40 Cultural Perspectives on Personality and Social Psychology
task situation and that cultural differences did not remain sta-
ble. For example, in experimental research, it was shown that
whereas Liberian schoolchildren are superior to unschooled
Mano rice farmers in abstract classification of geometric
shapes, the farmers tended to display more abstract levels of
classification than shown by the school children on a rice-
sorting task (Irwin & McLaughlin, 1970).
Notably, in this early tradition, experimental research fo-
cused on isolating the impact on thought of literacy and
schooling, as two of the dimensions believed to be most influ-
ential in affecting cognitive development. In one landmark
program of such research, Scribner and Cole (1981) conducted
research among the Vai tribal community as a way of assessing
the impact of literacy on thought independently of the effects
of schooling. Whereas in most societies, literacy covaries with
schooling, among the Vai certain individuals became literate
through working as priests without attending school. Results
of the Scribner and Cole (1981) investigation revealed that lit-
eracy had no independent impact on thought beyond the ef-
fects of schooling. In turn, the many programs of research
focused on evaluating the cognitive consequences of school-
ing revealed that formal schooling enhanced performance on
tests of cognitive achievement, but suggested that they had
highly limited generality in everyday domains of thought out-
side of school contexts (Sharp, Cole, & Lave, 1979).
In sum, early research on culture and cognition set a
strong foundation for contemporary cognitive work in cul-
tural psychology. Whereas its early findings suggested that
culture had the effect of arresting the rate of cognitive devel-
opment or the highest levels of cognitive development
attained, this finding became qualified as conclusions pointed
to the need for a more contextually based view of cognition.
The early image of global cultural differences in thought,
linked to an image of a primitive versus modern mind, gave
way to a view of common basic cognitive competencies.
Early work on culture and thought left many significant
legacies that remain influential in the field. There was a
recognition of the need to treat cognition as contextually de-
pendent rather than highly global. Equally, it was demon-
strated that experimental tasks do not provide pure measures
of cognitive ability. Rather, research revealed that greater
cognitive competence tends to be evident when individuals
respond to experimental tasks that are more motivationally
engaging or when individuals are observed interacting in the
contexts of everyday activities. However, at least in its early
period, a strong agenda had not yet been developed for cul-
tural psychology. As the anthropologist T. Schwartz (1981)
once commented, work in this tradition arrived at a conclu-
sion of universal cognitive competencies that, although it
represented a welcome advance from the early emphasis on
global cultural differences in thought, seemed to be proving
something that was already assumed by many anthropolo-
gists who held a view of individuals as competent in fulfilling
the cognitive demands of their culture. The field had not yet
reached the point of articulating a positive agenda of charac-
terizing how culture affected cognition. It was this kind of
stance that emerged as sociocultural work, and work on cul-
ture and cognition began to turn more explicitly to cultural
psychology.SummaryIn sum, early research in cross-cultural psychology laid im-
portant groundwork for contemporary research in the newly
reemerging framework of cultural psychology. In terms of
major empirical findings, this early work challenged the idea
that cultural differences map onto personality differences of
individual members of a culture, and pointed instead to the
role of normative practices in underlying observed differ-
ences in individual behavior. It also challenged claims of
global differences in cognitive capacity linked to moderniz-
ing influences, and instead identified modernizing influences
as having localized effects on cognitive capacities. It is im-
portant to note, however, that although in many respects it
was a precursor to much contemporary work in cultural psy-
chology, early work in these traditions of cross-cultural psy-
chology tended to remain in a relatively peripheral role in the
discipline and not to impact fundamentally on psychological
theory. Thus, in particular, work on culture and personality
never challenged the universality of psychological theories
themselves, such as psychoanalysis, but merely applied them
in understanding levels of personality development or dis-
play of assumed personality traits in different cultures.
Equally, work on individualism and collectivism was con-
cerned with developing parameters that affected the level of
development of particularly psychological attributes, but not
the nature of the attributes themselves. Thus, for example, the
prediction was made that self-esteem would be emphasized
more in individualistic than in collectivist cultures (e.g.,
Triandis, 1989), but culture was not assumed to affect quali-
tatively the nature of self-processes or the relevance of self-
esteem as a dimension of self in different cultural contexts
(e.g., Heine, Lehman, Markus, & Kitayama, 1999). Finally,
early comparative research in the sociocultural tradition
approached cognitive processes as culturally dependent, but
(at least in these earlier years) tended not to go beyond a con-
textually based view of cognition and claims of universal
cognitive competencies in its implications for psychological
theory. In the next section, consideration is given to some of
the theoretical insights that underlay the turn from these