Cultural Psychology

Cultural psychology is the study of how one's culture affects one's mind: how one thinks and reasons, what one feels, perceives, and attends to, and how one interprets the world. Cultural psychology has emerged as an important field of psychological research as more studies have found that theories of psychology developed in the West and thought to be universal do not generalize well to other cultures. Grounded in a conception that mind and culture are mutually constituted, cultural psychological research strives to identify both the effects of culture in the mind and the effects of mind in culture. It includes many theories and debates, to illustrate, about the forms of cultures themselves (individualism-collectivism); about moral and justice systems (different codes of ethics); and how different cultures affect how we judge causation (attributions to forces internal versus external to the individual). Other theories and debates concern how we conceive of ourselves (independent of versus interdependent with others); how we reason (analytic versus holistic reasoning); and even how we perceive the world (what one attends to and remembers from a scene).

Thus far, the most common comparisons have been between East Asian (Korean, Japanese, and Chinese) and European American participants, from which researchers have discovered profound cultural differences in many seemingly basic social psychology findings. Much of this research has implications for how peoples from different cultures will create and [Page 364]respond to legal systems. As countries become more multicultural and trade and communication between nations becomes more common, the interaction between law and justice systems, cultural norms, and psychological phenomena will grow in importance.