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In Neo-Confucian Epistemology and Chinese Philosophy: Practical Postulates for Actioning Psychology as a Human Science, Professor Liu offers a critique of the Cartesian underpinnings of psychology as a natural science. Drawing on Chinese cultural postulates, Professor Liu offers a vision for a global psychology more orientated towards the morally centered person and which developed a culturally-informed ethics. This commentary explores the implications of this rethinking of psychology for indigenous and applied social psychologies in Aotearoa/New Zealand.

The present article is inspired by Liu's (2017) idea on how Asian philosophy can, in general, and Confucianism, in particular, contribute to psychological science and practice. We first clarify potential misunderstandings of Liu's (2017) paper as a theoretical argument for indigenous psychology or as a debate on philosophy or the philosophy of science. To interpret and develop Liu's idea, we then conceptualize the concept of culture as canonic (abstract, philosophical and as it appears in classical books or articles) vs. popular (concrete, experiential and as it appears in people's daily lives). Further, since Liu's main point is about canonic rather than popular culture, we focus on canonic culture and propose three principles of it, namely the principle of diversity, the principle of hermeneutics and the principle of inspiration. These principles respectively reveal the characteristics, the interpretation process and the beneficial function of a canonic culture like Confucianism.

This article reviews the theoretical foundations of Height Psychology, which proposes that researchers not only do research but act on their ideas to make the world a better place. It is posited that researchers should be passionate humanist whose thoughts propel actions and whose actions propel new thoughts, and they should be engaged change agents who work with communities in defining and solving problems rather than being disinterested scientists who are only interested in creating a body of objective knowledge. This approach is likely to fit the worldview of non-western psychologists engaged in indigenous psychology, and also allow the development of global psychology that is culturally integrated and not excessively biased toward western or experimental psychology.

Belief in the benevolence and moral legitimacy of leaders in central government is theorized as a form of cultural capital consistent with the hierarchical relationalism of East Asian societies with Confucian roots. A reliable measure of benevolent authority beliefs (BAB) is introduced, and its convergent and discriminant validity relative to established measures of institutional trust are established. Its socialization as part of the political culture of Taiwan was examined among high school adolescents aged 13–16. Significant gender differences were found inconsistent with traditional patriarchy. Regression analyses showed that within the relationship with mothers but not fathers, adolescents associated higher reciprocal filial piety, authoritative parenting, and authentic (positive) affect with higher BAB. For daughters but not sons, reciprocal filial piety, authoritative parenting style, and authentic (positive) affect in the relationship with their father were positively associated with BAB. Affect-based transfer from parent-child relationships rather than authoritarian obligations based on rote learning was a key socializing factor in a contemporary Chinese society.

This article explains how the meta-theoretical framework of critical realism addresses methodological issues of concern to social psychologists and social scientists. The article outlines key tenets of critical realism – its notion of the stratified nature of reality and generative mechanisms as powers in natural and social objects that cause things; its notion of knowledge of reality as stratified rather than only empirical; its acceptance of epistemological but not judgmental relativism; and its monist ontology. The article then introduces realist social theory to provide a framework for understanding the society–person connection. It explains how issues relating to culture, context, and society raised in the indigenous psychology English literature might be addressed from a critical realist perspective. Some implications arising from adopting a critical realist perspective in research practice are outlined and social psychologists and social scientists are encouraged to explore the potential of critical realism as a meta-theoretical framework and new paradigm.

While Islamist forms of terrorism have received a great deal of attention from scholars, insider accounts by indigenous scholars are still under-represented. This Special Issue of the Asian Journal of Social Psychology brings together three articles on religious terrorism and sacred violence in Indonesia, the world's most populous Islamic state. They bring together qualitative methods, including interviews with terrorist members of KOMPAK and Jemaah Islamiyah (including the Bali Bombers), with quantitative methods using structural equation modelling to explain a national representative sample's attitudes towards sacred violence. The articles converge towards an indigenous theory of Islamist terrorism for Indonesia involving three steps: (i) existential threat (triggered by violence inflicted on Muslims, nationally or internationally, and perceptions of the impurity of the secular Indonesian government), (ii) self-categorization of the world into infidels and believers (thus arguing that the current situation is a state of war where violence against non-combatants is justified), and (iii) jihadi ideology as the trigger for turning existential threat into religious violence. It is the interpretation of scripture offered by trusted leaders, often reinforced by oaths of obedience, rather than scripture itself that fuels the indigenous psychology of violent (lesser) jihad presented here.

