Rethinking the Two Psychologies, Visions of Cultural Psychology

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Rethinking the Two Psychologies

The author starts his words by mentioning some problems about the cross cultural studies in the first psychology, which has deficiencies in explaining culture’s role in people’s mental life. Then he moves to talk about a new approach - the second psychology. Being a divided discipline, psychology was influenced by the cognitive revolution of the 1960s and 70s. At that era, although the methods of behaviorism were still used, the cognitive psychology brought a new perceptive about the mediating structures between output and input. In the 1970s, a cognitive science movement emerged with an emphasis on physical psychology and the integration of neurosciences and social sciences. Bruner, a foremost scientist of cognitive revolution, criticized the revolution by losing focus on the meaning making process and instead being reduced to just developing behaviorism. According to him, focusing only on the physiological dehumanizes the concept of mind, which is the exact opposite of what the revolution was setout to do. During these decades, other social behavioral sciences such as sociology and anthropology underwent their own revolutions. On the one hand some scholars claim that cognitive science can be a good start to understand the human mind in terms of culture since it integrates linguistics and philosophy into the social sciences. On the other hand, some scholars like Bruner, criticize the cognitive science for its excessive emphasis on technology, and the misconception that humanity could be assessed by techno-rationality. Currently, psychology and other related sciences do not have a well established and agreed upon criteria, however new possibilities are emerging. Cultural psychology, a late 20th century product of second psychology, is one of them and it is a new road in which “culture is placed on a level with biology and society in shaping individual human nature”.

Visions of Cultural Psychology

Throughout the history of psychology, some criticisms have been voiced for the limitation of psychological experiments which provide limited insight due to their fixed-task procedures. In the recent decade, the popularity of cultural psychology has increased because of the problems with the cross-cultural approach and the overall progress of psychology. In the same years, we also come across with the thinkers who believed that cultural psychology could be provide an alternative perspective. Stephan Toulmin, claimed that Wundt’s suggestion for a Volkerpsychologie (cultural psychology) should be reconsidered by the psychologist. Douglass Price-Williams suggested expansion of cross cultural psychology into cultural psychology, which would utilize semiotics (pragmatics in language) and more general cultural studies. Lutz Eckensberger, and Berdt Krewer, with their colleagues in Saarbrucken combined the ideas of Ernst Boesch with an action theory and Piagetian constructivism. They emphasized the developmental approach in cultural psychology. Richard Shweder, concentrated on the issues of context, content dependent human thinking, and mediation via meaningful symbols. According to him, culture shapes the individuals within it and also it is shaped by these individuals. Bruner’s view of cultural psychology focuses on the experiences and behaviors which are affected by human intentional states. Humans’ psychological processes come out and work within the “social-symbolically mediated everyday encounters” of people. Shweder and Bruner deviate from the other cultural psychology theorists in terms of their emphasis on interpretation, use of humanities based analysis methods, their view of roots of cultural psychology and the types of data that they use for their empirical studies.

Main characteristics of cultural psychology which are agreed upon by nearly all cultural psychologists are the following;

• 1) Actions are mediated in the context.
• 2) Genetic model is supported which comprises historical, ontogenic and microgenetic levels of analysis.
• 3) Events that take place in everyday human life constitute the analyzing units.
• 4) Mind is formed by the “joint mediated activity of people”. It’s “co-constructed”.
• 5) Although people cannot choose every setting they are in, they direct their developments.
• 6) A strict determinism (cause and effect) that excludes the influence of interpretation is rejected. Activity specific emergent nature of mind is emphasized.
• 7) Methodologies from humanities, biological and social sciences are used.

Questions

• 1)Does cultural psychology accept the role of biology and society in shaping human nature?
• 2)How and why did not scholars emphasize the importance of culture in the science of psychology before cultural psychology?