50 Cultural Perspectives on Personality and Social Psychology
research that is informed by in-depth understandings of dif-
ferent cultural communities will become more common in
psychology in the future. As the field becomes increasingly
international and culturally diverse, investigators will be able
to bring to their research cultural sensitivities and concerns
contrasting with those presently dominating the discipline.
There is equally a need for future research on culture to
become increasingly interdisciplinary, with investigators tak-
ing into account the conceptual and methodological insights
of anthropological and sociolinguistic research traditions and
avoiding the present insularity that results from ignoring or
dismissing work from different disciplinary viewpoints. This
neglect can yield findings considered to have relatively little
importance from the perspective of the other traditions. How-
ever, given the overlap in concerns across these research
traditions and given their contrasting strengths, greater inter-
disciplinary exchange can only serve to enhance progress in
the field.
Summary
To enhance the quality of existing cultural research, it is im-
portant for investigators to go beyond dichotomous frame-
works for understanding cultural differences, such as the
global dimensions of individualism-collectivism. These types
of frameworks fail to capture the complexity of individual
cultural systems, portraying cultures in ways that are overly
static, uniform, and isolated. Effort must be made to develop
more nuanced views of culture through attending to everyday
cultural activities and practices as well as to symbolic culture
and ecological dimensions of contexts. Additionally, attention
must be given both to individual differences and to cultural
influences—the assumption should not be made that individ-
ual differences map directly onto cultural variation. Finally,
the sensitivity of cultural research stands to be enhanced
through researchers’ working to gain a greater understanding
of the specific cultural communities which they study.
CONCLUSION
In conclusion, the present examination of culture in social
psychological theory highlights the importance of recogniz-
ing that culture is part of human experience and needs to be
an explicit part of psychological theories that purport to pre-
dict, explain, and understand that experience. What work in
culture aims to achieve, and what it has already accomplished
in many respects, is more than to lead investigators to treat
psychological findings and processes as limited in generality.
Rather than leading to an extreme relativism that precludes
comparison, work in this area holds the promise of leading to
the formulation of models of human experience that are in-
creasingly culturally inclusive. By calling attention to the
cultural meanings and practices that form the implicit context
for existing psychological effects, and by broadening present
conceptions of the possibilities of human psychological func-
tioning, work in cultural psychology is contributing new con-
structs, research questions, and theoretical insights to expand
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