The present paper examines the role, status and development of Asian social psychology from four perspectives: (i) looking back; (ii) looking in; (iii) looking out; and (iv) looking forward. Looking back elaborates early attempts to ‘add Asians’ to social psychology and replicate classic social psychological research in Asian contexts. Looking in describes more sophisticated developments in Asian social psychology including the indigenization of theory, methods and measurements. Looking out critically examines the position of Asian social psychology in the international arena and discusses its impact on the discipline more broadly. Finally, looking forward makes some cautious predictions about the future of Asian social psychology in both regional and international spheres.

This Special Issue (SI), which marks the 10th anniversary of the Asian Journal of Social Psychology, carries the triple roles of taking stock of the past, scouting the present, and envisioning the future. In so doing, it connects with the 6th biennial conference of the Asian Association of Social Psychology held in 2005, in which several keynote speakers (Atsumi, Hofstede, Leung, and Ward) addressed the same troika of concerns. Together with invited commentary from Chiu and Matsumoto they form the substance of this SI. As SI Editors, we read the papers several times, for what they were and, just as enlightening, for what they were not. In the process, we reflected on what is social about Asian social psychology and, equally intriguing, on what is Asian about it. The (tentative) conclusion that we have reached is that a practical and creative social psychology that is in, of, and for Asia, and defines itself as a network of like-minded collaborators gathered around a central purpose rather than as a geographic or genetic entity will have the best chance of realizing the potential of Asian social psychology.

In order to answer the three crucial questions (why, what and how) about the development of indigenous psychology, three levels of breakthrough need to be made, namely, philosophical reflection, theoretical construction and empirical research. The controversial issues that have occurred in the earlier development of indigenous psychology are analyzed in terms of the switch in Western philosophy of science from positivism to post-positivism. Based on this analysis, it is argued that indigenous psychologists should construct formal theories illustrating the functioning of the human mind that may be applicable to various cultures, and then use these theories to study the particular mentalities of people in a given culture with the scientific methods of empirical research.

The present paper endeavours to discuss some of the potential issues inherent in the developmental work for indigenous psychologies, especially in the Western context. The discussion is made around two topical issues, sustainability and local knowledge. The developmental processes in indigenous psychologies are influenced by the inter- and intracommunity environment. It is important to trace the development of local knowledge in a sustained community environment. The cross-fertilization of ecological perspectives with indigenous psychological knowledge can enlighten our understandings of global issues in psychology as well as the applications of psychological knowledge to a local context. A theoretical model is proposed to highlight major social psychological processes in a participatory community environment − the model is expected to address essential contentious issues to the future of a globalized psychology, especially the way integrated local knowledge can lay the foundations of a globalized indigenous psychology.

Indigenization in psychology leads to modes of theorizing based within local knowledge communities and defined in terms of culturally relevant criteria. The present study offers a conceptualization of the social psychology of science in terms of complexity theory. The value of alternative choices in advancing psychological knowledge is shown by a knowledge landscape whose shape depends on the diversity of paradigms within the community. Dominance by a single paradigm (such as a Western world view) leads to a single-peaked landscape where advances in knowledge are judged using only the criteria of that paradigm. Here, the most effective form of working is incremental step-by-step research; but this ignores the historical context of the indigenous community and runs the risk of promoting a kind of psychology that is irrelevant to its values and priorities. Indigenization is presented as a complexification of the knowledge community building on a diversity of world views, leading to a rugged, multiple-peaked knowledge landscape. Four features of working on rugged landscapes are examined: path dependence, showing the importance of history for shaping the direction of research; fostering research progress through seeding of multiple starting points; the benefits of locally dense networks within knowledge communities; and the role of policy-makers in tuning knowledge landscapes. Examples are drawn from the development of indigenous psychology within a number of countries.

Culture has been regarded as an anathema to psychology as an empiricist research tradition. Despite the explosive growth of research on culture and psychology over the last decade of the 20th century and its importance in Asian social psychology, the ontological and epistemological tension between psychology as a science and psychology as a cultural/historical discipline introduced in the writings of the thinkers of the Enlightenment and counter-Enlightenment still lingers on in the contemporary discourse of psychology. Clifford Geertz once ominously suggested that cultural psychology may have chewed more than it can. In the present paper, the interpretive turn in social science as exemplified by writings of Charles Taylor and Paul Ricoeur is reviewed and how it may impinge on the practice of Asian social psychology as an empirical science in methodological, epistemological, and ontological respects is discussed. It is argued here that the current practice of Asian social psychology is largely, though not entirely, free of the challenges mounted by these theorists, and that Asian social psychology has an advantage of not being encumbered by this traditional tension due to a monist ontology that is prevalent in Asia. © Blackwell Publishing Ltd with the Asian Association of Social Psychology and the Japanese Group Dynamics Association 2005.

