This historical overview of the concepts of harmony in Chinese culture situates the topic in the ecological context of a strong-ties society that fosters a type of rationality that privileges symmetry over asymmetry. Analysis of the discourse of harmony focuses on the texts of two native schools of thought—Confucianism and Taoism—and briefly mentions Buddhism (a religion imported from India). The modern history of harmony has just begun but is already portentous. The turbulent course of China’s rapid modernization suggests the possibility that as China transitions from a strong-ties society to the weak-ties global market, harmony may be encountering, for the first time, contradictions that defy harmonization. Whatever the future holds for the Chinese legacy of harmony, its contribution to the happiness and well-being of the individuals in their intimate relationship with self and others is likely to remain unchallenged.
Article
A History of the Concepts of Harmony in Chinese Culture
Louise Sundararajan
Article
Causal Attribution
Ahogni N'gbala and Denis Hilton
Attribution theory is an area of research in social psychology, which deals with how people perceive and interpret the causes of their own and others’ behavior. Attributional theory deals with how the observer’s causal perceptions and interpretations guide his/her own subsequent behavior. In recent years, work in the area has been broadened to include new theoretical models concerned with the explanation of intentional behaviors and responsibility, and blame assignment, along with counterfactual thinking, where mental simulations of changes in the causal structure of events have been shown to affect emotional reactions. As such attribution(al) theory overlaps with research in cognitive, developmental, and moral psychology, and its concepts have been applied to a wide variety of domains such as clinical psychology, marketing, and organizational behavior.
Article
Conservation and the Environment
Adam R. Pearson and Matthew T. Ballew
Environmental sustainability, the long-term management and protection of earth’s resources and ecosystems, is increasingly recognized as a societal challenge shaped by human behavior at every level of social interaction, from neighborhoods to nations. Psychological perspectives on conservation, which have traditionally emphasized individual determinants of proenvironmental behavior (e.g., personal environmental concern), have begun to incorporate a more nuanced picture of the ways in which both individual and group-level processes can influence conservation efforts. In particular, research on social norms and identity-based influences suggests that social perceptions, such as beliefs about what actions are common and socially valued, can be more powerful drivers of conservation behavior than monetary incentives, proenvironmental appeals, or the ease of proenvironmental actions. Additional research has begun to incorporate cross-cultural perspectives and insights from diversity science and intervention science to better understand how different cultural orientations and social identity processes, such as those related to race, ethnicity, and social class, impact environmental decision-making. A new class of “wise” interventions that target psychological mechanisms that shape conservation behavior, such as interventions that incorporate normative feedback, target public behavior, or seek to alter daily routines during major life transitions, have proven especially effective at promoting sustained behavior change. Generally, behavioral interventions are more effective at promoting conservation behavior when they are tailored to the social context in which behavior occurs.
Article
Forced Resilience: Conceptualizing Resilience in Life-Threatening Adversity
Helle Harnisch, Edith Montgomery, and Hans Henrik Knoop
The field of resilience research lacks conceptualizations of resilience that better reflect the coercive conditions, contexts and experiences of human beings who face life-threatening adversity. The article provides historic context to definitions of resilience and underlines how resilience, when defined as an absence of psychopathology, is too narrow a perspective given the life-threatening adversity many human beings face; but nevertheless, continue with life despite of. The article introduces “Forced Resilience” as a helpful concept in drawing attention to experiences of life-threatening adversity, and how resilient responses should not be deduced to whether psychopathology appears – or not, since such understandings do not embrace the complexity of life-threatening adversity and what human beings do to cope with it. Based on a qualitative empirical cultural case study comprising 10 months of ethnographic fieldwork over 4 years among former forcibly recruited children, youth, and adults in the Acholi region of Northern Uganda, the article analyzes resilience as it appears among the children and youth in our study who experienced numerous kill-or-get-killed situations, and who today, as adults, live in continuous adverse circumstances. The article analyzes whether and how the emic, first-person perspectives of the former forcibly recruited children, youth, and adults resonate with state-of-the-art resilience and psychotraumatology studies. The results underline how this is rarely the case. We argue that more careful and emic consideration is needed, regarding how we define and evaluate what are pathological and resilient responses to what types of adversity in the fast-growing field of resilience research. It is our hope that “Forced resilience” will serve as a helpful concept, which through an experience-near approach can draw attention to resilience as it occurs amidst life-threatening adversity and that this will contribute to a needed re-conceptualizing and contextualizing of resilience.
