Cultural Psychology: Outline

Outline

I. Cultural psychology is the study of the way culture and psyche interact, coordinate, as well as ultimately build each other up in the domains of self-organization, thinking, knowing, feeling, wanting, and valuing.

A. It began by taking inspiration from Johann Gottfried von Herder’s notion that “to be a member of a group is to think and act in a certain way, in the light of particular goals, values, pictures of the world; and to think and act is to belong to a group.”

B. As its name implies, it has two sides:

1. Culture, in which mentality-laden practices are examined; and

a. They are either symbolic (beliefs; doctrines) or behavioral (routines; traditions) inheritances acquired by being a member of a group where these are allowed,

Hearts through the experience of feelings and values; and

3. Contexts (and beyond) with the likes of previously mentioned subject matters.

III. It is ideal that future researchers and experts of cultural psychology to also come from other social sciences and various disciplines in hopes of expanding the current wave of experimental and ethnographic papers to include areas of interest such as gender, play, feelings as well as emotions, physical development, and spirituality that make use of innovative methodologies in order to fully explain the notion “one mind, many mentalities.”

Integration

Despite the fact that humankind has identical cognitive faculties and thus capable of the same processes, each person turns out to have a different understanding and valuing of the world they currently live in courtesy of diversity in society. Such is a representation of the motto “one mind, many mentalities: universalism without the uniformity,” which is a prospective answer to the issue with cultural psychology’s claim that “there may be multiple, diverse psychologies rather than a single psychology” as discussed throughout. While it shares a similarity to other contextual psychologies with the assumption that instances as well as development of thinking and behavior could only be comprehensively analyzed upon consideration of the specific time and place they transpire in, cultural psychology made its mark with the aim to explain how culture and psyche make each other possible by looking into the cultural foundations of the individual mind along with the psychological foundations of the cultural