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In the first post in this series, I talked about some basic cultural differences in thinking that have been uncovered over the past 20 years. Before we start a discussion about why these differences might occur, there is another why question to ask. Why bother studying cultural differences in the first place? After all, this work is hard to do, and it is often expensive as well. Besides, we're still learning a lot just by doing research with Western University students
The why bother question has a few answers. The easiest is, "because they're there." That is, any bit of new data is potentially interesting. It is interesting that the results of experiments done on Western-educated college students do not always hold up when testing members of other cultures. So, raw curiosity ought to drive us to study cultural differences.
In the current intellectual climate within Psychology, there are other important reasons to study cultural differences. For example, over the past 20 years, there has been a rise in the popularity of evolutionary approaches to Psychology. For example, my colleague David Buss from the University of Texas has done extensive studies of human mating behavior from an evolutionary perspective. In Cognitive Psychology, there are evolutionary approaches to a variety of aspects of thinking from vision (such as work by Randy Diehl and Bill Geisler, also at UT-Austin) to higher-level reasoning (by John Tooby, Leda Cosmides and their colleagues at UC Santa Barbara).
Evolutionary Psychology assumes that key aspects of our psychological processes were shaped by evolution. We are biological organisms, so this assumption is straightforward. The key issue is what aspects of our psychology are shaped by evolution. Many evolutionary theories assume that there is particular content of our thinking that was determined by evolution. Buss's work on mating suggests that men and women focus on different kinds of information about potential mates. Tooby and Cosmides assume that reasoning is optimized for factors important in hierarchical societies like detecting cheating.
Studying reasoning across cultures is useful, because it brings to light both commonalities in thinking across individuals with vastly different experience as well as extreme differences in thinking processes and styles as a result of these differences in enculturation. Unlike squirrels, say, whose behavior is pretty similar whether they are living in New York City, or rural Upstate New York, there are important differences in the way people think across cultures. Ultimately, an important component of evolutionary theories is that they must explain how our species came to have cognitive mechanisms that support fairly general purpose cultural programming. As Mike Tomasello of the Max Planck Institute points out, humans are the only species on the planet that enculturates their young in a way that allows each new generation to assume the current level of cultural complexity as a starting point.
The study of cultural differences also has an unintended benefit. Studying cultural differences illuminates variation between people across cultures. These observations also make it easier to recognize variability in thinking within a culture. Most of Psychology is really focused on typical behavior. That is, we want to understand how people in general think, reason, behave, and get along in social situations. You can see this, in the way we report statistics in papers. Often, experiments focus on the mean (average) level of performance.
Psychologists (and people more broadly) do know that there are differences between people. We acknowledge these differences most explicitly in areas like personality psychology, where we spend considerable time thinking about how people differ from each other.
Many other areas where we acknowledge differences, though, assume deep similarities between people. For example, we believe that people differ in "intelligence," and we set up tests to measure it. However, most of us assume intelligence is just some kind of intellectual power that drives our thinking processes. That is, we believe that all of us think in approximately the same way, some people just do it better than others.
Exploring cultural differences in thinking, allows us to recognize that there may be distinctly different cognitive styles. It may be easier to see these differences by comparing people across cultures. Once we see those different thinking styles, however, we may then begin to recognize them as prominent even within our own culture. So the study of cultural differences will give us insight into both the ways that people across cultures differ as well as in the many ways that people within a single culture deviate from the average.
For all of these reasons, then, it is important for psychologists to study cultural differences in thinking.
I'll continue this discussion in the next post by starting to address the question of why there are cultural differences in thinking. Stay tuned!
