Cultural Psychology
Discovering Psychology
with Philip Zimbardo
Tape 26
1:20 -26:00

What is culture? Is it the clothes we wear? Or the languages we speak? Or the foods we eat? Or the foods we don't? Is it the way we worship? Or the art we create? Is it where we live? Or the ways we play? Culture is all of these things and more. Beyond rituals, dances, and dialects. It is the very scaffolding of our psyches. How we think. What we feel. How we relate to others. Who we think we are. All depends upon the culture around us. Even how we interpret behavior can reveal how culture shapes us.

Kaiping Peng and Michael Morris study how people from East Asia and North America interpret behaviors differently. American subjects pay more attention to individual fish, individual movements, individual desires. Asian subjects pay more attention to movements of the group. American students paid attention to lone blue fish and attributed it being alone to wanting to get away from the group, hating the group, and wanting to be the leaders of the group. The Asian subjects pay attention to the group and say the group couldn't get along with the blue fish, they have kicked the blue fish out of the group, that they hate the blue fish.

These cultural differences in how we interpret behavior can lead to starkly different interpretations of events. An example given was different interpretations of a murder by American and Chinese press.

How we make sense of the world depends upon who we think we are and what we think we should be doing in this life as we engage with our cultures social meanings and practices. Hazel Markus and Shinobu Kitayama investigate how the self and culture continually create each other. "We think of people as culturally-shaped shapers. They are shaped by culture as they engage with these patterns of meaning and practices . . . They also shape the culture in course of behaving, in the course talking to other people, in the course of acting, in the course of making products and putting them into the world. Human nature . . and the ways of being a person, the ways of having a mind are very much tied to the patterning of those social worlds you are part of." Markus and Kitayama call this "mutual constitution." Within different cultural settings it can produce different psychological processes. They have described two of these possible modes of being as "independent" and "interdependent."

The independent mode of being can be seen most clearly in the United States and Europe. The interdependent way is more characteristic of East Asian society. "In European and American cultural settings individuals think about themselves as responsible for behavior and in control. They control their world by influencing other people." For many European and Americans making choices defines the self as unique and positive. It even influences how Americans treat their guests. At a party a host will say "help yourself." This statement would seem odd to many East Asians. In Japanese cultural practice greeting a guest wouldn't involve anything like offering a choice. You have to be attentive to your guest as a host. If you are a good enough person, a moral person, you ought to be able to tell and be prepared enough to offer what is good for this particular person.

This attunement to others needs emanates from many sources in East Asian culture. One of these sources in Buddhism. Buddhism emphasizes sympathy compassion and transcendence beyond individual desire. Over the centuries this powerful spiritual value has created a tendency to emphasize the well-being of others. Religion also contributes to the independent way of being in mainstream American culture through the Protestant ethic. It emphasizes individual achievement, personal responsibility, self-sufficiency, and control over the environment.

The different understandings of the self can be seen in how people talk about themselves. Markus and Kitayama video taped students talking about themselves. American students in describing themselves give about four positive attributes to one negative attribute. When she talks about friendliness it is something within her. She carries it with her. It her point of view on herself. People with an independent mode of being talk about how they will make a difference in the world, have an impact on the world, be responsible for some action, or be in control.

Japanese individuals hold many different views of the self. It is a way to meet the high standards of the group. She describes herself as persevering, extending effort, working hard and so on and quickly moves to negative aspects such as lazy and slow. The focus on negative aspects may be the beginning of self improvement. You have to find something negative to correct and get better on. By fostering the focus on the negative aspect of the self, Japanese culture encourages people to improve themselves to avoid letting others down rather than to get ahead of others.

We need not travel to an exotic land to see different cultures in action and interacting with one another. Among Americans there are many ways to be a person and to live a life. The current dynamic culture mix reflects the beliefs and practices of indigenous American Indians, West Africans who came to America as slaves, and wide array of immigrant populations. This pluralism also reflects the varied experiences that different ethnic groups have had in the United States. Some were welcomed and assimilated easily into the dominant European American mainstream. Others were not and had to be more ingenious in the project of becoming an American.

James Jones of the University of Delaware shows how West African influences and the harsh experience of slavery are apparent in some African American settings especially in conceptions of time, rhythm, improvisation, orality, and spirituality. Jones' theory is designated as TRIOS to highlight this special pattern of five capacities that characterize the ways of being of some African Americans.

Time for example in mainstream America is a commodity used to control the future, regulate our economy, and shape our behavior. But time ticks differently in West African cultural context where time is often focused on the present. The closer you get to the equator the more you describe people in terms of present time orientation. In some cases people call it social time. Time is defined by behavior and by feelings and by being in the world so time doesn't have an independent meaning that imposes itself on our behavior from moment to moment. Our behavior actually determines time.

The West African understanding of time is apparent in contemporary African American cultural patterns such as the emphasis on improvisation. Jones explains how present time orientation and improvisational skills can help African Americans navigate the undercurrents of racism. Racism is potentially present in every situation. How am I going to cope with that? How do I know whether a situation will value me as a person or not? And how do I create value for myself in a situation? Improvisation is really about problem solving in uncertain and difficult conditions. And being able to express who I am and how I feel in any given moment.

