Travelling into culture : a social psychologist encounters many strangers from many strange lands

As I survey my intellectual journey post-PhD, I detect four, overlapping stages in my development as a cross-cultural psychologist. My first stage, that of innocence, involved examining human responses using the social-personality constructs and measures extracted from my training in North America up to that date. My second stage, that of discovery, involved applying those constructs and measures in the different cultural settings of Japan and Hong Kong, only to discover that the constructs worked differently to produce different responses. My third stage, that of understanding, involved using Mainstream and indigenously developed constructs and measures to begin understanding how cultural differences might be producing these differences in the responses of a culture’s individual members. Moving into the 21st Century, we cross-cultural psychologists either collected or were gifted with access to multi-cultural data sets tapping multiple constructs whose role in shaping psychological responses could be analyzed with increasingly sophisticated statistical packages. These resources now increasingly enable us to explore the moderating impact on individual responses of a growing set of cultural measures provided by culturologists studying various types of culture in addition to the national. My current and fourth stage, that of enlightenment, involves halting attempts to integrate this complexity of constructs and their measures into a coherent model of how an individual’s many cultural socializations across the lifespan affects his or her psychological responses. My journey continues…