There is no domain of human thought or activity that is not influenced by a culture’s particular rich synthesis of adaptation to the physical, social, and metaphysical world. To conclude this chapter, we consider some important, broad questions about culture.

Culture is a uniquely human form of adaptation. Some theorists (Harris, 1979/2010) view it as a body of knowledge that developed to provide accurate information to people that helps them adjust to the many demands of life, whether that means obtaining food and shelter, defending against rival outgroups, and so on. Culture also tells us how groups of people work together to achieve mutually beneficial goals, and how to live our lives so that others will like and accept us—and maybe even fall in love with us. So if adaptation to physical and social environments were all that cultures were designed to facilitate, perhaps cultures would always strive toward an accurate understanding of the world.

However, adaptation to the metaphysical environment suggests that people do not live by truth and accuracy alone. Sometimes it is more adaptive for cultural worldviews to distort the truth about life and our role in it. Some things about life are too emotionally devastating to face head on, such as the inevitability of death. Because overwhelming fear can get in the way of many types of adaptive action, it sometimes is adaptive for cultures to provide “rose-colored glasses” with which to understand reality and our place in it. From the existential perspective, the adaptive utility of accurate worldviews is tempered by the adaptive value of anxiety-buffering illusions. As you will see throughout this textbook, compromise between accurate and pleasing perceptions of ourselves and the world pervades many aspects of everyday social life.

Culture is a necessary part of being human. Building on generations of accumulated wisdom and innovation culled from many cultural influences, our own culture helps us enjoy our lives, answer our toughest questions, and keep our deepest fears at bay. It provides tried and true forms of cuisine, entertainment, and technology. It gives us ways to feel connected, protected, and valuable. A human lacking or stripped of culture would be psychologically (and probably physically) naked, fearful, hard pressed to survive, and barely recognizable as a member of our species.

Cultures other than one’s own are important as well, because through cultural diffusion, cultures share innovations that mutually enhance people’s lives, offering them novel cuisines, technologies, music, and art. Imagine if you visited Oslo, Prague, Rio, or Beijing and all you found was strip malls full of the same fast-food restaurants and big-box stores you have in your hometown!

Although we can’t go about stripping an individual of his or her culture in a laboratory experiment to assess these functions of culture directly, anthropologists and psychologists have detailed many tragic historical examples of cultural disruptions, some of which have led to complete cultural disintegration. The documented effects of these cultural traumas seem to provide clear evidence of the psychological importance of culture.

A dramatic and sudden example of cultural trauma befell the inhabitants of Bikini Island in the South Pacific. The Bikinians were removed from the island by the U.S. government, which used the island to conduct 67 nuclear tests between 1945 and 1958 (FIGURE 2.12). The result was severe demoralization and stress among the Bikinian people, problems with which their descendants are still coping today. In a similar finding, research on children displaced by war or natural disaster consistently shows that those children whose cultural base has been disrupted by traumatic events are likely to develop posttraumatic stress disorder, whereas those who retain a strong cultural base cope much better (Beauvais, 2000).

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Over the course of history, cultural traumas have been experienced by indigenous tribal cultures throughout the world, as their ways of life and belief systems have been abruptly or gradually altered, and sometimes completely undermined, by intrusions from more technologically advanced cultures. The best-documented cases of these cultural traumas were set in motion by European explorers, missionaries, traders, and armies. The cross-cultural counseling psychologist Mike Salzman (Salzman & Halloran, 2004) has argued that the long-term consequences of such traumas have been remarkably similar around the globe, even though the victimized groups were often genetically, geographically, and culturally quite different. Many of the descendants of these traumatized cultures, largely stripped of their traditional ways and beliefs and not embraced by or able to embrace the dominant colonizer culture, have had difficulty sustaining a sense that they are valuable contributors to any meaningful world. Consequently, they suffer a high prevalence of debilitating anxiety, resulting in poverty, physical health problems, anxiety disorders, depression, and abuse of alcohol and other drugs. All of these unfortunate phenomena, taken together, make a strong case for the positive psychological value of an intact, functioning culture.

On the other hand, even cultures that are working well for their members have their negative side. Each culture limits the way its people think about themselves and the world and creates divides between its people and others within and outside the culture. We humans have great potential for freedom of thought and choice because of our reduced reliance on instinctual patterns of behavior and our flexible intelligence. But culture imposes preferred beliefs, attitudes, values, norms, morals, customs, and rituals on us, often leading us to internalize these worldviews long before we have the cognitive or physical capabilities or independence to question them or develop and institute alternative ways of thinking and behaving. Indeed, Becker (1971) argued that each culture is like a shared neurosis, a particular, peculiar, and limited way of viewing the world and acting in it. Consequently, those outside the culture are likely to view the behavior of those within it as odd, if not outright crazy.

