From Cross-Cultural Psychology to Cultural Psychology

The Quarterly newsletter of the Laboratory of Comparative Human Cognition 12 (1990) 1, S. 37-52
“… psychology from the very beginning has been struggling for its identity as a human science. Although psychology may seem to have successfuIly come of age, it is still an open question whether or not it can be further developed according to the principles of natural science, or whether it should have some unique features. Human beings, the way they think, feel and act, cannot easily be explained by "natural laws" alone; "cultural rules" have also to be taken into consideration. But these rules are genuinely of another ontological status than natural laws because they are themselves human creations, and hence are not binding because human beings can change them.” Whereas the author is “convinced that in the long run what psychology really has to deal with is exactly the tension between biological laws and cultural rules he restricts his argument “to the "cultural side" of this problem. He takes “a normative stance” and argues “that if some trends in cross-cultural research and theorizing are taken seriously, then cross-cultural psychology as well as mainstream psychology, will move towards what one might call "cultural psychology," i.e., a psychology which explicitly contains "culture" as a feature unique to human beings.” (DIPF/ ssch)