Socio- Cultural Psychology

The socio-cultural psychology examines the influences of social and cultural environments on behavior. Socioculturalists argue that understanding a person’s behavior requires knowing about the cultural context in which the behavior occurs (Matsumoto & Juang, 2013). (Culture refers to the shared knowledge, practices, and attitudes of groups of people and can include language, customs, and beliefs about what behavior is appropriate and inappropriate.)

The sociocultural approach often includes cross-cultural research, meaning research that compares individuals in various cultures to see how they differ on important psychological attributes. Cross-cultural research is important for testing the assumption that findings for one culture also generalize to other cultural contexts, and as such it allows psychologists to test for the possibility that some characteristics are universal (Hofmann & Hinton, 2014).

The sociocultural approach provides researchers and psychologists with a more informed view and understanding of the motivations which cause a person to behave in a particular way. Instead of relying on biological factors alone, the approach promises to paint a more vivid picture of the human mind through a wider understanding of how we acquire cognitive abilities at an early age.

A pioneer of the sociocultural approach was the Soviet psychologist Lev Semyonovich Vygotsky (1896-1934), who became interested in developmental psychology and helped to change the face of the field.One key element of Vygotsky’s sociocultural approach is his idea of a Zone of Proximal Development. Commonly abbreviated as ZPD, the Zone of Proximal Development is a way to gauge a child’s ability to learn and grow. Vygotsky believed that the ZPD was a far better way to gauge. A child’s intelligence than through the standard academic testing, which can often fail to account for cultural differences with regards to learning. Vygotsky claims that there are three cultural tools which children use to inform their cognitive abilities.

Politics, cultural ethics, gender,values, beliefs, ethnicity, socioeconomic status influence our behavior in society and interactions in social groups.

It also includes interpersonal and intrapersonal theory which we will see in a short video below:

Assumptions of Socio- Cultural Psychology

• All behavior occurs in a social context, even when nobody else is physically present
• A major influence on people’s behavior, thought processes and emotions are other people and the society they have created.
• Human’s ability to recall information is a result of our understanding of complex language.
• How we communicate, understand, relate and cope with one another is partially based on this theory. Our spiritual, mental, physical, emotional, physiological being are all influenced by sociocultural perspective theory.
• Examines how culture and politics effect our behavior.

Impacts on Science and Society:

• Gender influences our behavior
• Job’s opportunities to influence people’s goals and ambition.
• It is the study of rules, roles, groups, relationships, cultural norms, values and expectations.
• This approach helps us understand how behaviour can be influenced by other people, and the situation they find themselves in.
• It helps us understand that people’s behaviour may change if their situation changes.
• It helps us understand extreme human behaviours; this is good because if we can understand the causes of behaviour (such as power abuse by prison guards, SPE) then we can take steps to prevent it.

 

• The Social Approach underestimates the influence of individual differences in behaviour – it doesn’t explain why some people differ from the norm expected in any given social situation.
• The study doesn’t investigate why certain individuals were able to disobey an authority figure.
• Another weakness of this approacch is that in order to obtain valid results, social research is often conducted without the participant’s knowledge.
• It is often criticised for being ethnocentric, meaning that research from this approach may not generalise across cultures.