Abstract
This chapter attempts to bring anthropological perspectives and knowledge into psychology—with regard to broadening the definition of research and acceptable methodologies, especially with regard to culture; to understanding and attempting to compensate for ethnocentrism; and looking at the discipline of psychology itself from a social science point of view.
An earlier version of this chapter appeared in the 2000 American Anthropologist, 102(3), 552–563. © 2000 by the American Anthropological Association, and is used with permission from the American Anthropologist.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Notes
- 1.
The term “culture” is used in this chapter as a shorthand to refer to the subject matter generally regarded as cultural, without confronting problems of definition (e.g., the 164 definitions in Kroeber & Kluckhohn, 1952), other difficulties with the concepts “personality, “culture,” and “society” (Fish, 1996), or differing perspectives from cultural studies (During, 2003; Edgar & Sedgwick, 2005). Similarly, this chapter does not go beyond the discussion of “etics” and “emics” in Chapter 1, though the concepts have been used widely, and in a variety of ways (Harris, 1999; Kitayama & Cohen, 2007). In addition, although all inhabitants of the New World could rightly be thought of as “American,” the term is used here to refer to people in the United States because it is the folk term we in the United States use to refer to ourselves. This is a parallel to the way another culture might refer to itself with a term that means “the human beings.” Finally, terms like “white” and “black” are used because they are the American folk terms referring to purported “races”—even though Homo sapiens has no races in the biological sense.
- 2.
Questionnaire surveys, because they are quantitative, are viewed by psychologists as more scientific than ethnographic interviews; however, they are seen as less scientific than experiments, because experiments yield causal inferences.
- 3.
An example of the problem can be seen in the widely used and highly regarded edited volume, “Ethnicity and Family Therapy” (McGoldrick, Giordano, & Garcia-Preto, 2005), now in its third edition. Following an introduction, the book contains 47 chapters, each of which describes American families from a particular cultural background and discusses issues relevant to family therapy with them. The great majority of chapter authors are family therapists (social workers, psychologists, and a few psychiatrists) whose main qualification to write about the ethnic group in question is their membership in it—rather than specifically relevant training in the social sciences. My point is not that the cultural content does not exist—the three-volume second edition of the Handbook of Cross-Cultural Psychology (Berry et al., 1997) is just one example to the contrary. Rather, it is that awareness of the existence of the content and of the complexity and pervasiveness of culture has not diffused to most psychologists (as well as others, like social workers and psychiatrists—though this chapter is not about them), including many who teach psychology courses with some form of the word “culture” in the title.
- 4.
Psychologists also make a point of distinguishing among their doctorates to emphasize their expertise and training, and to more clearly distinguish themselves from psychiatrists and social workers. The PhD is a research degree awarded to scientists and scientist-practitioners (e.g., clinical psychologists). The PsyD (Doctor of Psychology) is an applied degree awarded to practitioners by university psychology departments as well as both university-based and free-standing schools of professional psychology. The EdD degree (Doctor of Education) implies a focus on education and the schools and is usually awarded by schools of education to educational psychologists and school psychologists. PhD psychologists are the most numerous and the PhD is the most prestigious degree; the PsyD has been in existence for only a few decades but has rapidly become widespread; EdD psychologists are on the wane, with educational psychology tending toward the PhD and school psychology becoming dominated by the PsyD.
- 5.
The social class origins and aspirations of social scientists are a topic of evident importance and worthy of empirical investigation. The author’s impressionistic observations of psychologists are consistent with the following. Eugene Ogan (n.d.) presents evidence for the upper-class and upper–middle class roots of American anthropology. Anne Roe’s (1953) study of 14 eminent psychologists and 8 eminent anthropologists suggested that the anthropologists came from money, while the psychologists worked their way up. Psychologists’ identification with the upper middle class may not make them unique—Strangers in Paradise (Ryan & Sackrey, 1984) discusses the difficulties faced by academics of working class origin in a variety of fields—but it is relevant to their work. For example, Sherwood and Nataupsky (1968) examined the biographical characteristics of 83 researchers who had studied “racial” differences in intelligence. They concluded that, “investigators whose research was categorized as concluding that Negroes are innately inferior intellectually came from higher socioeconomic backgrounds.” (p. 57) Similarly, Kaufman (1957) found that status concern (i.e., agreeing with statements like “Raising one’s social position is the most important goal of life”) correlated with anti-Semitism—though this was not a study of psychologists or social scientists.
