown and dissolution (e.g. Duck's stage model of dissolution, Duck, 1982; Drigotas and Rusbult, 1992). Some of this work has at least recognised the importance of the immediate social context (for example, in the form of the available alternatives in Drigotas and Rusbult's study). Allied to this greater ‘spread’ of interests has been the development of concepts that aim to explain these relationship progressions and their outcomes. Rusbult and her colleagues, for example (e.g. Rusbult, 1987), have proposed that there are four modes of response to relationship problems: exiting the relationship, voicing concern, staying loyal, or neglecting the relationship. This popular taxonomy is indicative of a broader interest in taxonomising that has become a major feature of the field (Berscheid, 1994); we now, for example, have several taxonomies of love (e.g. Sternberg's triangular model, Sternberg 1988), love styles (e.g. Hendrick and Hendrick, 1986); and marriage type (Fitzpatrick and Badzinski, 1985).

So what has been the outcome of this ‘long history’ of relationships research? While a consideration of relationship alternatives hinted at the existence of a wider social field, the focus is still on the analysis of the individual. An example would be the study of self-esteem, which influences how an individual presents his/her physical appearance (Diener et al., 1995), the love styles of the individual (Dion and Dion, 1988) and how they react to relationship problems (Rusbult et al., 1986). This emphasis on personality reflects a general shift in social psychology towards the personal rather than the social level of analysis, as reflected in writings in the major journals in the field, such as the influential Journal of Personality and Social Psychology (West et al., 1993). This has been accompanied by a growing interest in the socio-cognitive processes that characterise interpersonal relationships, the focus of Berscheid's (1994) review of the field. These include relationship schemas and scripts, which represent the expected ordering of events in a situation (e.g. the work of Burnett et al., 1987), and the study of attribution, which largely focuses on the cognitive interpretations and biases in interactions made by couples (e.g. Bradbury and Fincham, 1990). Such analyses largely neglect vital economic factors such as social class and housing (Allan, 1993). Furthermore, although such work could be usefully applied to consider broader cultural norms and motifs, relationships research has as yet focused almost exclusively on laboratory work involving the information processing of Western couples (usually students). While we must not neglect the influence of such individual-level variables, we must also broaden our analysis further – to include the analysis of structural factors such as social class and, of course, culture.

Why we need a cross-cultural approach

At first glance, the study of the link between personality and relationships and exchange processes seems a good start for a cross-cultural examination. Surely relationships everywhere can be classified, and there are universal processes that underpin attribution and other cognitive processes?

At the simplest level, this is of course correct; as I will argue in the next chapter, there may be apparent similarities between people who score similarly on various cultural groupings. However, when we look again we realise that these observations tell us relatively little. Gaines (1997) notes how the individualistic obsession with the study of the welfare of oneself in a relationship may provide us with only a superficial understanding when we orient our study towards the shared knowledges, the ‘we-orientations’ that are necessary for examining interchanges between couples. This may be particularly important when we analyse what we ‘get’ from a relationship as a predictor of whether we maintain our inv...

Table of contents

• Front Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of illustrations
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction: Studying personal relationships
• 1 The development of research into personal relationships across cultures
• 2 Relationships in a cultural setting
• 3 Relationship formation
• 4 The developing relationship
• 5 Sexual attitudes and behaviour
• 6 Family relations across cultures
• 7 Relationships at work
• 8 Friendship and the broader social network
• 9 Taking it further: Implications and future developments
• Bibliography
• Index