Culture

Michael J. Halloran

Culture can be generally defined as an interrelated set of values, tools, and practices that is shared among a group of people who possess a common social identity. More simply, culture is the sum total of our worldviews or of our ways of living. Cultural worldviews affect a range of psychological processes, including perceptual, cognitive, personality, and social processes, but are thought to most strongly influence social psychological processes. For much of the 20th century, there was scant research and publishing on the subject of culture and behavior in the general psychological literature. Some of the more notable exceptions are seen in the work of Wilhelm Wundt, Lev Vygotsky, and Frederic Bartlett. One influential finding on cultural effects was made by Marshall Segall in the 1960s, who, along with his colleagues, found that Africans and Westerners varied in their susceptibility to certain visual illusions, theoretically because of their differential exposure ...

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