How was my first date with the cultural psychology?

At the beginning of the semester, cultural psychology had a mind-changing effect on my mind. I didn’t expect that cultural psychology would have that much impact on all fields of psychology. I will start with my learnings from the first chapter:

Culture exists at all points of our life. Most people can say that they do not have too many cultural properties and they have grown up far from any culture, but this is like impossible because there are cultures everywhere people exist. People think like this because today most people don’t live in cultures out of touch with other cultures. Every human being is in touch with cultures and interacts with humans and cultures. Human affects cultures as culture affects humans.

The culture cycle(ideas, institutions, interactions, individuals) is a nice summation of how culture exists and works. I think institutions take the biggest role on effecting cultures and people through culture, but most important one of the element of the culture cycle is interactions, because in my opinion the best way of change of cultures is individuals’ direct interactions. I noticed that there is a big differences between the interdependent cultures and independent cultures. This difference also named as Western cultures and Eastern cultures. If there really is such a sharp distinction accepted by the academia, it didn’t seem right to me. Inferences about WEIRD people on psychology has come so sad for our field(and right).

I wrote too long about the chapter, because of that I want to continue with the article. I think the article was so instructive about what cultural psychology is than the chapter. It was a very shortened “Cultural Psychology 101” course. Again, the examples from the article was mostly about the Western and Eastern distinction. It seems like the literature is not working on the cultures of Africa, South America, Oceania or Middle East. The part of the article the author explained the assumption about “Cultural Psychology is used only to confirm the generalizability of theories” was so clear, and this part was the most memorable for me.