Article
Gender in Organizations
Karyssa Courey, Makai Ruffin, Mikki Hebl, Dillon Stewart, Meridith Townsend, Leilani Seged, Jordyn Williams, Cedric Patterson, Sara Mei, and Eden King
In the U.S., women represent an abysmally small number of Fortune 500 chief executive officers (CEOs) positions, and are generally absent from some of the highest status occupations and the highest echelons of leadership in almost every aspect of society. Scientific research has been brought to bear on this social problem, with the goal of building understanding, awareness, and change. In particular, psychological theory and evidence provide compelling documentation of the challenges that women encounter upon entering and navigating the workplace. The primary theoretical rationales used to explain gender disparities and challenges include social learning theory, social role theory, role congruity theory, lack of fit model, ambivalent sexism theory, and the stereotype content model. These theories emphasize the perceived misalignment between expectations of ideal workers or leaders and those of ideal women as a driver of workplace gender inequities that include women’s disadvantages in educational experiences, access to jobs and pay, leadership positions, sociobiological patterns, and caregiving demands. Workplace gender inequities in these areas can be remedied by implementing strategies for positive change such as empowering women, valuing feminine characteristics, creating equal opportunities, and changing workplace and societal cultures.
Article
Group Socialization
Geoffrey J. Leonardelli
Group socialization refers to the psychological process by which individuals and groups mutually influence each other’s experience of being a group member. It is a significant topic, considered central to group members’ experience of group living, adjustment, and well-being, and it can be hotly contested, affecting groups of people that include less than a handful to thousands, millions, or more. Group socialization is most regularly interpreted to refer to how groups influence individuals’ transition to becoming group members. However, group socialization includes other membership transitions, too (e.g., becoming full members or exiting the group). Individual members can also influence what defines group membership for themselves and others. Social and self-categorization processes describe how people internalize group socialization, not only in terms of how socializing content is cognitively represented as a group prototype, but also in how people come to see themselves as group members through a process called self-stereotyping. Group socialization is different from, but can inform, group development (i.e., how groups change over time) and is a topic that is regularly negotiated by group members, as the literatures on socialization attitudes (e.g., assimilation, segregation, multiculturalism) and subjective group dynamics attest. Future research would benefit from understanding which principles of group socialization apply to all groups or specific types (small groups, categories). It would also benefit from understanding how multiple and competing group prototypes can be reconciled, the role of the intergroup context in group socialization, and the conditions under which group socialization is negotiated or simply internalized.
Article
Historical Psychology
Noemi Pizarroso Lopez
Historical psychology claims that the mind has a history, that is, that our ways of thinking, reasoning, perceiving, feeling, and acting are not necessarily universal or invariable, but are instead subject to modifications over time and space. The theoretical and methodological foundations of this movement were laid in France by psychologist Ignace Meyerson in his book Les fonctions psychologiques et les œuvres, published in 1948. His program stressed the active, experimental, constructive nature of human behavior, spanning behavioral registers as diverse as the linguistic, the religious, the juridical, the scientific/technical, and the artistic. All these behaviors involve aspects of different mental functions that we can infer through a proper analysis of “works,” considered as consolidated testimonies of human activity. As humanity’s successive achievements, constructed over the length of all the paths of the human experience, they are the materials with which psychology has to deal.
Meyerson refused to propose an inventory of functions to study. As unstable and imperfect products of a complex and uncertain undertaking, they can be analyzed only by avoiding the counterproductive prejudice of metaphysical fixism. Meyerson spoke in these terms of both deep transformations of feelings, of the person, or of the will, and of the so-called “basic functions,” such as perception and the imaginative function, including memory, time, space, and object.
Before Meyerson the term “historical psychology” had already been used by historians like Henri Berr and Lucien Febvre, a founding member of the Annales school, who firmly envisioned a sort of collective psychology of times past. Meyerson and his disciples eventually vied with their fellow historians of the Annales school for the label of “historical psychology” and criticized their notions of mentality and outillage mental. The Annales historians gradually abandoned the label, although they continued to cultivate the idea that mental operations and emotions have a history through the new labels of a “history of mentalities” and, more recently at the turn of the century, a “history of emotions.” While Meyerson and a few other psychologists kept using the “historical psychology” label, however, mainstream psychology remained quite oblivious to this historical focus. The greatest efforts made today among psychologists to think of our mental architecture in terms of transformation over time and space are probably to be found in the work of Kurt Danziger and Roger Smith.