Yang’s 1974 to 1991 research on individual modernity and traditionalism in Taiwan is examined and the methodology for developing measurement instruments in this program critiqued. It is proposed that the proper strategy for research on indigenous psychology is to analyze a culture at the conceptual level with the symbolic approach, and then conduct empirical research on ‘lifeworlds’ using activity theory. Yang’s research on individual modernity and traditionalism uses an inductive empirical approach without the theoretical grounding of conceptual analyses. Based on the philosophy of constructive realism, two types of knowledge (the scientific ‘microworld’ and the ‘experienced lifeworld’) are differentiated in order to explicate the significance of the discontinuity hypothesis of modernity for non-Western countries and to critique Yang’s methodology for measuring individual modernity and traditionalism. It is proposed that the research strategy of cultural psychology be used in future study. This replacement would usher in the indigenous psychology approach as is evident in Yang’s (1999, Yang, 2000) later works.

This paper aims to present a critical analysis of the development of indigenous psychologies within the western and non–western contexts. The rhetoric of indigenous psychologies is cross–examined to include historical perspectives, cultural interdependence and institutional regulations. The paper also examines the processes of psychologizing indigenous views that are largely regulated by the powerful social agencies. The paper endeavors to draw a link between historical perspectives and post–historical cultural interdependence in order to explicate the contentious issues of ‘micro and macro indigenous psychologies’, both within and beyond western indigenous psychologies. The importance of the cross–fertilization of knowledge from diverse indigenous psychologies for the development of a global indigenous psychology is reaffirmed.

Comprehensive comparison and conceptual analysis of cross-cultural, cultural, and indigenous psychologies in terms of their aims and theoretical and methodological perspectives lead to the conclusion that the first two are special cases of the third. Two basic types of indigenous psychology are distinguished on the basis of conceptual analysis: monocultural indigenous psychologies (including monocultural cultural psychologies) and cross-cultural indigenous psychologies (including both cross-cultural psychology and cross-cultural cultural psychology). Corresponding to these two types of indigenous psychology are two basic ways to conduct indigenous research, namely, the monocultural indigenous approach and the cross-cultural indigenous approach. Both approaches require achievement of the condition of indigenous compatibility, which stresses the sufficient congruity of the researcher's theory, methods, and results with the studied psychological or behavioral phenomenon and/or its sociocultural context. Finally, several ways to integrate research findings obtained by the monocultural and cross-cultural indigenous approaches are delineated and discussed with respect to their function in creating an indigenously derived global psychology.

The keynote speakers at the 2nd Asian Association for Social Psychology Meetings were asked to clarify the relationship among the three scholarly fields known as cultural psychology, indigenous psychology and cross-cultural psychology. Are they three names for the same thing? If not are they complementary or antagonistic enterprises? Does one approach subsume the other(s) or make the other(s) possible? What follows is my own general view of the ‘‘three psychologies’’ issue. I suggest that cultural psychology and indigenous psychology are kindred approaches, which differ in significant ways from cross-cultural psychology. A distinction is drawn between the study of ‘‘mentalities’’ (the proper unit of analysis for cultural and indigenous psychology) and the study of ‘‘mind’’ (a non-cultural phenomenon). Cultural psychology is a type of interpretive analysis of social practice which asks, ‘‘what are the ‘goals, values and pictures of the world’ with reference to which this behavior might be seen as rational?’’ The essay describes the assumption of rationality and the place of cultural critique in interpretive analysis. Is there any significant difference at all between cultural psychology and indigenous psychology? One aim of cultural psychology (‘‘globalizing the local’’) is premised on the view that ‘‘indigenous psychologies’’ may have relevance outside their points of origin. How open is the indigenous psychology movement to the idea that (e.g.) a psychology with a ‘‘Chinese soul’’ might illuminate the psychological functioning of members of non-Chinese populations?

Cultural psychology, cross-cultural psychology, and indigenous psychology are three approaches to the psychology of culture. The author begins by comparing the three approaches ‐ conceptually, methodologically; and historically. She concludes that each approach has contributed knowledge of the ‘‘deep structure’’ of culture to the field of psychology. This ‘‘deep structure’’ consists of the framework of individualism and collectivism; particular cultures are therefore surface forms of one or the other of these basic cultural frameworks. Rather than being universal, classical social and developmental psychology are seen as reflecting a particular indigenous psychology. For the future, a truly universal psychology must offer a theoretical framework that encompasses alternative indigenous psychologies. It was a great honor to be part of this important series on indigenous, cultural, and organized for the Third Biennial Conference of the Asian Association of Social Psychology. My title is ‘‘Three approaches to the psychology of culture: Where do they come from? Where can they go?’’ Before discussing origins and future directions, however, it is necessary to address the question, ‘‘What are they?’’ Therefore, I will begin with a conceptual and methodological analysis of the three approaches.