Chapter 7: Teaching Cross-Cultural and Cultural Psychology

In the early days of the discipline of psychology, researchers were eager to share their findings and ideas with others and they convened for the First International Congress of (Physiological) Psychology in Paris in 1889. Coming from 20 countries, most of the 200 attendees were from Europe with a few from the Americas representing psychology, philosophy, physiology, anthropology, and sociology. Among the attendees were Wilhelm Wundt, William James, Sigmund Freud, Francis Galton, and William Preyer (Sabourin & Cooper, 2014).

International connections suffered during World War II. However, after the war psychology flourished in the USA, and by the early 1990s most psychological research and theories emanated from the Western world, primarily the USA (Rosenzweig, 1992). Most of this research made the universalist assumption that psychological processes were the same for everyone everywhere so there was no need to look for possible differences across cultural groups. This led to a reliance on Western, educated, industrialized, rich, democratic (WEIRD) research participants (usually college sophomores), ignoring evidence that basic cognitive and affective processes vary across populations (Henrich, Heine, & Norenzayan, 2010).