- 6.
The heritability statistic is a fraction—the genetically associated variation in a population under given environmental conditions divided by all variation (both genetically and environmentally associated). By limiting the environments considered, one decreases the environmentally associated variation. This makes the denominator smaller and hence the heritability estimate larger.
- 7.
- 8.
This explanatory strategy is also used in Chapter 5.
- 9.
The existence of such a title would seem to imply a recognition by the author that most psychologists define reality in terms of individual behavior (even if cross-cultural psychologists do not). The implicit dialogue justifying the book’s existence would go something like this. “I’m a psychologist, interested in understanding behavior. Why do I need to learn about culture?” “Because culture influences behavior.”
- 10.
Over time, the more numerous applied psychologists have come to dominate APA, to focus policy attention on guild issues, and to expand the number of applied divisions to reflect their concerns. As a result, the American Psychological Society (APS) was formed in 1988 as an explicitly “scientific” organization. In case applied psychologists didn’t get the message, the members eventually voted to keep the acronym APS, but change the name to the “Association for Psychological Science.” The APS journal that goes to all members (corresponding to AAA’s American Anthropologist or APA’s American Psychologist) has been called Psychological Science from the start. The author learned firsthand about the status gulf between experimental and applied psychology at Columbia University in the 1960s. The experimental psychology programs were housed on the main campus, south of 120th Street (referred to as “the widest street in the world”), and the applied psychology programs were housed at Teachers College. The subject matter and status distinctions were so important that the university even had two PhD programs in social psychology—a program emphasizing laboratory experiments on the main campus and one emphasizing the study of social issues at TC. And while much at Columbia has changed over the decades, the geographical demarcation of the two spheres of influence with their accompanying status distinctions, as well as the existence of two PhD programs dealing with social psychology, continues.
- 11.
There are approximately 108,000 people with doctorates in psychology in the United States. Approximately another 213,000 have master’s degrees and about 71,000 of them are working in psychology. Over 70,000 people a year graduate with bachelor’s degrees in psychology, though few of them work in the field since positions generally require more advanced training. The following figures are presented to give a sense of the order of magnitude of differences (a) between the memberships of psychological organizations and other professional organizations concerned with “culture” and (b) between the memberships of psychological organizations representing the field as a whole and those specifically concerned with “culture.” Approximate memberships are as follows: American Psychological Association, 84,000; Association for Psychological Science, 16,000 (many of whom are also APA members); American Sociological Association, 13,000; American Anthropological Association, 11,500; Society for the Psychological Study of Social Issues, 3,000; Society for the Psychological Study of Ethnic Minority Issues, 1,200; International Association of Cross-Cultural Psychology, 690 (260 from the United States, others from 69 countries); and Society for Cross-Cultural Research, 200. The assistance in compiling these numbers of the APA Research Office, of individuals in the various associations, of readers of earlier drafts of this chapter, and of my graduate assistant Lily Hung is greatly appreciated. While these figures will be out of date by the time this book is published, the message the relative proportions convey will not.
- 12.
The point here is not that cross-cultural psychology began recently—IACCP has been around for nearly 40 years. Rather, it is that the separate existence of an entity named “cross-cultural psychology” has served to isolate cultural issues from the mainstream field of social psychology and undercut the argument that cultural concerns are an intrinsic aspect of its subject matter. “You study culture, we’ll do our experiments, and everybody will be happy” is the communication.
- 13.
