Hope It Helps

Cultural Psychology

Steven J. Heine
University of British Columbia

Please address correspondence to
Steven J. Heine
2136 West Mall, University of British Columbia
Vancouver, BC, V6T 1Z4 Canada
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To appear in S. T. Fiske, D. T, Gilbert, & G. Lindzey (Eds). Handbook of Social Psychology, Fifth Edition.
Introduction
We are members of a cultural species. That is, we depend critically on cultural learning in virtually all aspects of our lives. Whether we’re trying to manage our resources, woo a mate, protect our family, enhance our status, or form a political alliance – goals that are pursued by people in all cultures – we do so in culturally-grounded ways. That is, in all our actions we rely on ideas, values, feelings, strategies, and goals that have been shaped by our cultural experiences. Human activity is inextricably wrapped up in cultural meanings; there are not any occasions when we cast aside our cultural dressings to reveal the naked universal human mind. To be sure, there are many regularities that exist across humans from all cultures with respect to many psychological phenomena, while at the same time there remain many pronounced differences (for a review see Norenzayan & Heine, 2005). Yet the point is that all psychological phenomena, whether largely similar or different across cultures, remain entangled in cultural meanings. The challenge for comprehending the mind of a cultural species is that it requires a rich understanding of how the mind is constrained and afforded by cultural learning. The field of cultural psychology has emerged in response to this challenge. Cultural psychologists share the key assumption that not all psychological processes are so inflexibly hardwired into the brain that they appear in identical ways across cultural contexts. Rather, psychological processes are seen to arise from evolutionarily-shaped biological

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