Toward a Psychological Science for a Cultural Species

ABSTRACT—Humans are a cultural species, and the study of human psychology benefits from attention to cultural influences. Cultural psychology’s contributions to psycho-logical science can largely be divided according to the two different stages of scientific inquiry. Stage 1 research seeks cultural differences and establishes the boundaries of psychological phenomena. Stage 2 research seeks under-lying mechanisms of those cultural differences. The liter-atures regarding these two distinct stages are reviewed, and various methods for conducting Stage 2 research are discussed. The implications of culture-blind and multi-cultural psychologies for society and intergroup relations are also discussed. Before we inquire into origins and functional relations, it is nec-essary to know the thing we are trying to explain. (Asch, 1952