The psychology of culture

About the evolutionary, modern and universal dimensions of culture and identifying the most important areas of research in cultural psychology

The term culture will mean the full range of activities, beliefs, lifestyles, habits, rituals, arts, ethics and behavioral patterns in a society. Despite the broad definition of culture, in that the cultural elements are too different and different, it is not easy to create a relationship between culture and psychology. There are two common ways in which the relationship between psychology and culture is studied through intracultural psychology or behavioral patterns in a particular community and intercultural psychology or behavior and psychological characteristics of societies.

Intracultural psychology seeks to understand the cultural basis of behavior by studying a society's peculiarities, its rules and norms, and shows how traditions shape or influence the collective psyche of people in the community. In psychology, however, this is simply regarded as 'cultural psychology' as a straightforward term that denotes the study of cultural traditions and their effects on human psychology. This kind of categorization can be misleading as it tends to see cultures as fundamentally different entities and highlights differences rather than similarities. Cross-cultural psychology focuses on finding universal patterns of behavior or beliefs that are common among people of all cultures, and this is what is described here as 'intercultural' psychology. The terms ‘intra-cultural’ and ‘intercultural’ psychology would be more conducive to finding a psychology that shows convergent patterns of cultural behavior among people across Therapy for woman.

The psychology of culture requires further development in the definition of culture and in finding cultural roots that will highlight collective psyche or universal patterns of behavior. Humans are finally united by common emotions and psyche, and this broader cultural psychology has been promoted by Carl Gustav Jung, who focused his studies on the importance of inferring or understanding the collective unconscious with the elements or archetypes of a generation. to another.

Culture has been defined as the accumulated experiences of a society as a whole that has been transmitted socially, so that the collective unconscious in Jungian terms would serve as an archive of cultural imprints that shape human behavior from childhood. The three predominant schools of cultural psychology have been identified as having activity, symbolic or individualistic approach (Carl Ratner explains this well). The activity method emphasizes the social activities of a group, the symbolic approach defines culture as shared meanings and concepts or symbols. The individualistic approach emphasizes the individual's interaction with society, and through this, individuals construct their personal culture. But I would downplay the personal aspect of culture and propose culture as essentially a group phenomenon similar to individual conformity in society, so apart from activity and symbolism, culture should be defined based on its beliefs, values ​​and ethics. Culture is finally about shared activities, shared symbolism and shared belief systems.