Article
Immigration, Migration, and Culture
Victoria M. Esses
Migration is the movement of people from one location to another, either within a country (internal migration between cities or regions) or between countries (international migration). Migration may be relatively voluntary (e.g., for employment opportunities) or involuntary (e.g., due to armed conflict, persecution, or natural disasters), and it may be temporary (e.g., migrant workers moving back and forth between source and receiving areas) or permanent (e.g., becoming a permanent resident in a new country). The term immigration refers specifically to international migration that is relatively permanent in nature. Immigrants are those individuals who have moved to a new country on a relatively permanent basis. Of importance, refugees are a particular type of immigrant, defined and protected by international law. They are individuals who have been formally recognized as having fled their country of residence because of a well-founded fear of persecution, armed conflict, violence, or war. Until they are recognized as such, these individuals are asylum seekers—individuals who have claimed refugee status and are waiting for that claim to be evaluated. Despite the relative permanence of immigration, advances in transportation and communication mean that immigrants are able to travel to, spend time in, and communicate on a regular basis with their country of origin. As a result, what has been termed transnationalism may result, with individuals holding strong ties with, and actively participating in, both the country of origin and the new receiving country.
Migration often results in two or more cultures coming into contact. This contact is especially likely for international migration where immigrants from one national group (the society of origin) come into contact with members of a different national group (the receiving society). Culture may include specific beliefs, attitudes, and customs, as well as values and behaviors. The term acculturation refers to the changes that may occur when individuals from different cultures come into contact, with possible changes in both immigrants and members of the receiving society. Psychological theory and research suggest that acculturation is bidimensional, with changes potentially taking place along two dimensions—one representing the maintenance or loss of the original culture and the other representing the adoption or rejection of the new culture. This bidimensionality is important because it suggests that acculturation is not linear from original culture to new culture, but instead that individuals may simultaneously participate in the new culture and maintain their original culture. The two cultures may be expressed at different times, in different contexts, or may merge to form cultural expressions that have aspects of both cultures. With voluntary and involuntary migration at historically high levels, understanding the drivers of migration and its consequences for migrants and those with whom they come into contact are essential for global cooperation and well-being.
Article
The Origin of Psychology in the Humanities
Sven Hroar Klempe
The term “psychology” was applied for the first time in the 16th century. Yet the most interesting examples appeared in three different contexts. The Croatian poet and humanist Marko Marulić (ca. 1520), the German philosopher and Calvinist Johann Thomas Freig (1575), and the German Lutheran philosopher Rudolph Goclenius (1590). Marulić’s manuscript is likely lost, and neither of the other two defined the term. Even the interests of the three went apparently in different directions. Marulić focused on poetry and history, Freig on physica, and Goclenius on theological issues. Nevertheless, they had something in common, and this may represent the gate through which the ways they conceived the term can be understood. They all dealt with the soul, but also that it was a highly disputable concept and not uniformly understood. Another commonality was the avoidance or reinterpretation of Aristotle’s philosophy. The Florentines’ cultivation of Plato had influenced Marulić. Freig was a Ramist, thus, also a humanist who approached philosophical questions rhetorically. Goclenius belonged partly to the same movement. Consequently, they all shared a common interest in texts and language. This is just one, yet quite important aspect of the origin of psychology as a science. Thus, these text- and humanity-oriented aspects of psychology are traceable from the very beginning. This reaches a peak point when Alexander Baumgarten publishes his two volumes on aesthetics, as they were based on Christian Wolff’s Psychologia empirica (1732). They are also traceable in Kant’s critical phase, and even more in Wundt’s folkpsychology. Thus there is a more or less continuous line from the very first uses of the term psychology and some tendencies in social and cultural psychology. In other words, psychology is pursued along an historical line that ends up in the German, and not the British enlightenment.
Article
Population Aging and Globalization: The Impact of Cultural and Social Change
Christopher Phillipson
Globalization has become an influential force in the construction of older age, notably in the framing of social and economic policies designed to manage and regulate demographic change. National institutions such as the welfare state provided a distinctive shape and associated meanings to the final phase of the life course in Western societies during the 20th century. This process was disrupted from the 1990s onward, with a combination of more intense processes of globalization and accelerated international migration. A transformed cultural context is influencing a move from a linear life course toward one in which events influencing later life are scattered across a broad spectrum of time, space, and chronological age.
