Cross-Cultural Psychology
Samantha Mortinsen
9/18/2011
Psy/450
Dorothy Rodwell

Cross-Cultural Psychology Culture, we all have grown up knowing one, or at times more than one, kind of culture. Everyone has different beliefs and ways of doing things and this usually has to do with our culture and the way we have been raised and brought up. This type of psychology looks into these many different cultures and studies how they affect us as humans and our development, mental processes, and behavior. Cultural psychology is a field in psychology that assumes that the idea that culture and mind are inseparable and that psychological theories in one culture are likely to be limited in applicability when applied to different cultures. …show more content…

These psychologists must learn how people within these cultures think and reason, this is tapping into the cultures and their peoples critical thinking, the peoples deep thoughts and thinking and reasoning for the things they do within their culture and how it affects their lives and who they become and how they act and behave. We are all critical thinkers in some way or another and the way we think and do things makes us who we are, that is why it is important for psychologists to better understand each cultures way of critical thinking. Cross-cultural psychology follows a bedrock method of describing, explaining, and predicting: describe the major differences and similarities between the cultures, explain the underlying factors that affect the examined psychological phenomenon, and finally predict the factors that would bring about the optimal outcome (Shiraev & Levy, 2010). There are two different major divisions of research in this field of cross-cultural psychology, they are: quantitative and qualitative. The quantitative approach measures central tendency to describe human behavior, like; mean, median, mode, etc. Now the qualitative approach tries to explain the many different types of unobservable behavior and cognition, like innuendo and dreams. Some approaches that researchers use when experimenting in cross-cultural psychology are; the application oriented strategy