PSYC 391 - Chapter 1 Notes - What is Cultural Psychology? - Continuation · Psychological Processes Can Vary Across Cultures o Example: Sense of humour across cultures o Cultural variation in psychological processes can extend much deeper than just preferences " Eg. Way people perceive the world, sense of right and wrong, things that motivate them etc. o How can we understand the workings of the human mind when it apparently works in different ways in different contexts? " Arguments for cultural variability in psychological processes are controversial and this controversy reveals the differing underlying assumptions that are embraced by many psychological researchers · Is the Mind Independent from, or Intertwined with, Culture? o General psychology " Field of psychology that inherently assumes that the mind operates under a set of natural and universal laws that are independent from content or context - Richard Shweder · He argues that the guiding assumption of general psychology is one captured by the song lyrics "people are the same wherever you go" · Human universals eg. Smiling when happy " General psychologists tend to focus on human universalities than cultural variability · Interest in universality Shweder proposes arises because general psychologists tend to conceive of the mind as highly abstract central processing unit (CPU) that operates independently of the content that it is thinking about or of the context within which it is thinking.
· Underlying goal of general psychology is to provide glimpses of the CPU operating in the raw so that we can understand the set of universal and natural laws that govern human thought o Context and content cloud ability to perceive functioning of CPU, so highly controlled experiments in lab are conducted to provide purest view of CPU · CPU is computer metaphor as they function independently from content and context in computers " Cultural psychologists on the other hand tend to believe that in many ways the mind does not operate independently of what it is thinking about . Thinking involves interacting with the content that one is thinking about and participation in the context within which one is doing and thinking . Actions, thoughts, and feelings are meaningful " Cultural meanings are entangled with the ways that the mind operates and we cannot consider the mind separate from culture . The mind is shaped by experiences, and cultures differ in the kinds of experiences that they provide " Taxi drivers in London create mental maps for where they need to navigate, changing structure of their brains - develop larger volumes of posterior region of hippocampi · Cultural psychologists view general psychologists goal of understanding the mind after it has been stripped clear of the noise of content and context as misguided " Culture and mind make each other up - cultures emerge from the interaction of the various minds of the people that live within them, and cultures then, in turn, shape the way that those minds operate · Case Study: The Sambia
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