Very briefly—a breeding population consists of members of a species that breed among themselves more than with other members. Over time they come to differ in the frequencies of certain genes from other breeding populations. Genetic drift is the random process by which these population differences arise (in contrast to natural selection). Because populations near each other interbreed more than they do with distant ones, the frequency of genes in different populations varies gradually across geographical distances along gradients known as clines. Thus, human physical variation around the globe is gradual or clinal; and this is why the human species has no “races” in the biological sense of the term (subspecies or lineage).
- 14.
Here are two more illustrations of the ways in which psychologists lack contact with other disciplines’ knowledge about “race.” APA, like AAA and other professional organizations, is located in Washington, DC. The 1997 AAA convention, highlighting the issue of “race,” took place there; and the editor of the APA Monitor (comparable to the Anthropology Newsletter) was asked to send a reporter to cover some of the key presentations. She decided not to because the presentations were not by psychologists. Similarly, the editor of APA Books turned down a proposal for a multidisciplinary book on race and intelligence because too few of the chapters were by psychologists.
References
Arnett, J. J. (2010). Adolescence and emerging adulthood: A cultural approach (4th ed.). Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice Hall.
Aronson, E., Ellsworth, P. C., Carlsmith, J. M., & Gonzales, M. H. (1990). Methods of research in social psychology (2nd ed.). New York: McGraw-Hill.
Baker, T. B., McFall, R. M., & Shoham, V. (2009). Current status and future prospects of clinical psychology: Toward a scientifically principled approach to mental and behavioral health care. Psychological Science in the Public Interest, 9(2), 67–103.
Berlin, B., & Kay, P. (1969). Basic color terms. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press
Berry, J. W. (1969). On cross-cultural comparability. International Journal of Psychology, 4, 119–128.
Berry, J. W., Poortinga, Y. H., Pandey, J., Dasen, P. R., Saraswathi, T. S., Segall, M. H., & Kagitçibasi, C., (Eds.). (1997). Handbook of cross-cultural psychology (2nd ed., Vols. 1–3). Boston, MA: Allyn and Bacon.
Brislin, R. (2000). Understanding culture’s influence on behavior (2nd ed.). Fort Worth, TX: Harcourt.
Brown, D. E. (1991). Human universals. New York: McGraw Hill.
Buss, D. M. (2000). The dangerous passion: Why jealousy is as necessary as love and sex. New York: Free Press.
Buss, D. M. (Ed.). (2005). Handbook of evolutionary psychology. Hoboken, NJ: Wiley.
Cole, M. (1996). Cultural psychology: A Once and future discipline. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Cousins, A. J., & Gangestad, S. W. (2007). Perceived threats of female infidelity, male proprietariness, and violence in college dating couples. Violence and Victims, 22(6), 651–668.
During, S. (2003). The cultural studies reader (2nd ed.). New York: Routledge.
Edgar, A., & Sedgwick, P. (2005). Cultural theory: The key concepts (2nd ed.). New York: Routledge.
Ekman, P. (1992). Facial expression of emotion: New findings, New Questions. Psychological Science, 3, 34–38.
Fish, J. M. (1983, August). The Concept of race: Contrasting Brazilian and American views. Paper presented at the Annual Meeting of the International Council of Psychologists, San Francisco.
Fish, J. M. (1995a). Mixed blood. Psychology Today, 28(6), 55–61, 76, 80.
Fish, J. M. (1995b). Why psychologists should learn some anthropology. American Psychologist, 50(1), 44–45.
Fish, J. M. (1996). Culture and therapy: An integrative approach. New York: Jason Aronson.
Fish, J. M., & Newton, D. (1998). Review of the book Black, Jewish, and interracial: It’s not the color of your skin but the race of your kin, and other myths of identity. American Anthropologist, 100(3), 23–24.
Gangestad, S. W., Simpson, J. A., Cousins, A. J., Garver-Apgar, C. E., & Christensen, P. N. (2004). Women’s preferences for male behavioral displays change across the menstrual cycle. Psychological Science, 15(3), 203–207.
