Cross-cultural Psychology

Cross-Cultural Psychology versus Ethnic Minority Psychology

Differences in interpretation of “culture” account for the differences between cross-cultural psychology and ethnic-minority psychology. They differ in two ways, although they sometimes overlap and are taken as synonymous by some psychologists.

Ethnic minority psychology focuses on various ethnic groups such as African Americans. Cross-cultural psychology, in contrast, emphasizes differences between two or more cultures. Besides, ethnic minority psychology rooted in the United States has a briefer history than cross-cultural psychology does. Only after the civil rights movement of the 1960s was the Association of Black Psychologists founded, in 1968. The Journal of Black Psychology was first published in 1974 and the Hispanic Journal of Behavioral Sciences in 1979.

Historical Background

Traditional research in psychology has understandably been carried out mostly by thinkers of Western (ultimately Hellenic) cultures. The concepts and tools of psychological research came into being in an era of industrial systems of ideas, while consideration of culture has been relegated to a secondary role in psychology, appearing, at most, as moderating or qualifying footnotes to the major theoretical propositions assumed to be universally applicable.

In the meantime, however, there slowly emerged an awareness that such psychological theories in the traditional thinking mode, being Anglo-European, may well be of quite limited relevance to non-Western communities. It was thought that consideration of cultural aspects in psychological research would render psychology more widely relevant.

The era of cross-cultural psychology commenced soon after World War II ended. Its rapid expansion can be attributed to a shared motivation to understand the attendant horrors of war and to expand the intellectual horizons of psychology beyond parochial, nationalistic boundaries. With an emerging international perspective accompanying the cold war, the study of human behavior in cultural context evolved quite rapidly. The half decade of 1966 to 1970 saw the start of the quarterly Cross-Cultural Psychology Bulletin (originally called Cross-Cultural Social Psychology Newsletter, published periodically) and the International Journal of Psychology, as well as an initial Directory of Cross-Cultural Psychological Research.

Those years were marked also by the publication of a multisocietal study of cultural influences on cognitive conflict, a paperback volume titled Cross-Cultural Studies, and the flagship publication in cross-cultural psychology, Journal of Cross-Cultural Psychology, launched in 1970. By the late 1970 and early 1980s, enough research had been done to justify several major handbooks in cross-cultural psychology in general and in human development in particular. From the 1990s until the beginning of the 21st century, there appeared several new and updated handbooks on cross-cultural psychology. In 1998, Marshall H. Segall, Walter J. Lonner, and John W Berry published an article, “Cross-Cultural Psychology as a Scholarly Discipline,” on the critical role of culture in psychology. Several books through the 1990s into the 21st century (e.g., Cross-Cultural Psychology: Research and Applications) highlight many emerging themes in cross-cultural psychology.

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