Title: Cultural Differences (CULTURAL PSYCHOLOGY) iResearchNet
Headings: Cultural Differences
Cultural Differences
Cultural Differences Definition
Cultural Differences Context and Focus
Cultural Differences Background and History
Cultural Differences Evidence
Cultural Differences Implications
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Content: However, it was not until around the 19th century C.E. that scholars began to conduct systematic studies of unique cultural beliefs and practices, such as Alexis de Tocqueville’s writings about the unique aspects of early American culture and Max Weber’s analysis of how religious ideologies developed in Northern Europe created cultural differences in beliefs about the meaning of work. About 100 years later, the field of cultural anthropology emerged with an exclusive focus on understanding the nature of cultural differences around the world. Today, psychological research has brought new understanding about the nature of cultural differences and similarities by combining an anthropological focus on culture with sophisticated experimental methods developed in social and cognitive psychology. This area of research within social psychology is referred to as cultural psychology. Before psychologists began to study culture, it was often assumed that knowledge gained from psychological research conducted within one culture applied to all humans. This assumption about the universality of human psychology was challenged when researchers then tried to replicate studies in other cultures and found very different results for a number of important phenomena. For example, psychological experiments showing that people tend to exert less effort when working in a group versus alone showed an opposite pattern in East Asian societies. There, people tend to exert less effort when working alone compared to when working in a group. Further, studies conducted in India, and later in Japan, showed an opposite pattern to earlier research conducted in the United States—that people tend to overestimate the influence of personality and underestimate the influence of situational factors on behavior. Cultural Differences Evidence
Three broad types of evidence have been used to demonstrate cultural differences.