Cross-cultural psychology is the scientific study of human behavior and mental processes, including both their variability and invariance, under diverse cultural conditions.
[1] Through expanding research methodologies to recognize cultural variance in behavior, language, and meaning it seeks to extend and develop psychology.
[2] Since psychology as an academic discipline was developed largely in North America and Europe, some psychologists became concerned that constructs and phenomena accepted as universal were not as invariant as previously assumed, especially since many attempts to replicate notable experiments in other cultures had varying success.
[3][4] Since there are questions as to whether theories dealing with central themes, such as affect, cognition, conceptions of the self, and issues such as psychopathology, anxiety, and depression, may lack external validity when "exported" to other cultural contexts, cross-cultural psychology re-examines them.
Cross-cultural psychologists are turning more to the study of how differences (variance) occur, rather than searching for universals in the style of physics or chemistry.
"[8] In contrast to sociologists, most cross-cultural psychologists do not draw a clear dividing line between social structure and cultural belief systems.
More empirically oriented research was subsequently conducted by Williams H. R. Rivers (1864–1922) who attempted to measure the intelligence and sensory acuity of indigenous people residing in the Torres Straits area, located between Australia and New Guinea.
They emphasized the enormous cultural variability of many psychological phenomena thereby challenging psychologists to prove the cross-cultural validity of their favorite theories.
[6] The Malinowskian dictum focuses on the idea that there is a necessity to understand the culture of a society in its own terms instead of the common search for finding universal laws that apply to all human behavior.
Hofstede's cultural dimensions theory is not only the springboard for one of the most active research traditions in cross-cultural psychology, but is also cited extensively in the management literature.
His initial work found that cultures differ on four dimensions: power distance, uncertainty avoidance, masculinity-femininity, and individualism-collectivism.
[28] Still later, after work with Michael Minkov using data from the World Values Survey, he added a sixth dimension - indulgence versus restraint.
Indeed, the individualism-collectivism debate has itself proven to be problematic, with Sinha and Tripathi (1994) arguing that strong individualistic and collectivistic orientations may coexist in the same culture (they discuss India in this connection).
Specifically, they emphasize the necessity of the counselor's having multicultural competence and the ability to apply this knowledge when working with persons of varying ethnic backgrounds.
To examine this question, lexical studies measuring personality factors using trait adjectives from various languages have been conducted.
[41] Over time these studies have concluded that the factors of Extraversion, Agreeableness, and Conscientiousness almost always appear, yet Neuroticism and Openness to Experience sometimes do not.
This important information may be critical in recognizing the cross-cultural difference between Asian and American judgments of the universal emotional expressions.
It is difficult to identify a universal indicator as to how much subjective well-being individuals in different societies experience over a period of time.
While there are strong associations between cultural average income and subjective well-being, the "richer=happier" argument is still a topic of hot debate.
One of the main findings overall was that under the topic of sex and gender, pan-cultural similarities were shown to be greater than cultural differences.
[49] Further calls have been made to examine theories of gender development as well as how culture influences the behavior of both males and females.
Because only 3.4% of the world's children live in the United States, such research is urgently needed to correct the ethnocentric presentations that can be found in many American textbooks (Gielen, 2016).
[54] Most studies supporting this claim of cross-cultural generalizability have been focused on comparing industrialized countries in high- and middle-income regions,[55] but could not establish the global validity of this theory.
[56] The motivational process models did not correspond entirely and the study could not provide sufficient evidence for the etic validity of self-determination theory.
[57] The rise of cross-cultural psychology reflects a general process of globalization in the social sciences that seeks to purify specific areas of research which have western biases.
Major reviews of literature in cross-cultural psychology, from: Triandis, Harry C.; Roy S. Malpass; Andrew R. Davidson (1971).