Tips for incorporating culture in class

Be aware of some common, interrelated misconceptions about culture.

By APA?s Task Force on Diversity Issues at the Precollege and Undergraduate Levels of Education in Psychology

True or false: 1) When explaining someone else?s behavior, people tend to make the 'fundamental attribution error,' overemphasizing personal dispositions and overlooking the influence of the situation.

2) An important aspect of mental health is an integrated, stable sense of individual identity.

3) Mothers and infants who enjoy a good relationship maintain frequent eye contact.

'True' is the right answer to all these questions?if you are talking about people from Western cultures, which put a premium on individualism and autonomy. But these and many other psychological findings have turned out to be less applicable in collectivist cultures, which emphasize social relationships and group needs over personal goals and individual expression.

In India and China, where people are more group oriented than in the West, sensitivity to situational constraints on behavior is high and the fundamental attribution error is not so fundamental (Miller, 1984; Morris & Peng, 1994). In Japan, the sense of self?who you feel yourself to be?often fluctuates considerably from one situation to the next (de Rivera, 1989). In Samoa, mother-infant eye contact is not so important; babies are often placed looking away from the mother, out into the family or group (Ochs, 1988).

Psychology teachers are increasingly trying to integrate crosscultural findings such as these into their courses. At a symposium at the XXVI International Congress of Psychology in Montreal in 1996, Walter J. Lonner, PhD, head of the Center for Cross-Cultural Research at Western Washington University, outlined some approaches that instructors can take. These approaches include, among others, mentioning some cultural variations in each unit; occasionally covering specific topics in depth, such as culture-bound disorders or cultural differences in problem-solving, in order to demonstrate the complexities involved in their study and interpretation; treating the cultural perspective as a major psychological paradigm and integrating its findings into many units of the course; and infusing selected topics, or even the entire course, with cultural coverage.

Misunderstandings

Whichever strategy they use, instructors need to be aware of some common, interrelated misconceptions about culture:

? Culture as exotic. Students sometimes interpret cultural variations as odd, irrational or amusing and find it hard to stand back and view their own culture as someone from another society might do. For example, they may regard Latin American notions of time as mysterious and the North American emphasis on strict punctuality as 'natural.' The implicit assumption is that 'culture' is something that only other people have.

? Culture as arbitrary. Students often fail to see how cultural customs fit into a group?s economic, political and kinship systems. They may decide that cultural variations are capricious and be puzzled when efforts to change other cultures? ways meet resistance. Instructors can help, by putting cultural variations in historical and political context, rather than merely describing them.

? Culture as explanatory. As Lonner and Roy Malpass (1994) have noted, people often use the term 'culture' to explain some behavior, as in 'Group X attacks its neighbors because it has a warlike culture,' without specifying the specific mechanisms that underlie cultural influences. This approach is circular, and begs the question of why cultural practices arise, continue, change and fade.

? Culture as monolithic. Whenever we teach about diverse groups, it is easy to stereotype. People?s experiences are influenced by age, socioeconomic status, education and individual dispositions and are far more complex than any cultural norms. If group differences are exaggerated and oversimplified, students may conclude that any study that failed to examine people exactly like themselves has nothing to tell them.

Bringing culture home

One way to correct such misunderstandings is to have students examine their own cultural assumptions and expectations. For example, to show that everyone 'has' a culture, a teacher might ask students to analyze norms for conversational distance, speaking to strangers in public, challenging a professor in class, arriving at a designated time for an appointment, taking care of elderly parents and so forth. Because the United States is a diverse society, students from different ethnic and national, and from different geographic regions of the country, are likely to come up with differing norms.

Instructors might also assign a classic exercise from social psychology, in which students intentionally violate a norm regarding personal space by sitting or standing closer than usual to someone else, then describe how they felt and what the reactions of others were. Yet another approach is to ask students whether they have ever unintentionally violated a culture norm while traveling or living in another country.

To address the issue of where cultural norms come from, instructors might lecture on the possible origins of some specific custom or cultural characteristic. For example, Richard Nisbett (1994) has proposed that some cultures?including regional cultures in the American South and parts of the West?have higher levels of male violence than others do in part because of these cultures? historic dependence on herding and hunting. When livelihoods can be lost overnight by the theft of animals, a culture may encourage vigilance toward any act that might be interpreted as a threat. Cultural attitudes such as this one can remain powerful long after their usefulness has passed.

Explaining cultural customs is not the same as endorsing them, of course. For example, exploring the origins of male violence is not equivalent to endorsing male violence! Similarly, understanding the economic and historic origins of female circumcision does not require approval of the practice. But instructors may want to make it clear that while Americans often dislike 'foreign' customs, the converse is also true. For example, many cultures disapprove of male circumcision, and many find the American death penalty for criminal offenses to be barbaric.

What to emphasize

When incorporating cultural issues and findings into a course, instructors must inevitably make some choices about which topics to include. The particular selection, however, is probably less important than emphasizing general points such as these:

? Cultural identity has a profound influence on the behavior of all human beings.

? Researchers? cultural assumptions can influence the questions they study, the importance they give to various topics, the behaviors they notice and the theoretical concepts they emphasize.

? Psychological conclusions based on studies of North Americans and Europeans are not necessarily valid for the rest of the world?s population.

? Ethnocentrism is universal, and an effort is required to overcome it.

? Cross-cultural research is useful in establishing not only human differences but also human commonalities and universals (for example, in language acquisition and stages of moral reasoning).

Because we all necessarily see the world through a cultural lens, a truly global psychology may never be possible, but as researchers and teachers, we can at least become more aware of the culturally specific nature of some of our findings.Y

References cited in this article:

? de Rivera, J. (1989). Comparing experiences across cultures: Shame and guilt in America and Japan. 'Hiroshima Forum for Psychology,' 14, 13-20.

? Miller, J. G. (1984). Culture and the development of everyday social explanation. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 46, 961-978.

Morris, M. W., & Peng, K. (1994). Culture and cause: American and Chinese attributions for social and physical events. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 67, 949-971.

? Nisbett, R. E. (1993). Violence and U.S. regional culture. American Psychologist, 48, 441-449.

? Ochs, E. (1988). Culture and language development: language acquisition and language socialization in a Samoan village. Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press.

This article is the sixth in a series by the APA Board of Educational Affair?s Task Force on Diversity Issues at the Precollege and Undergraduate Levels of Education in Psychology. The group is working to promote the teaching of psychology as a more inclusive discipline. The task force seeks to find constructive ways of supporting teachers? efforts to convey research findings on diverse groups and address such issues as gender, ethnicity, culture, sexual orientation and disability.

The task force members are A. Toy Caldwell-Colbert, PhD, Ruth E. Fassinger, PhD, Joseph J. Horvat, Jr., PhD, Joe Lamas, Linda Mona, PhD, John N. Mortisugu, PhD, and chair Carole E. Wade, PhD.

Further reading

Adler, L. L., & Gielen, U. P. (Eds.) (1994). Cross-cultural topics in psychology. Westport, Conn.: Praeger.
Lonner, W. J., & Malpass, R. S. (Eds.) (1994). Psychology and culture. Boston: Allyn & Bacon.
Matsumoto, D. (1994). People: Psychology from a cultural perspective. Pacific Grove, CA: Brooks/Cole.
Matsumoto, D. (1996). Culture and psychology. Pacific Grove, Calif.: Brooks/Cole.
Triandis, H. C. (1995). Individualism and collectivism. Boulder, Colo.: Westview Publishing Co.