Culture and the Mind

Since the dawn of psychology as a science, conceptual and methodological questions have accompanied research at the intersection of culture and psychology. In the past, studying the relationship between culture and psychology has been difficult due to sampling restrictions and response biases. Since these challenges have been mastered, a wealth of research has accumulated on how culture influences cognition, emotion, and the self. We will first review and discuss this work. We will next discuss a set of new challenges for culture and psychology. Such challenges include questions about conceptual clarity, within-cultural and sub-cultural variations (e.g., variations due to social status, class, religion, or political affiliation), differentiation and integration of processes at the group vs. individual level of analysis, modeling of how cultural processes unfold over time, and integration of insights from etic and emic methodological approaches. The final goal of this seminar will be to propose ways to address these challenges, ideally in a form of mini-research projects presented at the end of the class.