Cultural Psychology

Cultural psychology studies how cultures reflect and shape the psychological processes of their members, on the premise that mind and culture are inseparable and mutually constituted: individuals are shaped by their culture, and culture is in turn shaped by the individuals within it. The field is centrally concerned with defining the nature and function of culture in relation to psychological phenomena. As the anthropologist Gerd Baumann put it, culture is not a real thing but an abstract analytical notion that does not itself cause behavior but abstracts from it, functioning as a heuristic for explaining how people understand and act on the world rather than as something normative or predictive. Richard Shweder, a major proponent of the field, has defined cultural psychology as the study of how cultural traditions and social practices regulate, express and transform the human psyche, producing not psychic unity for humankind but ethnic divergence in mind, self and emotion.