Insights and Challenges of Cultural Psychology 43regarding the nature, causes, and consequences of emotions,
cultural routines for responding to emotions, natural lan-
guage categories for defining emotions, and a range of other
sociocultural processes.
This assumption of the interdependence of psychological
and cultural processes represents the central idea of cultural
psychology. Notably, the term cultural psychologywas se-
lected by theorists to convey this central insight that psycho-
logical processes need to be understood as always grounded
in particular socio-cultural-historical contexts that influence
their form and patterning, just as cultural communities de-
pend for their existence on particular communities of inten-
tional agents. The present considerations then lead to the
expectation that qualitative differences in modes of psy-
chological functioning will be observed among individuals
from cultural communities characterized by contrasting self-
related sociocultural meanings and practices.
Summary
Among the key conceptual insights giving rise to cultural
psychology were the emergence of a view of the individual as
actively contributing meanings to experience and an under-
standing of culture as a symbolic system of meanings and
practices that cannot be explained exclusively in functional
terms as mapping onto objective adaptive constraints. Crucial
to the field’s development was that it also came to be recog-
nized that higher-order psychological processes depend for
their emergence on individuals’ participation in particular
sociocultural contexts, and thus that culture is fundamental
to the development of self.
Select Overview of Empirical Research
in Cultural Psychology
The present section examines representative examples of em-
pirical studies that embody this core insight regarding the
cultural grounding of psychological processes, an insight that
is central to the many traditions of work in cultural psychol-
ogy (e.g., Cole, 1990, 1996; Markus et al., 1996; J. G. Miller,
1997; Shweder, 1990; Shweder et al., 1998). Although the
overview presented here is necessarily highly selective and
incomplete, it serves to illustrate ways in which cultural re-
search is offering new process explanations of psychological
phenomena as well as identifying fundamental variability in
the forms that psychological processes assume.
Sociocultural Traditions of Research
The discussion here makes reference to findings from a di-
verse range of related viewpoints that have derived from the
work of such major cultural theorists as Vygotsky (1978,
1981a, 1981b), Leontiev (1979a, 1979b), Luria (1979, 1981),
Bakhtin (1986), and Bourdieu (1977) among others; their
work is reflected in the many contemporary traditions of re-
search in sociocultural psychology (e.g., Cole, 1988, 1990;
Rogoff, 1990; Valsiner, 1988, 1989; Wertsch, 1979, 1991).
Central to theoretical work within this tradition is an empha-
sis on the mediated nature of cognition. Human behavior is
seen as dependent on cultural tools or on other mediational
means, with language recognized as one of the most central
of these cultural supports. Embodying a broad lens, sociocul-
tural approaches focus on understanding human activity at
phylogenetic, historical, ontogenetic, and microgenetic lev-
els, with cultural practices and activities viewed in terms of
their place in larger sociopolitical contexts.
Considerable research in this area focuses on document-
ing how interaction with cultural tools and participation in
everyday cultural activities leads to powerful domain-
specific changes in thought. In work on everyday cognition
(see review in Schliemann, Carraher, & Ceci, 1997), it has
been shown, in fact, that everyday experiences can produce
changes that represent an advance on those produced by
schooling. For example, Scribner (1984) documented that
individuals who work as preloaders in a milk factory and
have less formal education than do white-collar workers are
able to solve a simulated loading task more rapidly than do
white-collar workers through using a more efficient percep-
tual solution strategy as contrasted with a slower enumerative
approach. Likewise, in a growing body of research on exper-
tise, it has been revealed, for example, that compared with
novice adult chess players, child chess experts use more
complex clustering strategies in organization and retrieval of
chess information; they are also more proficient in their
memory for chess pieces (Chi, Glaser, & Farr, 1998). Similar
effects have equally been shown to occur in the solving of
math problems among expert versus novice abacus users
(Stigler, 1984).
It is important to note that sociocultural research is also
providing new process models of the nature of everyday cog-
nition. For example, recent research on situated cognition has
challenged the view of learning as a distinct activity or as an
end in itself set off from daily life and has emphasized its em-
beddedness in everyday activities and social contexts (Lave,
1988, 1993; Lave & Wenger, 1991). Research has revealed,
for example, that in contrast to the forms of instruction that
occur in formal school settings, learning in everyday situa-
tions is more oriented toward practical problems. In part as a
result, individuals tend to be more motivationally involved in
tasks and spontaneously to search for and generate more flex-
ible task solutions in everyday situations than they do in
formal school contexts.