32 Cultural Perspectives on Personality and Social Psychology
disciplinary practices that are affecting these shifts. The first
section considers factors that are contributing to the tendency
to assign cultural considerations a relatively peripheral role
both in social psychology and more generally in the larger
discipline. The second section provides an overview of some
of the earliest traditions of cultural research in social psy-
chology, highlighting respects in which this research, al-
though groundbreaking in many respects, did not seriously
challenge this tendency to downplay the importance of cul-
ture in psychology. Finally, attention turns to the core as-
sumptions of cultural psychology, assumptions that highlight
the need to accord culture a more integral role in basic psy-
chological theory.
Downplaying of Culture in Mainstream
Social Psychology
Signs of the peripheral theoretical role accorded to cultural
considerations in social psychology may be seen in its being
downplayed in major social psychological publications. Text-
books typically either leave the construct of culture theo-
retically undefined, treat it as the same as the objective
environment or social ecology, or approach it in an eclectic
way that lacks conceptual clarity. Likewise, basic theory
tends to be presented without any reference to cultural con-
siderations. Culture is treated merely as a factor that influ-
ences the universality of certain psychological effects but not
as a process that must be taken into account to explain the
form of basic psychological phenomena. One example of
such a stance can be found in Higgins and Kruglanski’s
(1996) recent handbook on basic principles of social psy-
chology: The only citations for culturein the index—with
only one exception—refer to pages within the single chapter
on cultural psychology by Markus, Kitayama, and Heiman
(1996), rather than to any of the other 27 chapters of the vol-
ume. In the following discussion, we argue that this down-
playing of culture in social psychology reflects to a great
degree the tendency to conceptualize situations in culture-
free terms, the embrace of an idealized natural-science model
of explanation, and the default assumption of cultural homo-
geneity that dominates the field.
Culture-Free Approach to Situations
A key contribution of social psychology—if not its signa-
ture explanatory feature—is its recognition of the power of
situations to impact behavior. Such a stance is reflected, for
example, in a series of classic studies; salient examples in-
clude the Milgram conformity experiment, which demon-
strated that to conform with the orders of an experimenter,
individuals were willing to inflict a harmful electric shock on
a learner (Milgram, 1963), as well as the prison experiment of
Zimbardo and his colleagues (Haney, Banks, & Zimbardo,
1973), which demonstrated that individuals who had been
thrust into the role relationships of guards and prisoners in a
simulated prison behaved in ways that reflected these posi-
tions, with the guards behaving abusively and the prisoners
becoming passive. It also may be seen in recent lines of in-
quiry on such topics as individuals’ limited conscious access
to their cognitive processes, priming effects, and the mere ex-
posure effect (Bargh, 1996; Bornstein, Kale, & Cornell,
1990; Zimbardo, Banks, Haney, & Jaffe, 1973). Social psy-
chological work of this type has shown that contexts affect
behavior in ways that do not depend on conscious mediation
and that may even violate individuals’ conscious expectations
and motivational inclinations.
Supplementing this focus on the power of situations to af-
fect behavior, it has also been documented that individual dif-
ferences influence the meaning accorded to situations. This
attention to individual differences is evident not only in work
on personality processes but also in the attention given to
cognitive and motivational schemas as sources of individual
variability in behavior. Individual difference dimensions,
however, typically are accorded a secondary role to situa-
tional influences within social psychological theory. They are
believed to affect the display of certain basic psychological
dimensions, but they are not often implicated in normative
models of psychological phenomena. To give a representa-
tive example of such a stance, the theory of communal and
exchange relationships has been forwarded to distinguish
qualitatively between relationships that are based on need
versus those based on exchange considerations (Mills &
Clark, 1982). In this model, individual differences are in-
voked only in a descriptive sense (i.e., to distinguish between
persons who are more or less likely to adopt each type of ori-
entation) and not in a theoretical sense (that is, to identify dis-
tinctive approaches to relationships beyond those specified in
the original conceptual model).
The crucial point is that the approach to situations that
dominates social psychological inquiry treats contexts as
presenting one most veridical structure that can be known
through inductive or deductive information processing. No
consideration is given to the possibility that culture is neces-
sarily implicated in the definition of situations or that cul-
tural presuppositions constitute prerequisites of what is
considered objective knowledge. It is assumed that variability
in judgment arises from differences in the information avail-
able to individuals or from differences in their information-
processing abilities, resulting in certain judgments’ being
more or less cognitively adequate or veridical than others