Читать книгу Social Psychology - Daniel W. Barrett - Страница 205

Social psychologists’ primary aim in studying human social behavior can be boiled down to our wish to understand human nature. The evolutionary approach is particularly pertinent because it can help identify aspects of human social behavior that are universal. Yet, as we have said, social behavior is inherently cultural (Leung & Cohen, 2011). It has been argued that one of the universal aspects of human nature is that it is molded by culture and that humans are “beasts for culture” (Baumeister, 2005; Heine, 2010b). Given the potential for variability in social behavior across the globe, then, it is critical that we examine humans from a wide variety of cultures and in a large sample of contexts. Until recently, most psychological research has focused on individuals from WEIRD (Western, educated, industrialized, rich, and democratic) cultures (Henrich, Heine, & Norenzayan, 2010). You are no doubt aware that WEIRD cultures represent only a small percentage of the world’s population, and therefore our ability to draw broad inferences from such research findings is severely limited. Unfortunately, cross-cultural research is not simply a matter of transplanting an experiment or a survey originally completed in, say, London, to Tokyo or Istanbul. Rather, cross-cultural studies present several significant challenges that must be met in order to create valid and reliable studies, including those pertaining to language, situational equivalence, response styles, and sampling (Cohen, 2007; Heine, 2010a).