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  • Culture, a Missing Link in Psychology: Note from Mexican Ethnopsychology

    Monday, October 26, 2009 | 7:00 PM - 9:00 PM
    The New York Academy of Sciences

    Presented by the Psychology Section

    • Registration Closed

    Early in psychological thought Wundt (1916) vigorously pioneered both behavioral and cultural psychology. In retrospect, his principal objective of integrating them into an objective, generalizable, yet culturally sensitive science is still a project in progress. The outcome has been that psychological main stream has overstressed internal validity, and taken excessive liberties in regards to external validity, producing broad and ill founded generalizations of results obtained from small culturally homogenous samples. On the other hand, Wundt´s “folk psychology” is apparent in the empirical and theoretical contributions by those who are focused on discovering and describing behavior based on its ecological and cultural context.

    As a result, the acknowledgement of culture is certainly present in cross-cultural psychology; however, the simple comparison of some psychological process or phenomenon of participants representing diverse groups does not insure the presence of culture as a studied variable. In fact, attempts of curving rampant intuitive interpretations of non equivalent samples and variables across alleged cultures by suggesting specific methodological strategies (Poortinga & Malpass, 1986), have generally fallen on deaf ears. A truly ecological or cultural perspective requires the direct inclusion or measurement of cultural and structural variables as well as the functional relationship of psychological variables within a cultural system, before any attempt of cross-cultural comparisons are made.

    In consideration of the sound methodological and theoretical proposals made by some cross-cultural psychologists, but ignored by most, we will review the development of a Mexican ethnopsychology (e.g. Diaz-Guerrero, 1994; 2002), which is directed from a universal conception of psychology, but also stresses the importance of measuring psychological manifestations of culture through norms, beliefs, values and education, the behavioral manifestations of psychological constructs common to the participants in different sub-cultures, and the interrelationship between cultural and psychological variables.
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