Kuang-Hui Yeh - Asian Indigenous Psychologies in the Global Context

Palgrave Studies in Indigenous Psychology aims to introduce psychologists and social scientists to the indigenous psychology movement and to major theoretical and practical issues discussed in this tradition. It publishes books that make significant contributions to psychology in the era of globalization by asking important questions about the discipline, profession, and practice of psychology. The series critically appraises cultural assumptions and theoretical frameworks; sheds light on the dialectics of the universal and the particular in human subjectivity; goes beyond Western psychology in researching the ontological, epistemological, ethical, spiritual, and aesthetic dimensions of the mental life; addresses issues of structural oppression in the globalizing era; and explores possibilities for a more equitable global psychology. Given the interdisciplinary nature of indigenous psychology, this book series welcomes contributions from all disciplines in the social sciences and the humanities. In particular, it welcomes scholarship that embodies a critical thinking that is informed by the local knowledge, and inspired by the spiritual strivings of a culture.

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The Taiwanese Psychological Association invited Prof. Shinobu Kitayama from the University of Michigan, USA, to give a keynote speech in its annual meeting held at Cheng-Kung University, Tainan, from September 1516, 2016. Professor Kitayama is an old acquaintance of mine; we first met 20 years ago at Kyoto University in Japan when the Asian Association of Social Psychology held its bi-annual conference. Before that, he published a widely cited article on the independent self and interdependent self (Markus & Kitayama, 1991), and became one of the most famous Asian psychologists in the international community of psychology.

Professor Kitayama was invited by the Department of Psychology, National Taiwan University, to give a lecture on Research of Culture Neuroscience on Emotion: Achievement and Future Direction on September 18th, 2016. Subsequently, I made a 30-minute comment on his presentation entitled, Neuroscience or Cultural System: Direction of Research for Cultural Psychology , in which I mentioned his commentary on previous research related to individualismcollectivism published in a special issue of Psychological Bulletin (Kitayama, 2002). He had indicated that cross-cultural research on psychological process by any instrument of measurement should be interpreted from a system view of culture. Unfortunately, Kitayama himself has since moved away from this approach. He and his colleagues have compiled a great deal of empirical data in the field of cross-cultural research on neuro-imaging with fMRI.

This is totally the wrong direction if we are to understand the subjectivity of East Asian cultures. This reductionist approach tries to capture the cultural differences by reducing them to some pan-cultural dimensions measured by either a paper-and-pencil instrument or fMRI. But the accumulation of fragmentary data cannot provide a whole picture of the cultural system (Hwang, 2015). I will begin my arguments with a brief review on the weakness of previous research on individualismcollectivism.

The most popular culture theory, which has been widely used for cross-cultural comparison is the research paradigm of individualism and collectivism. Hofstede (1980), a well-known Dutch organizational psychologist, was the first to conduct research on individualismcollectivism. When he was a director in the department of human resource management at IBM, Hofstede constructed a scale of 32 items to measure work goals or values. He administered this scale to equivalent and stratified samples of IBM staff in 40 countries, calculated means of their endorsement on 32 work values for samples from each country and created a correlation matrix amongst the 32 average nation-values. Four factors were thus obtained as a result of factor analysis: individualism, power distance, masculinity and uncertainty avoidance. Factor scores of the 40 countries were marked to show their positions on the map constituted by any two of these four dimensions, respectively.

His empirical mapping of the worlds 40 major countries on these four cultural dimensions attracted great attention from the psychology community. Inspired by this work, in the following decades many psychologists began to conduct research on related topics. Indeed, a tremendous amount of research has been done on the dimension of individualismcollectivism. For example, an intensive review by Oyserman, Kemmelmeier, and Coon (2002) showed that psychologists had constructed at least 27 distinct scales for measuring individualismcollectivism (INDCOL) tendencies, and completed numerous empirical studies on related topics in the last two decades.