Cultures and Persons

Valid understanding of the relationship between cultures and persons requires an adequate conceptualization of the many contexts within which individuals work and live. These contexts include the more distal features of the individual’s birth ecology and ethno-national group history. These features converge more proximally upon individual experience as “process” variables, through the institutional–normative constraints and affordances encountered through socialization into a diverse set of cultural groupings. This enculturation is then revealed in the individual’s response profile of values, beliefs, choices, and behaviors at any given time. Cross-cultural psychologists have typically compared these uncultured responses cross-nationally by averaging the scores of equivalent groups of persons across national groups, terming these average differences “cultural differences.” This procedure has generated considerable resistance, primarily due to careless over-generalization of results to all members.considerable resistance, primarily due to careless over-generalization of results to all members of a given cultural group. Critics of nation-based characterizations have challenged their methodological and conceptual inadequacies, but we now know better how to address the measurement-related aspects of culture-level “psychological” variables, such as individualism–collectivism. In challenging the accuracy of these measures, critics have also neglected to acknowledge the continuing predictive and discriminant validity of these dimensions of national culture. We here review the utility of more recent measurements. We then show how nation-level comparisons can be used by psychologists to improve our understanding of individual, rather than group, outcomes. Nations are heterogeneous amalgams of ethnicities, social classes, organizations, school systems, and families. Individuals’ socialization into these groups affects their functioning at any given point in life. These enculturations are further dependent on their gender, age, and education. Assessment of culture’s relation with individual functioning requires adequate measurement of both personality and normative aspects of situations in which behavior is enacted. “Two primary goals of psychological science should be to understand what aspects of human psychology are universal and the way that context and culture produce variability. This requires that we take into account the importance of culture and context in the way that we write our papers and in the types of populations that we sample.”

We argue in this paper that a valid understanding of the relation between persons and cultures requires an adequate conceptualization of the many different contexts within which individuals work and live. In particular, we explore the interrelation between the attributes of large cultural groups and the factors acting upon the specific experiences of individuals located within such groups. Relevant contexts include the more distal features of the individual’s birth ecology and ethno-national group history that are treated as “background” variables in Berry’s (2018) eco-cultural framework. These distal features give impetus over time toward individual experience through the constraints and affordances encountered by.Over the course of this developmental process, the individual becomes less dependent on others for survival and better able to exercise greater agency in choosing his or her proximal cultural groupings and the micro-cultures of relationships within these proximal cultures (Bandura, 2001). This general process is individualized and sorted (Fowler et al., 2011) at each stage by the genetic profile of temperaments, intelligence, proclivities, and skills with which each person is endowed at birth (Thomas and Chess, 1977; Deary et al., 2010). These genetic givens are then infused into the normative cultural realities of the specific cultural groupings encountered by the individual. Successive enculturation experiences then channel the individual’s genetic profile into a behavioral repertoire which interacts with the fortuities of life (Bandura, 1998) to further refine the individual’s motivations and beliefs about the perceived world (Sasaki and Kim, 2017). These emergent structures finally channel individual choices and skill enhancements, leading to individual personality developments compatible with the constraints and affordances of the proximal cultural systems encountered as embedded within the distal birth culture of