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Experimental Psychology of Culture

It is, for understandable reasons, difficult to hear, ‘What you’re doing is not what you think/say it is.’ A message like this is not likely to evoke a friendly response; it is unlikely to be seen as a friendly remark. In essence, the message does not deny the activity—’Yes, you are doing something’—but rather denies the interpretation assigned to the activity. This is my attitude toward the cognitive/experimental psychology of culture, although I must admit that, in my mind, these studies are closer to nonsense than to misinterpreted activities.



The first sign that there is a problem is the discipline’s silence regarding its limitations. The silence I am referring to is not innocent; it permits over-reaching and misapplication of the discipline and its methods.

If we fail to establish certain boundaries driven by the desire for justice, we will lack mechanisms to detect acts of injustice. Avoiding discussions about such boundaries tacitly permits acts of (epistemic, ethical, political, etc.) injustice.

If we never talk about the limits of cognitive/experimental psychology, we can pretend it has none. We can deceive ourselves into believing it can gradually expand to include or colonize all other parts of psychology, including social psychology, cultural psychology, or political psychology. On the other hand, if we discuss the limitations of cognitive/experimental psychology and train ourselves to be mindful of these limitations, not as a fixed set of axioms but as an ongoing topic of discussion, we reduce the likelihood of over-reach and misapplication.

When I write, “cognitive/experimental psychology is blind to culture,” I mean that, right from the beginning and before its awkward and prejudiced approach to culture, cognitive psychology has deprived itself of the tools necessary for understanding cultural facts. If it had these tools, it would be a proper cultural psychology, appropriate to its subject-matter.

The critique I summarize in the second half of the video is also available in my book, Experimental Psychology and Human Agency (pp. 8-10). It is part of a larger critique of experimental psychology that began with short commentaries titled “Phenomenology as Critique, Discovery, and Justification” and “Behavior versus Performance.” My critique applies, perhaps even more harshly, to the questionnaire approach to culture. Thus, I discourage you from interpreting my critique of experimentation as an implicit endorsement of questionnaires/surveys and statistical models. I am most certainly not endorsing those.

If your knee-jerk response is, “There must be some value to this type of research if it is being published in prestigious journals and cited so often,” your response is understandable. However, I urge you to drop (or at least supplement) your pseudo-religious attitude toward scientific establishment and authorities. Good science and its significance can be established on rational grounds, regardless of popularity and the current prestige attributed to a discipline. With that in mind, see if you can construct a rational justification for these experimental studies of culture.

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