African American cultural context has long been the source of exquisite word craft. Story telling, preaching, speech making and song. They're all manifesting the same combination of rhythm, orality, improvisation, and style. And so it becomes a way of expressing the experiences people have and of understanding it and organizing it and preserving it. It becomes the legacy of the people.

An important of that legacy is spirituality. The belief that higher powers influence human affairs. Spirituality has imparted serenity and strength to many African Americans to help cope with the injustices of their society.

They can live with circumstances that others would find depressing and demoralizing. They don’t hold onto themselves responsibility for everything that happens. So in a sense they are free and can be at peace.

American Indians have also had to adjust to overwhelming adversity. In the nineteenth century the tidal wave of western expansion resulted in a genocide that decimated native cultures. Despite the many hardships that American Indians have faced, over 500 American Indian tribes are still in existence in the United States.

Dr. Joseph Trimble, a cross cultural psychologist of American Indian heritage, studies how American Indians have adapted to and influenced mainstream American culture.

Historically all tribes were collective cultures organized along very, very elaborate clans systems. Everyone was given a role and responsibility and that role and responsibility was an integral part of keeping life alive, keeping the community alive, keeping the village alive.

This special sense of community is common to most American Indian cultural contexts. It is expressed in many Indian spiritual understandings and practices.

Spirituality is respect for all things, for all that is, for all that lives, the two-leggeds, the four-leggeds, the wingeds, the plants, the trees, the clouds, the earth that we live in, the that earth we live on. And with that respect is the understanding that we are all connected.

One way to honor that connectedness is through a tradition of sharing. Unconditional giving honors the universe and maintains life’s balance, but it was a tradition that confused other peoples.

A lot of non Indian people had real difficulty with that. They feel like they are now obligated. Cause they are now owned because they have been the recipient of this gift.

When Columbus came to America he was showered with gifts. When he refused them the native leaders were insulted.

It got to be such a problem that he prevented his troops from receiving gifts which in turn insulted the people themselves. Your not just insulting this individual. You are insulting this individual’s family. You’re insulting their clan. Here is this very deep seated value that has never gone away.

Those first uneasy interactions foreshadowed the tragic history that unfolded between European colonizers and indigenous peoples. This history of how American Indians were forced to adapt to European American culture is horrific.

The melting pot ideology assumed that native peoples should assimilate readily and completely to dominate cultural patterns.

The whole idea behind sending young Indian people off to boarding schools, forbidding them to speak their own language, forcing them to cut their hair, forcing them to wear clothing that were totally foreign to them, forcing them to deal with people who were from different tribes who they didn’t know or understand. All of them in that setting being forced to change.

Today psychologists understand that the melting pot is a myth. Adapting to a new culture is a stressful process made all the more difficult when the host culture does little to welcome, appreciate, or even acknowledge that different ethnic and cultural groups have different ideas about what is real, right, and good.

Clinical psychologists, like Dr. Ricardo Munoz of the University of California at San Francisco, are the frontline in struggle of trying to understand the psychology of acculturation. Munoz explains why working with Latinos is challenging, especially in getting them to use available mental health services.

There are about 35,000,000 Latinos in the U. S. It is one of the largest Latino countries in the world, actually. But about half the Latinos in America don’t speak English well. Unless you have Spanish speaking services you are not going to have good utilization of these services. There are a couple other reasons. One of them is that there is a stigma attached to mental health services in general, but in the Latino population the stigma is probably greater. And so there is this belief that only people with really severe disorders, people who are crazy, if you will, are the ones who use mental health services.

Because Latinos are less likely to rely on psychologists, Munoz takes psychology to the people, rather than waiting for people to come to psychology. Community outreach is becoming vitally important for the Latino community. A recent California study, has shown that among Mexican Americans the incidence of clinical or major depression is climbing rapidly especially for those who have been in the United States for more than 13 years.

For the recent immigrants the rate of major depression was about 3%. For those who had been here more than 13 years it went way over 7%. For those who had been born in the U. S. it was 14.4%. In the general population the rate is about 17%. So it looks like the longer that people stay here, the more like the U. S. population they become in terms of depression.

Why are rates of depression among Latinos increasing over time? Cultural psychology offers two explanations. The first is that the longer immigrants stay in the United States the more psychologically distressed they become.

When immigrants come into the United States they still have strong ties to their country of origin. They have contact with their families and so on. As they stay here longer and longer, those contacts become fewer and fewer. One of the things that may be happening is that their support system starts to break down.

Social support is vital to everyone’s mental health. But having friends and family may be even more crucial to well being in the Latino context. The family is sacred and many cultural practices revolve around sustaining deep familial ties, but this emphasis on human relationships sometimes doesn’t fit with the mainstream American values of independence and individuality. Having conflicting sets of cultural values may create confusion and feelings of rejection among Latinos, especially for the first generation born in the United States.

That generation has lost a lot of their cultural and certainly their linguistic roots and yet they not be accepted sufficiently in the United States. They have this feeling that they should be like everyone else born here, but they are not treated that way.

A second explanation for the rise in depression rates is that ironically U. S. born Latinos are becoming more American. They may be showing psychological distress in ways that are now recognizable in the larger society. Like other psychological processes psychological distress varies across time and cultural context.

As the earth’s population explodes and technology connects us in new ways cultural contexts are colliding with unpredictable consequences. To negotiate this multicultural world the insights of cultural psychology will be vital for exploring how cultures both shape and are shaped by individual minds.