Melbourne School of Psychological Sciences - Research Publications
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ItemCulture and Intergroup Relations(Guilford Press, 2021-10-01)
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ItemA History of Cultural Psychology: Cultural Psychology as a Tradition and a Movement(Guilford Press, 2019-04-30)Cultural psychology that the current Handbook of Cultural Psychology embodies is an intellectual movement located in cultural psychology as an intellectual tradition whose historical roots can be found in the Enlightenment and Romantic schools of thought, and their conceptions of the person, in the 18th and 19th Century Western Europe. The chapter traces their influence in the history of psychology as an academic discipline in the form of natural scientific versus cultural scientific models of psychological investigation – emergence, entrenchment, and ebbing of this structure – in interaction with global history, and describes the historical context in which contemporary cultural psychology appeared as an approach that regards humans as meaning seeking and meaning making beings. The chapter then observes an emerging conception of the person that challenges the Enlightenment-Romantic assumption that separates culture from nature, and notes its reflection in cultural psychology’s recent push to naturalize culture in the early 21st century against the backdrop of the global challenges to humanity including climate change and intergroup conflict. The chapter concludes with a call for new conceptions of the person that regard culture in nature, which can help orient cultural psychology for the future. Cultural psychology has two senses. In one sense, it is an intellectual movement that has come into prominence in the late 20th century; in the other sense, it is a primarily Western European intellectual tradition that has continued since the 19th century. The publication of Cultural Psychology: Essays on Comparative Human Development (Stigler, Shweder, & Herdt, 1990) marked the start of the former with Richard Sheweder’s (1990) essay, Cultural Psychology – What is It? The first edition of The Handbook of Cultural Psychology (Kitayama & Cohen, 2007) was very much a product of this movement. However, it finds its inspiration in the early writings of the Romantics of the 19th century. To wit, Shweder’s (1984a) essay, Anthropology’s romantic rebellion against the enlightenment, or there is more to thinking than reason and evidence, links Shweder’s thinking on psychological anthropology to the Romantic intellectual tradition, which cultural psychology as a tradition draws from. In many ways, these two senses of cultural psychology – movement and tradition – are thematically intertwined despite the time that separates them. Yet, their implications for the future of psychology may differ a great deal. Believing that a reconstruction of history is most useful when conducted in order to understand the present and contemplate a future, I will attempt to outline a history of cultural psychology in these two senses, while bringing out their thematic continuities and discontinuities, so as to point to risks and opportunities for cultural psychology. To anticipate, it is my contention that the role of cultural psychology in the future of psychology depends on how culture, nature, and the person are construed, and how the conception of the person inform the practice of cultural psychology. The conceptions of the person underlying much of the history of cultural psychology, and indeed psychology more generally in the past, assumed that nature and culture are separate, and even in conflict; however, the concept of culture is now beginning to be naturalized – culture is no longer in opposition to nature, but a critical aspect of human nature – and the changing conception of the person implies that being naturally cultured is what it means to be human. But for now, we need to go upstream in the latter half of the 19th century Central Europe to begin this time travel.
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ItemA History of Cultural Psychology Cultural Psychology as a Tradition and a Movement(GUILFORD PRESS, 2019)
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ItemWhat is culture for?(Oxford University Press, 2019-12-10)
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ItemModeling cultural dynamics(Routledge, 2017)This chapter provides a broad and selective introduction to diverse literatures on computational approaches to cultural dynamics. It explains the social psychological models of cultural dynamics, and then move to two prominent approaches to cultural dynamics— Axelrod's model of cultural dissemination and evolutionary game theoretic approaches to evolution of cooperation. These approaches focus on complementary aspects of cultural dynamics, and that each has unique strengths in dealing with some aspects, but not others. The Axelrod model has been used to explore the dynamics deriving from transmissions of cultural information and the role of drift and to some extent of importation; however, it does not address invention, or most importantly, selection. The evolutionary game theoretic approaches have a unique strength in examining the importance of the selection process in cultural evolution. The chapter discusses how the existing approaches complement each other, and also point to the gap in the existing theory— neither has addressed the process of invention.
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ItemThe Psychology of Cultural Dynamics: What Is It, What Do We Know, and What Is Yet to Be Known?(ANNUAL REVIEWS, 2019)The psychology of cultural dynamics is the psychological investigation of the formation, maintenance, and transformation of culture over time. This article maps out the terrain, reviews the existing literature, and points out potential future directions of this research. It is divided into three parts. The first part focuses on micro-cultural dynamics, which refers to the social and psychological processes that contribute to the dissemination and retention of cultural information. The second part, on micro-macro dynamics, investigates how micro-level processes give rise to macro-cultural dynamics. The third part focuses on macro-cultural dynamics, referring to the distribution and long-term trends involving cultural information in a population, which in turn enable and constrain the micro-level processes. We conclude the review with a consideration of future directions, suggesting behavior change research as translational research on cultural dynamics.