3.1 CROSS-CULTURAL
PSYCHOLOGY NOTES
COORDINATOR: Marise Born
Themes (Part 1):
1.Classics in cross-cultural psychology
2.Cognitions and emotions
3.Issues related to society and work
4.Normality and abnormality
PART 1
THEME 1: CLASSICS IN
CROSS-CULTURAL PSYCHOLOGY
VIGNETTES 1 & 2 (Meeting 1)
Subjective Culture (Triandis, 2002)
Culture → 2 parts: Material Culture & Subjective Culture
Material culture: e.g. dress, buildings, tools
,Subjective culture: Society’s characteristic way of perceiving its social
environment
● Ideas about what has worked in the past and thus is worth transmitting to future
generations.
“Culture is to society what memory is to individuals.”
● Includes practices
● Language
● Shared!!
○ Subcultures → E.g. Japanese people, Japanese lawyers, Japanese female
lawyers
Categories → the more words we use to describe a category, the more interested
we are in it
● Words that can not be translated to other languages tell a lot
3 features we base categories on:
● Evaluation
● Potency
● Activity
Etic vs Emic
● Etic → between-cultures (apples are more expensive than oranges)
● Emic → within-culture (oranges are juicy and fresh)
● Emic associations between categories tell a lot about a culture
Attitudes towards things reflect culture
● Components of attitudes:
○ Cognitive component
○ Emotional component
○ Predisposition to action component
Norms → (ideas about expected behavior) some cultures are tight, some are loose
Roles → prescriptive elements (should …) and proscriptive elements (should not
…)
Tasks
Values → conceptions of the desirable state of affairs
● Beliefs that pertain to desirable states or behaviors that transcend specific
situations and guide the selection or evaluation of behavior and events and that
are ordered by relative importance
● 10 sets of values in most cultures according to Schwartz (1992)
, 1. Self-direction
2. Stimulation
3. Hedonism
4. Achievement
5. Power
6. Security
7. Conformity
8. Tradition
9. Benevolence
10. Universalism
● A more abstract set of values by Kluckhohn:
○ Innate human nature
○ Man’s interaction with nature
○ Modality of human activities
○ Relationship of humans to other humans
○ Time focus
Elements of subject culture overall:
1. Categories
2. Beliefs
3. Attitudes
4. Norms
5. Roles
6. Tasks
7. Values
Cultural Psychology (Heine, 2010)
Self-concept
● Independent vs Interdependent
● Self-consistency vs Flexibility
● Insider vs Outsider phenomenological experiences
● Incremental vs Entity theories of self
Independent vs. Interdependent
● TST
● Western → inner attributes, uniqueness, advertising oneself
● non-Western → position relative to others, role in a group, dependence to
others, relational roles
, ● Differences already evident in kindergarten children
● Cultural variation in independence vs interdependence is linked to these
psychological processes:
○ Cultural differences in motivation for uniqueness
○ Self-enhancement
○ Feelings of agency
○ Kinds of emotional experiences
○ Perspectives on relationships
○ Analytic vs. holistic reasoning styles
Self-consistency vs. Stability
● Independent self → consistent across situations
● Interdependent self → less evidence for a consistent self-concept across
situations
○ Japanese people depended on who was in the room when evaluating
their self-concepts
● Independent people are more consistent in terms of emotions too
● Interdependent people also have more contradictory features within their
self-concept
● The benefit of being consistent across contexts is less apparent in
interdependent cultures (in terms of wellbeing)
● People with interdependent selves have different types of consistency needs
○ Especially when others are involved
○ Interdependent people aspire consistency when they consider
themselves in relation to others
Insider vs. Outsider phenomenological experiences
● Insider → people prioritize their own perspective
● Outsider → people prioritize the perspective of an audience
● Interdependent people’s attention to an audience leaks into and distorts their
memories of themselves
○ Better at taking the perspective of a partner
○ Self-evaluations of East Asians are less affected by the presence of a
mirror
Multicultural selves
● 2 perspectives on self-concepts:
PSYCHOLOGY NOTES
COORDINATOR: Marise Born
Themes (Part 1):
1.Classics in cross-cultural psychology
2.Cognitions and emotions
3.Issues related to society and work
4.Normality and abnormality
PART 1
THEME 1: CLASSICS IN
CROSS-CULTURAL PSYCHOLOGY
VIGNETTES 1 & 2 (Meeting 1)
Subjective Culture (Triandis, 2002)
Culture → 2 parts: Material Culture & Subjective Culture
Material culture: e.g. dress, buildings, tools
,Subjective culture: Society’s characteristic way of perceiving its social
environment
● Ideas about what has worked in the past and thus is worth transmitting to future
generations.
