Cross-cultural psychology: issues and overarching themes

Abstract

A selection of current and presumably future issues is addressed in four sections. The first section deals with the pervasive controversy between relativistic and universalistic orientations. In the second section, the authors discuss how the notion of culture is used in empirical studies, drawing attention to, among other things, the low emphasis on cross-cultural similarities that emerge from many data sets. The third section addresses three themes that may well become more important in the future, namely questions concerning the degree of coherence in cross-cultural data spanning larger ranges of behavior, the integration of findings from non-Western societies, and an increase in research on human development in cultural context. The fourth section emphasizes the responsibility of cross-cultural psychologists to apply their expertise, especially to problems of economic and social inequality, to contribute to human well-being.