Gielen, U. P. (1996). Moral reasoning in cross-cultural perspective: A review of Kohlbergian research. World Psychology 2, 313–333.
Goodman, M., New, A., & Siever, L. (2004). Trauma, genes, and the neurobiology of personality disorders. Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences, 1032, 104–16.
Graves, J. L. (2006). What we know and what we don’t know: Human genetic variation and the social construction of race. Retrieved December 6, 2009, http://raceandgenomics.ssrc.org/Graves/.
Greenfield, P. M. (1997).You can’t take it with you: Why ability assessments don’t cross cultures. American Psychologist, 52, 1115–1124.
Greenfield, P. M. (2000). What psychology can do for anthropology, or why anthropology took postmodernism on the chin. American Anthropologist, 102(3), 564–576.
Harris, M. (1964). Patterns of race in the Americas. New York: Walker.
Harris, M. (1970). Referential ambiguity in the calculus of Brazilian racial identity. Southwestern Journal of Anthropology, 26(1), 1–14.
Harris, M. (1999). Theories of culture in postmodern times. Walnut Creek, CA: AltaMira Press.
Hergenhahn, B. R. (2005). An introduction to the history of psychology. Belmont, CA: Thomson Wadsworth.
Higbee, K., Lott, W., & Graves, J. (1976). Experimentation and college students in social psychological research. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 2, 239–241.
Kaufman, W. C. (1957). Status, authoritarianism, and anti-semitism. American Journal of Sociology 62, 379–382.
Keltner, D. (2007). Evolutionary approaches to emotion. Berkeley, CA: UC Berkeley.
Kitayama, S., & Cohen, D. (2007). Handbook of cultural psychology. New York: Guilford.
Klineberg, S. L. (1999, April). Paper presented at the symposium celebrating the centenary of Otto Klineberg’s Birth, New York Academy of Sciences, New York.
Kluckhohn, F. R., & Strodtbeck, F. L. (1961). Variations in value orientation. New York: Row, Peterson.
Kroeber, A. L., & Kluckhohn, C. (1952). Culture: A critical review of concepts and definitions (Vol. 147, No. 1). Cambridge, MA: Peabody Museum.
Levine, R., Rodrigues, A., & Zelezny, L. (Eds.). (2008). Journeys in social psychology: Looking back to inspire the future. New York: CRC Press.
Lucas, R. E., Diener, E., Grob, A., Suh, E. M., & Shao, L. (2000). Cross-cultural evidence for the fundamental features of extraversion. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 79(3), 452–468.
Lynn, R., & Martin, T. (1995). National differences for thirty-seven nations in extraversion, neuroticism, psychoticism and economic, demographic and other correlates. Personality and Individual Differences, 19(3), 403–406.
Mandler, G. (2007). A history of modern experimental psychology: From James and Wundt to cognitive science. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Marks, J. (1995). Human biodiversity: Genes, race, and history. New York: Aldine de Gruyter.
McGoldrick, M., Giordano, J., & Garcia-Preto, N. (Eds.). (2005). Ethnicity and family therapy (3rd ed.). New York: Guilford.
Murdock, G. P., & Provost, C. (1973). Measurement of cultural complexity. Ethnography 12, 379–392.
Pawluch, D., Shaffir, W., & Miall, C. (2005). Doing ethnography: Studying everyday Life. Toronto, ON: Canadian Scholars’ Press.
Philipsen, G., & Coutu, L. M. (2005). The ethnography of speaking. In R. Sanders, & K. L. Fitch (Eds.), Handbook of research on language and social interaction (pp. 355–379). Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum.
Rosenzweig, M. R. (1992). Psychological science around the world. American Psychologist 47, 718–722.
Ryan, J., & Sackrey, C. (1984). Strangers in paradise: Academics from the working class. Boston, MA: South End Press.
Sears, D. O. (1986). College sophomores in the laboratory: Influences of a narrow data base on social psychology’s view of human nature. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 51, 515–530.
