Culture is something that both unites and segregates individuals of the human race. I have always found different cultures to be interesting and have enjoyed meeting people from other ethnic backgrounds. Coming to a new country that did not understand nor fully accept the culture that I brought with me was not an easy adjustment. I always felt a bit lost and misunderstood, never really being able to celebrate my Punjabi heritage or the American culture. Holidays were especially hard because my family did not understand the traditional American holidays and we didn’t have an outlet to celebrate the holidays we did for the first 8 years of my life. It was hard finding a healthy balance. This all helped me to better understand culture in general. But, what is culture? More importantly what is its relationship to psychology?

Culture is defined as a group of characteristics, behaviors, attitudes, values and customs that are particular to a group of people. “Behaviors must be judged according to cultural rules and ideologies or the judgment has no basis in the reality embraced by the culture” (Solomon, Greenberg, & Pyszczynski, 1991). Cultural Psychology deals with specific location, perceptive and beliefs of a culture that one has been raised in or is accustomed to. Cultural psychology looks at how factors of culture influence a person’s behavior. Cross Cultural Psychology, according to ‘Introduction to cross-cultural psychology’, “is the scientific study of human behavior and mental processes, including both their variability and invariance, under diverse cultural conditions.” (Alder & Gielen, 2001)

Cross-Cultural psychology studies the “links between cultural norms and behaviors and the ways in which particular human activities are influenced by different, sometimes dissimilar social and cultural forces.” (Shiraev & Levy, 2010) Cultural Psychology looks into the essential ties between a culture and the psychology of the people in that culture, and states that one’s behavior inside a culture should be observed within that context of the sociocultural for a behavior to deem meaningful. “Cross-Cultural Psychology could not exist without the more focal study of individual culture and its effect on the individual.” (Shiraev & Levy, 2010)

When used correctly, critical thinking can be very beneficial as life’s complexities and complications can be hard to understand. This learned style of processing can be helpful when one faces a lot of uncertainty in life, Decrypt puzzles, synchronized thoughts, hypothetical situations/ issues and communication all require one to use critical thinking. When it comes to cross-cultural psychology, critical thinking is important so that an individual is able to understand another’s perspective by putting themselves in the other’s shoes. “In communicating and making observations cross-culturally, it is essential to refrain from continually supporting beliefs that serve no purpose other than to alienate and ostracize one group of individuals from another. Critical thinking prevents this type of lazy and rigid thinking. Cross-cultural psychologists need to avoid biases of generalization and yet realize that cultural comparisons require a great deal of imagination and abstraction when culturally diverse and unique underlying factors exist” (Shiraev & Levy, 2010). It is also important that one is open minded to other cultures and are able to get a better understanding instead of being stuck in one’s way. It was important for me to educate myself on the American culture so that I could find a healthy balance to live within it. At times I still struggle understanding my Caucasian American friends and often have to “think like them”. I’m sure that they feel the same way when dealing with me as well and use a lot of critical thinking methods to do so.

According to Shiraey and Levy, “Quantitative research in cross-cultural psychology involves the measurement of certain aspects of human activity from a comparative perspective. The variables chosen for examination have to be studied empirically, primarily through observation, as opposed to other forms of reflection, such as intuition, beliefs, or superstitions. The most common data are measures of central tendency: the mode, the median, and the mean. There are four types of measurement scales: nominal, ordinal, interval, and ratio.” (Shiraev & Levy, 2010) “Quantitative research measures human activity and makes comparisons with empirical study using observation rather than more subjective forms of reflection. In essence, the quantitative approach looks for relationships or correlations between two or more variables” (Shiraev & Levy, 2010). Cross-cultural psychologists use methods such as observation, survey, experiment, content-analysis, psychobiography, meta-analysis, focus-group methods, and other typical research procedures. “There are four basic goals of research in cross-cultural psychology: description, interpretation, prediction, and management. After identifying the goals, the researcher has to choose a methodological approach that is most appropriate for the implementation of these goals. In general, research methodology in cross-cultural psychology can be divided into two categories: quantitative and qualitative.” (Shiraev & Levy, 2010)

Cross-Cultural Psychology deals with how my Punjabi culture influences my behavior. “The relationship between cultural and cross-cultural psychology is interdependent, and cross-cultural psychology could not exist without the microcosmic view of cultural psychology” (Triandis, Malpass, & Davidson, 1971). Culture is important and more important is understand how culture effects a person’s behavior and way of thinking. Critical thinking is important when it comes to understanding people from other cultures by seeing things from that cultural perspective. We also looked at what methodologies are associated with cross-cultural research.