Psychology and Culture How the Two Fit Together

Cultural Influence and Critical Thinking

No psychological perspective is really free of cultural biases, as every perspective is rooted in something, whether it is Freud's perspective rooted in his own cultural experience or Augustine's rooted in (more anciently) in his own. If cultural bias is defined as something by which a psychologist bases certain presumptions about life, the human mind, experience, etc., it is impossible to hold the view that any one psychological perspective has been developed that is free (i.e., cultivated in a vacuum) of any influence or impact from one's culture. Freud was no doubt influenced by German modernism (Enlightenment ideology coupled with Romanticism) just as Augustine was no doubt influenced by Catholic teaching later in his life and the dualists in his younger life. To free a psychological perspective from culture is like freeing ice from water or divorcing a compound from its parts. Culture is to psychology as it is to all other aspects of life, as anyone in business, sociology, sport, banking, etc. would testify.

Thus, it is equally impossible to argue that one psychological perspective is most impacted by cultural biases -- unless one wants to assert that Cultural Psychology (because it deliberately takes into account the culture of the patient) is an example of a psychological perspective that is most impacted by cultural biases. But then one would have to argue whether or not a deliberate perspective on culture is really the same thing as a bias (Fiske et al., 1998).

The perspective that would argue for the existence of "human nature" can be said to be all of them, as well, even if their progenitors would disagree. Freud for instance presents a psychological perspective that attempts to define the nature of the mind and thus holds a view on human nature. Jung does the same and virtually every psychologist too on down the line. Any psychological perspective that looks at the human mind and attempts to discern patterns or explain cognitive processes is making a view on what must be called "human nature" -- because to dissociate the "nature" of the process from the human subject is to act with a bias against the idea of "human nature" as though humans did not have one. Indeed, any school of psychology presupposes by its very existence that there is a nature to the human subject which the school has analyzed and attempted to interpret -- otherwise there would be no point to its existence (Castillo, 1997; McGoldrick, 2005).