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For presentational purposes in this chapter, we have generally treated culture as a single, largely static entity. However, as we noted at the outset of this chapter, cultures actually are continually evolving. In addition, cultures are often very heterogeneous, consisting of many subcultures. It is important to recognize that members of such subcultures are profoundly influenced by both their subculture and its relationship to the dominant culture.

The tone of this chapter could be taken to suggest that because people are deeply embedded in their cultures, they are mere helpless pawns of their cultural upbringing. But clearly within cultures, people vary greatly in their traits, beliefs, values, preferences, and behaviors. So how much of the person is determined by his or her culture as opposed to universal or unique characteristics? Although there is no basis for putting a number on how much, one way to examine this issue is to consider research on immigrants, people who move from one culture to another. How much do they keep? How much do they change? How easily can they adapt to the norms and customs of a very different culture? Fortunately, there is a body of theory and research on acculturation—the process whereby individuals change in response to exposure to a new culture—that can help answer such questions.

One of our wives has worked with the International Rescue Committee (IRC) to help refugees allowed into the United States to settle into life in America; she found this to be an incredibly eye-opening experience. In the last decade, many refugees have fled from Sudan, Somalia, and other parts of Africa, where civil war, ethnic cleansing, and genocide have killed many and left many more homeless. Traditional African tribal cultures are generally very collectivistic and technologically primitive, and polygamy, with associated limits on women’s rights, is prevalent. For people from these regions, the shift to American culture is a radical one. When they arrive, many of these individuals don’t know, for example, what a doorknob or a toilet is, or how they work. Many have never walked on a paved road.

Imagine the adjustment to American culture! One caseworker found a group of Somali women sitting in a modern American apartment in a circle on the kitchen floor, cleaning chicken together. This is very odd when seen through American eyes—why aren’t they being hygienic and using the counter? But it’s not so strange if we consider that they had never seen a kitchen counter before and didn’t know what it was for—and more important, that preparing food in this way was a long-standing traditional communal activity in their culture. Yet, despite the radical cultural shift and the steep learning curve necessary to learn new ways, many African refugees have adapted quite successfully—a testament to the flexibility of human intelligence and the capacity to move beyond the limits of one particular cultural worldview.

Systematic research confirms that, although some level of acculturative stress is not uncommon, most immigrants succeed in growing accustomed to their new culture (Berry, 2006; Furnham & Bochner, 1986). Some people gradually shift almost entirely from their traditional culture to the beliefs and ways of the new culture, a process known as assimilation. As people assimilate, they not only embrace the new culture’s ways of dressing, eating, and so on but also begin thinking in ways promoted by the new culture (Berry, 1997; Church, 1982; Kitayama & Markus, 2000).

Most immigrants retain aspects of their former culture while adapting to the new culture, a process known as integration. Immigrants who have achieved integration are referred to as bicultural because they identify with two cultures simultaneously. It is interesting to note that research on bicultural individuals suggests that they can think and act like members of either culture, depending on which culture’s language they are using or which culture’s symbols are prominent in their minds. Consider a study set in Hong Kong (Hong et al., 1997), a city of people primarily of Chinese descent and under Chinese control since 1997, but heavily influenced by Western culture because of 100 prior years of British rule. Researchers showed participants a cartoon of one fish swimming in front of a group of other fish. If shown pictures of a cowboy and Mickey Mouse first, they explained the lead fish’s behavior in terms of the characteristics of the fish, much as Westerners typically do. However, if first shown pictures of a Chinese dragon and temple, they explained the fish’s behavior in terms of the situation the fish was in, as Easterners typically do. This phenomenon further attests to the ability of people to transcend the perspective of one particular cultural worldview and shift to another when exposed to that worldview as well.

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Whether individuals with a background in one culture but living in another ends up assimilating, integrating, or becoming marginalized depends in part on their own choices, the strength of their initial cultural identification, and the compatibility of the two cultures. But it also depends on the attitude of the current culture toward immigrants and those with sub-cultural identifications (Berry, 2001). Some cultures promote a melting pot viewpoint that assumes that all people will converge toward the mainstream culture; this orientation more or less forcefully encourages assimilation. Other cultures value cultural diversity and promote multiculturalism, or cultural pluralism, encouraging integration (Allport, 1954).

In historical terms, American culture could be characterized as having generally had a melting pot orientation with regard to European immigrants, while simultaneously having a discriminatory orientation, fostering marginalization, with regard to African Americans, Native Americans, and Hispanic Americans. Currently, the cultural diversity movement, which primarily targets societal orientations toward blacks, Native Americans, and Hispanics, is attempting to move American culture toward a multicultural orientation. If it succeeds, it may eventually help shift members of these groups from marginalization to integration (Moghaddam, 1988).

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