Culture

[I]ndividuals feel, think, and see things from the viewpoints of the groups in which they participate (Smith, 1991, p. 182).

[W]e cannot understand human diversity without understanding how culture contributes to the substantial variations we observe every day (Lonner, 1994, p. 241).

Culture is to human behavior as operating systems are to software, often invisible and unnoticed, yet playing an extremely important role in development and operation (Matsumoto, 2001, p. 3).

In the early years of psychology’s development as a discipline separate from philosophy, during the last part of the 19th century, there was interest in what was called “folk culture.” But this interest waned as issues related to the concept were seen as too speculative and not readily amenable to empirical inquiry (Pepitone, 2000). Culture has re-emerged as a significant construct in the past few decades. In current psychological discourse, our definitions and conceptualizations of culture come primarily from cultural anthropology where culture is generally understood to refer to that part of our environment that is constructed by human beings to embody shared learning.

Definitions and Common Themes

An early definition, in 1891, presents culture as the incorporation of all socially acquired habits and knowledge (see Mio, Trimble, Arredondo, Cheatham & Sue, 1999). More than a century later, the core of this definition remains the same, despite multiple variations on the basic theme. Baldwin, Faulkner, Hecht, and Lindsley (2006) refer to the definition of culture as a “moving target” and devote an entire book to its discussion, providing an appendix of 300 variations. Nevertheless, for the purpose of the present text, I focus on what seems to be the essence of common agreement.

In this common agreement within social science, culture is understood to represent