Globalization will undoubtedly be a major factor in shaping the lives of older people through the 21st century. The types of changes it will bring are easy to predict in some respects, much less so in others. Older people will certainly be living in a culturally and socially diverse world, increasingly aware not only of the aging of their own society but also the impact of growing old on communities across the globe. An additional change will be the influence of supranational bodies in determining policies in areas such as Social Security and health and social care, these creating the framework for resources for support for old age. Globalization—as one constituent of the “risk society”—may also generate new forms of insecurity for individuals, of which anxieties and fears about aging could represent a significant dimension.
Article
Religion and Spirituality in Sport
Ivo Jirásek
Religion, spirituality, and sport is an increasingly popular discipline in the sport psychology framework, often based on one’s own faith and religious beliefs. The spiritual dimension of the human experience first focused on religious and mystic experiences; later, various other states of mind, such as peak experiences, flow, and “being in the zone,” were discussed using the framework of humanistic and positive psychology, including in the context of sports. Human movement activities were part of religious cults and rites in ancient societies, for example in the Greek Olympic Games. Thanks to this tradition, the father of the modern Olympic Games, Pierre de Coubertin, wrote about religio athletae when discussing the transcendent aspects of modern sport. Contemporary sport is not connected to religion in such a direct way, however. The modern athlete normally follows his or her own religious tradition in a private manner. This does not mean, however, there is no connection between religion and sport. On the contrary, religious and quasi-religious behavior is commonly found in the sport environment, including superstitious rituals of athletes and fans, prayer in sporting areas, and application of non-Christian practices in sports psychology consulting. Furthermore, deeper values and meanings can be attributed to sport activities as a kind of nonreligious spirituality. It is possible to observe an increasing interest in the religious and spiritual aspects of sports in the new millennium, which can be seen in the establishing of specific professions like sport psychologists or chaplains, as well as university centers for the study of religion and spirituality in sport.
Article
Socioeconomic Status and Cultural Difference
Keiko Ishii and Charis Eisen
Socioeconomic status (SES) is a multidimensional construct based on access to material resources and one’s own rank relative to others in a social hierarchy. It fundamentally shapes individuals’ psychological and behavioral tendencies. In many ways, socioeconomic variation parallels East–West cultural dynamics. Like East Asian cultures, lower SES fosters interdependence, a reduced striving for personal choice, holistic thinking, and the attribution of events and behavior to external causes. In contrast, similar to Western cultures, higher SES supports independence, a strong desire for control, self-expression through choice, analytic thinking, and internal attribution. SES has also been found to shape additional psychological tendencies. Because limited access to resources and education makes it necessary to rely on other people, lower SES has been shown to be linked to a greater understanding of others’ emotions and a tendency to act altruistically.
Although the evidence is still limited, this article describes what is known about the simultaneous influence of SES and culture. Some studies have explored similar SES effects across cultures. However, reflecting the variation in the dominant ideas and practices shared among people within sociocultural contexts, some studies have suggested that socioeconomic contexts elicit different psychological processes across national cultures. Higher-SES individuals especially seem to adjust themselves to culturally sanctioned ideas and practices. The article suggests directions for future research that will enhance our understanding of the interplay between SES and national cultures.
Article
Wisdom Across Cultures
Igor Grossmann and Franki Kung
The concept of wisdom is ancient and deeply embedded in the cultural history of humanity. However, only since 1980s have psychologists begun to study it scientifically. Taking a culturally and philosophically informed perspective, this article integrates insights from the quantitative science of wisdom. Analysis of epistemological traditions and research on folk theories of wisdom suggest cultural similarities in the domain of cognition (e.g., wisdom as reasoning ability and knowledge). These similarities can be contrasted with cultural differences concerning folk-theoretical affective and prosocial themes of wisdom, as well as expression of various wisdom-related themes, rooted in distinct sociocultural and ecological environments. Empirical evidence indicates that wisdom is an individually and culturally malleable construct, consistent with an emerging constructionist account of wisdom and its development. Future research can benefit from integration of ecological and cultural-historical factors for the meaning of wisdom and its expression.
