Knowra Cultural psychology Cultural psychology Cultural psychology studies how cultural practices and social environments shape psychological experience and behavior, and how people in turn sustain or change culture.
Socialization : The process through which people learn the norms, roles, and practices of their society. It explains how cultural expectations become habits and assumptions across development.
Culture : A changing system of shared meanings, practices, institutions, and material forms transmitted among people. Cultural psychology examines how this broad system shapes and is shaped by minds.
Kitayama and Cohen : Shinobu Kitayama and Dov Cohen are psychologists known for research on culture and psychological processes. Their edited volume helped establish experimental and comparative approaches in the field.
Cultural determinism : The view that culture rigidly determines people's thoughts and behavior. Cultural psychology studies influence and mutual shaping, not fixed cultural control.
Cultural models : Shared, often implicit frameworks that organize how people interpret experience and guide action. They show how common meanings shape thought without dictating every individual response.
Cross-cultural psychology : The comparative study of psychological similarities and differences across cultural groups. Its group comparisons differ from cultural psychology's focus on processes linking culture and mind.
Markus and Kitayama's self-construal research : Research linking independent and interdependent self-construals to culturally patterned cognition, emotion, and motivation. It demonstrates how social understandings of the self relate to psychological tendencies.
Biological determinism : The view that biological factors principally determine human traits and behavior. The field rejects explanations that reduce psychological patterns to biology alone.
Situated cognition : The view that thinking depends on the body, environment, social relations, and ongoing activity. It connects psychological processes to the settings and practices in which they occur.
Ethnography : A method of studying people through sustained observation and participation in their everyday settings. It reveals local meanings and practices that standardized measures can miss.
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