Cultural Psychology and Cross-Cultural Psychology: The Case of Chinese Psychology

This paper discusses ways that cultural psychology can complement cross-cultural psychology to achieve a deeper understanding of culture, psychology, and their relationship (see Ratner, 2008Ratner, , 2011a, b, c, b, c, for further discussion).Cross-cultural psychology is accomplished in clarifying, operationalizing, and testing issues related to culture, psychology, and their relation.Cross-cultural psychology utilizes standardized tests and measures and variables most successfully when prior research has identified the parameters of the issues to be tested.Without this prior research, standardized content of standardized tests and measures may not fully reflect the complexity of culturally variable issues.I propose that cultural psychology can elucidate this complexity.Cultural psychology draws on rich social science theory and "thick" description from ethnographic and qualitative methodologies.Cultural psychology draws upon sociological, historical, and anthropological theories of culture to identify the rich, varying, cultural-historical content of cultural and psychological factors in particular societies.Cross-cultural psychologists can take this complex, nuanced information about culture and psychology and standardize it in measurable variables, instruments, and even experimental conditions.However, standardized cross-cultural psychological methodology is not adept at discovering complex, nuanced information about culture and psychology.It requires a symbiotic relationship with cultural psychology to make its instruments ecologically and psychologically valid.Cross-cultural psychologists have acknowledged the importance of emic descriptions to complement etic variables, and this article deepens this point through an extended example (Berry, 1980).I shall present a corpus of evidence from cultural psychological research on Chinese psychology.This evidence comprises important new information which has not been discovered by tests and measures that have been standardized for given content.Moreover, the evidence challenges certain mainstay assumptions about Chinese culture and psychology held by cross-cultural psychologistse.g., that China epitomizes collective society and psychology.Recent work by culturallyimmersed cross-cultural psychologists (e.g., Bond, 2010) indicates some changes in Chinese psychology.However they do not describe this with the detail that the following cultural psychological research does.The new evidence from cultural psychology about Chinese psychology is a fertile direction that cross-cultural psychologists can explore through their methodology.Psychologists Goh and Kuczynski (2009) researched ways that Chinese parents are becoming more child-centered, and children are consequently becoming more demanding and assertive.They emphasize the one-child policy that led parents to spoil their single child, in contrast to having to spread their largesse among several children as in the past.The language is revealing: "As the number of children in each household has decreased, traditional children as old age insurance, i.e. economic value, has been replaced by the emotional and psychological value of children" (Goh & Kuczynski, 2009, p. 507)."Children are few in number-in contrast to the larger families of previous generations-allowing the child to have one-on-one personal relationships with caregivers.Each adult caregiver has an emotional stake with the child" (Goh & Kuczynski, 2009, p. 525).