The picture we have painted so far may vaguely suggest a scene from some 1950s science-fiction film in which the protagonist is a living brain that thinks, feels, hopes, and worries while suspended in a vat of pink jelly in a basement laboratory. Although psychologists often do focus on the brain and the mind of the individual, they have not lost sight of the fact that human beings are fundamentally social animals who are part of a vast network of family, friends, teachers, and co-workers. Trying to understand people in the absence of that fact is a bit like trying to understand an ant or a bee without considering the function and influence of the colony or hive. People are the most important and most complex organisms that we ever encounter; thus it is not surprising that our behaviour is strongly influenced by their presence—or their absence. The two areas of psychology that most strongly emphasize these facts are social and cultural psychology.

Social psychology is the study of the causes and consequences of sociality. As this definition suggests, social psychologists address a remarkable variety of topics. Historians trace the birth of social psychology to an experiment conducted in 1895 by psychologist and bicycle enthusiast Norman Triplett, who noticed that cyclists seemed to ride faster when they rode with others. Intrigued by this observation, he conducted an experiment that showed that children reeled in a fishing line faster when tested in the presence of other children than when tested alone. Triplett was not trying to improve the fishing abilities of children, of course, but rather was trying to show that the mere presence of other people can influence performance on even the most mundane kinds of tasks.

Social psychology’s development began in earnest in the 1930s and was driven by several historical events. The rise of Nazism led many of Germany’s most talented scientists to immigrate to America, and among them were psychologists such as Solomon Asch (1907–1996) and Kurt Lewin. These psychologists had been strongly influenced by Gestalt psychology, which you will recall held that “the whole is greater than the sum of its parts,” and though the Gestaltists had been talking about the visual perception of objects, these psychologists felt that the phrase also captured a basic truth about the relationship between social groups and the individuals who constitute them. Philosophers had speculated about the nature of sociality for thousands of years, and political scientists, economists, anthropologists, and sociologists had been studying social life scientifically for some time. But these German émigrés were the first to generate theories of social behaviour that resembled the theories generated by natural scientists and, more importantly, they were the first to conduct experiments to test their social theories. For example, Lewin (1936) adopted the language of mid-century physics to develop a “field theory” that viewed social behaviour as the product of “internal forces” (such as personality, goals, and beliefs) and “external forces” (such as social pressure and culture), whereas Asch (1946) performed laboratory experiments to examine the “mental chemistry” that allows people to combine small bits of information about another person into a full impression of that person’s personality.

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Other historical events also shaped social psychology in its early years. For example, the Holocaust brought the problems of conformity and obedience into sharp focus, leading psychologists such as Asch (1956) and others to examine the conditions under which people can influence each other to think and act in inhuman or irrational ways. The civil rights movement and the rising tensions between African Americans and white Americans led psychologists such as Gordon Allport (1897–1967) to study stereotyping, prejudice, and racism, and to shock the world of psychology by suggesting that prejudice was the result of a perceptual error that was every bit as natural and unavoidable as an optical illusion (Allport, 1954). Allport argued that the same perceptual processes that allow us to efficiently categorize elements of our social and physical world allow us to erroneously categorize entire groups of people. Social psychologists today study a wider variety of topics (from social memory to social relationships) and use a wider variety of techniques (from opinion polls to neuroimaging) than did their forebears, but this field of psychology remains dedicated to understanding the brain as a social organ, the mind as a social adaptation, and the individual as a social creature.

North Americans and Western Europeans are sometimes surprised to realize that most of the people on the planet are members of neither culture. Although we are all more alike than we are different, there is nonetheless considerable diversity within the human species in social practices, customs, and ways of living. Culture refers to the values, traditions, and beliefs that are shared by a particular group of people. Although we usually think of culture in terms of nationality and ethnic groups, cultures can also be defined by age (youth culture), sexual orientation (gay culture), religion (Jewish culture), or occupation (academic culture). Cultural psychology is the study of how cultures reflect and shape the psychological processes of their members (Shweder & Sullivan, 1993). Cultural psychologists study a wide range of phenomena, ranging from visual perception to social interaction, as they seek to understand which of these phenomena are universal and which vary from place to place and time to time.

Perhaps surprisingly, one of the first psychologists to pay attention to the influence of culture was someone recognized today for pioneering the development of experimental psychology, Wilhelm Wundt. He believed that a complete psychology would have to combine a laboratory approach with a broader cultural perspective (Wundt, 1900–1920). But Wundt’s ideas failed to spark much interest from other psychologists, who had their hands full trying to make sense of results from laboratory experiments and formulating general laws of human behaviour. Outside of psychology, anthropologists such as Margaret Mead (1901–1978) and Gregory Bateson (1904–1980) attempted to understand the workings of culture by travelling to far-flung regions of the world and carefully observing child-rearing patterns, rituals, religious ceremonies, and the like. Such studies revealed practices—some bizarre from a North American perspective—that served important functions in a culture, such as the painful ritual of violent body mutilation and bloodletting in mountain tribes of New Guinea, which initiates young boys into training to become warriors (Mead, 1935/1968; Read, 1965).

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Yet, at the time, most anthropologists paid as little attention to psychology as psychologists did to anthropology. Cultural psychology only began to emerge as a strong force in psychology during the 1980s and 1990s, when psychologists and anthropologists began to communicate with each other about their ideas and methods (Stigler, Shweder, & Herdt, 1990). It was then that psychologists rediscovered Wundt as an intellectual ancestor of this area of the field (Jahoda, 1993).

Physicists assume that E = mc² whether the m is located in Moosejaw, Moscow, or the Orion Nebula. Chemists assume that water is made of hydrogen and oxygen, and that it was made of hydrogen and oxygen in 1609 as well. The laws of physics and chemistry are assumed to be universal, and for much of psychology’s history, the same assumption was made about the principles that govern human behaviour (Shweder, 1991). Absolutism holds that culture makes little or no difference for most psychological phenomena, that “honesty is honesty and depression is depression, no matter where one observes it” (Segall, Lonner, & Berry, 1998, p. 1103). And yet, as any world traveller knows, cultures differ in exciting, delicious, and frightening ways, and things that are true of people in one culture are not necessarily true of people in another. John Berry (of Queen’s University) and his colleagues maintain that relativism holds that psychological phenomena are likely to vary considerably across cultures and should be viewed only in the context of a specific culture (Berry et al., 1992). Although depression is observed in nearly every culture, the symptoms associated with it vary dramatically from one place to another. For example, in Western cultures there is greater emphasis on cognitive symptoms such as worthlessness, whereas in Eastern cultures there is greater focus on somatic symptoms such as fatigue and body aches (Draguns & Tanaka-Matsumi, 2003).

Today, most cultural psychologists fall somewhere between these two extremes. Most psychological phenomena can be influenced by culture, some are completely determined by it, and others seem to be entirely unaffected. For example, the age of a person’s earliest memory differs dramatically across cultures (MacDonald, Uesiliana, & Hayne, 2000), whereas judgments of facial attractiveness do not (Cunningham et al., 1995). As noted when we discussed evolutionary psychology, it seems likely that the most universal phenomena are those that are closely associated with the basic biology that all human beings share. Conversely, the least universal phenomena are those rooted in the varied socialization practices that different cultures evolve. Of course, the only way to determine whether a phenomenon is variable or constant across cultures is to design research to investigate these possibilities, and cultural psychologists do just that (Cole, 1996; Segall et al., 1998). We will highlight the work of cultural psychologists throughout the text and in Culture & Community boxes like the one in this section concerning cultural differences in analytic and holistic styles of processing information.

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