What is Cultural Psychology?

Many aspects of how we behave and how we think have to do not with our personal life experiences or our genetics, but with the culture in which we are immersed.

In fact, although today the predominant point of view is the Western one, we must not lose sight of the fact that, in certain places, the cultural border means that tribes living in the same region do not understand each other by language or customs and mentality.

Cultural psychology is the branch of psychology that tries to deal with this aspect of the human mind, based on diversity and with the cultural heritage that we receive. Let's see what exactly it is and what it is for.

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Cultural Psychology: A Definition

Cultural psychology is a section of psychology that is responsible for studying the way in which cultural elements influence behavior, customs and perception of groups of people. That is, it examines the context in which people live to find in it causes that individuals tend to act in one way and not another.

For example, have you ever wondered why so many people in India refuse to slaughter cows? The easy answer to this is to point out that for a good part of the population cows are sacred, but in reality this does not explain much. What makes cows sacred sustainable?

Cultural psychologists are able to investigate the different ways in which the society of this country takes advantage of these animals without having to kill them. In turn, they have tools to know where the limits of the respect that these people have for cows are.

The same is true of many other cultural phenomena. This type of psychologist is in charge of look in society for the causes of behavior patterns and, through predictions, to know which new actions would conflict with these customs and which would not.

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Its relationship with sociology and anthropology

Cultural psychology is closely related to two social sciences: sociology and especially anthropology.

With sociology

Sociology is responsible for studying social phenomena in a broad sense. For example, ghetto formation and social stratification, or migration patterns in a country. When it comes to cultural psychology, it can provide data, especially quantitative data, to help understand the historical dynamics that have shaped a specific culture.

With anthropology

Anthropology, unlike sociology, focuses rather on understanding cultures themselves, with all the characteristic symbols, customs, rituals, and concepts. In other words, while sociology studies the forms of what happens in society, anthropology studies the content of cultural units that intervene in this dynamic of collective change.

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The functions of Cultural Psychology

The main fields of application of cultural psychology are as follows.

1. Helps to understand ethnicities

In an increasingly globalized world such as ours, it is very important to know the type of population in a region where foreign initiatives are to be deployed. Cultural psychologists they can work as advisers to companies or any other type of organization so that what is done does not have a negative impact on the way of life of these people and that, incidentally, a lot of time and money is not wasted on initiatives that simply do not work.

2. It allows to intervene in conflicts

In mediation efforts, it is always good to be clear that the opposing parties sometimes do not share the same vision of reality. The language and ideology differ between groups, and if what you want is to achieve a good fit, you have to first know how the pieces are to be put together.

3. It serves to detect differential aspects

Something that characterizes the hegemony of a culture (in the case of the present times, the Western one) is that all those ethnic groups that do not are part of the dominant are so ignored that many of them are unknown, and it is simply assumed that they are like the others but with certain folkloric and aesthetic characteristics of their own.

Cultural psychology participates in the process of understanding the depth of these differences between communities and, in definitively, to shed light on something that previously seemed like a mischief of cultures due to simple ignorance and bias Eurocentric.

4. Support other disciplines

Of course, cultural psychology not only draws on sociology and anthropology: it also contributes to their advancement. It does this by participating in the rest of the functions that we have seen and adopting a perspective focused on the mode in that the social and cultural, over time, influences the actions, perceptions and thoughts of the people.