Segall, M. H., Dasen, P. R., Berry, J. W., & Poortinga, Y. H. (1999). Human behavior in global perspective: An introduction to cross-cultural psychology (2nd ed.). Boston, MA: Allyn and Bacon.
Sherwood, J. J., & Nataupsky, M. (1968). Predicting the conclusions of negro-white intelligence research from the biographical characteristics of the investigator. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 8, 53–58.
Smedley, A. (1998). Race in North America: Origin of a worldview (2nd ed.). Boulder, CO: Westview.
Spradley, J. P. (1979). The ethnographic interview. New York: Holt, Rinehart & Winston.
Stewart, E. C., & Bennett, M. J. (1991). American cultural patterns: A cross-cultural perspective (2nd ed.). Yarmouth, ME: Intercultural Press.
Takooshian, H., Mrinal, N. R., & Mrinal, U. S. (2001). Research methods for studies in the field. In L. L. Adler & U. P. Gielen (Eds.), Cross-cultural topics in psychology (2nd ed., pp. 29–46). Westport, CT: Greenwood.
Telles, E. E. (2004). Race in another America: The significance of skin color in Brazil. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
Torgersen, S., Lygren, S., Oien, P. A., Skre, I., Onstad, S., Evardsen, J., Tambs, K., & Kringlen, E. (2000). A twin study of personality disorders. Comprehensive Psychiatry, 41(6), 416–425.
Triandis, H. C. (1994). Culture and social behavior. New York: McGraw Hill.
Triandis, H. C. (1995). Individualism and collectivism. Boulder, CO: Westview.
Triandis, H. C. (2008). An autobiography: Why did culture shape my career? In R. Levine, A. Rodrigues, & L. Zelezny (Eds.), Journeys in social psychology: Looking back to inspire the future (pp. 145–166). New York: CRC Press.
Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. (2006). Wilhelm Maximilian Wundt.
Masters, W. H., & Johnson, V. E. (1966). Human sexual response. Boston, MA: Little, Brown & Co.
Masters, W. H., & Johnson, V. E. (1970). Human sexual inadequacy. Boston, MA: Little, Brown & Co.
Thornhill, R., & Palmer, C. T. (2000a). A natural history of rape: Biological bases of sexual coercion. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Thornhill, R., & Palmer, C. T. (2000b). Why men rape. The Sciences, 40(1), 30–36.
Kelly, G. A. (1955). The psychology of personal constructs. New York: Norton.
Assessment Psychology Online (2008). Retrieved January 17, 2010, http://www.assessmentpsychology.com/doctor.htm.
Roe, A. (1953). A psychological study of eminent psychologists and anthropologists, and a comparison with biological and physical scientists. Psychological Monographs 67, 1–55.
Triandis, H. C., Lambert, W. W., Berry, J. W., Lonner, W. J., Heron, A., Brislin, R., & Draguns, J. (Eds.). (1980–1981). Handbook of cross-cultural psychology (pp. 1–6). Boston, MA: Allyn and Bacon.
Fish, J. M. (Ed.), (1998a). How to legalize drugs. Northvale, NJ: Jason Aronson.
Fish, J. M. (1998b). Psychologists and “race.” Anthropology Newsletter, 39(6), 2.
Fish, J. M. (1999). More on psychologists and “race.” Anthropology Newsletter, 40(8), 3.
Fish, J. M. (1997a). How psychologists think about “race.” General Anthropology, 4(1), 1–4.
Fish, J. M (1997b, November). Folk Taxonomies. Paper presented at the Annual Meeting of the American Anthropological Association, Washington, DC.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2011 Springer Science+Business Media, LLC
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Fish, J.M. (2011). How Anthropology Can Help Psychology. In: The Concept of Race and Psychotherapy. Springer, New York, NY. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4419-7576-8_3
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4419-7576-8_3
Published:
Publisher Name: Springer, New York, NY
Print ISBN: 978-1-4419-7575-1
Online ISBN: 978-1-4419-7576-8
eBook Packages: Behavioral ScienceBehavioral Science and Psychology (R0)