Psychology is culture

Harry Charalambos Triandis was born in 1926 in Greece. In his twenties he left his ancestral home for Canada, where he did his undergraduate studies at McGill University. He moved on to the University of Toronto for further studies before going down to Cornell University in the US for his doctoral work. Triandis is important here not because he went on to occupy several noteworthy positions in the American and international psychology fraternity, including serving as president of the International Association of Cross-Cultural Psychology. His importance stems from the fact that in one of his books he actually mentions Africa. It is not a flattering mention. This does not mean that those who do not mention Africa do not hold views about it; but, having had the courage to utter the word, Triandis offers us something to which we can directly respond. In the book in question, Culture and Social Behaviour , published in 1994, this Greek-born and Western-educated social psychologist relates an interesting story about the first time he visited India in 1965. It is a tale about a hotel in Mysore, recounting an inconvenience caused by an amusing cultural misunderstanding and an ensuing happy ending. The point of the story is that ‘we are not aware of our own culture unless we come in contact with another one’ (Triandis 1994: 3). After narrating the anecdote, Triandis writes: While this anecdote is amusing and instructive, it raises an important issue: how much of the context of psychology may in fact be a distortion when applied to other cultures? When I started editing the six-volume Handbook of Cross-Cultural Psychology , I asked myself that question. I wrote to some forty colleagues, all over the world, and asked them to send me psychological findings from their culture that are not totally in agreement with findings published in the West. I got back very little. I was frustrated until Terry Prothro, then at the American University in Beirut, Lebanon, pointed out to me that our training and methods are also culture bound, and it is difficult to find new ideas without the theoretical and methodological tools that can extract them from a culture. Most of the people I had written to had gotten their doctorates in Western universities and would not have been especially good at analyzing their own cultures from a non-Western viewpoint.

Récupéré en direct depuis OpenAlex et désinversé. Les résumés ne sont pas conservés dans cette base de données : les index inversés représentent 8,6 Go des 9,3 Go de texte de la base, et le serveur dispose de 13 Go libres.