“Culture is to society what memory is to individuals.”
● Includes practices
● Language
● Shared!!
○ Subcultures → E.g. Japanese people, Japanese lawyers, Japanese female
lawyers
Categories → the more words we use to describe a category, the more interested
we are in it
● Words that can not be translated to other languages tell a lot
3 features we base categories on:
● Evaluation
● Potency
● Activity
Etic vs Emic
● Etic → between-cultures (apples are more expensive than oranges)
● Emic → within-culture (oranges are juicy and fresh)
● Emic associations between categories tell a lot about a culture
Attitudes towards things reflect culture
● Components of attitudes:
○ Cognitive component
○ Emotional component
○ Predisposition to action component
Norms → (ideas about expected behavior) some cultures are tight, some are loose
Roles → prescriptive elements (should …) and proscriptive elements (should not
…)
Tasks
Values → conceptions of the desirable state of affairs
● Beliefs that pertain to desirable states or behaviors that transcend specific
situations and guide the selection or evaluation of behavior and events and that
are ordered by relative importance
● 10 sets of values in most cultures according to Schwartz (1992)
, 1. Self-direction
2. Stimulation
3. Hedonism
4. Achievement
5. Power
6. Security
7. Conformity
8. Tradition
9. Benevolence
10. Universalism
● A more abstract set of values by Kluckhohn:
○ Innate human nature
○ Man’s interaction with nature
○ Modality of human activities
○ Relationship of humans to other humans
○ Time focus
Elements of subject culture overall:
1. Categories
2. Beliefs
3. Attitudes
4. Norms
5. Roles
6. Tasks
7. Values
Cultural Psychology (Heine, 2010)
Self-concept
● Independent vs Interdependent
● Self-consistency vs Flexibility
● Insider vs Outsider phenomenological experiences
● Incremental vs Entity theories of self
Independent vs. Interdependent
● TST
● Western → inner attributes, uniqueness, advertising oneself
● non-Western → position relative to others, role in a group, dependence to
others, relational roles
, ● Differences already evident in kindergarten children
● Cultural variation in independence vs interdependence is linked to these
psychological processes:
○ Cultural differences in motivation for uniqueness
○ Self-enhancement
○ Feelings of agency
○ Kinds of emotional experiences
○ Perspectives on relationships
○ Analytic vs. holistic reasoning styles
Self-consistency vs. Stability
● Independent self → consistent across situations
● Interdependent self → less evidence for a consistent self-concept across
situations
○ Japanese people depended on who was in the room when evaluating
their self-concepts
● Independent people are more consistent in terms of emotions too
● Interdependent people also have more contradictory features within their
self-concept
● The benefit of being consistent across contexts is less apparent in
interdependent cultures (in terms of wellbeing)
● People with interdependent selves have different types of consistency needs
○ Especially when others are involved
○ Interdependent people aspire consistency when they consider
themselves in relation to others
Insider vs. Outsider phenomenological experiences
● Insider → people prioritize their own perspective
● Outsider → people prioritize the perspective of an audience
● Interdependent people’s attention to an audience leaks into and distorts their
memories of themselves
○ Better at taking the perspective of a partner
○ Self-evaluations of East Asians are less affected by the presence of a
mirror
Multicultural selves
● 2 perspectives on self-concepts:
