Introduction to methods and assessment in culture and psychology

While developments in research on culture in psychology have come a long way in the last decades, they have only slowly found their way into the mainstream areas of psychology and have not yet been comprehensively adopted. Increasingly, incoming editors of peer-reviewed journals call for culturally informed samples and research questions (e.g., see the editorials of JPSP by Cooper, 2016; Kawakami, 2015; Kitayama, 2017, as prominent examples). The continuing absence of culture is often due to the (tacit) general belief that psychological processes transcend cultural populations and that the inclusion of culture would “muddy the waters.” However, looking back at psychological research, there are numerous examples where hostile, erroneous, yet far-reaching generalizations were made about differences between cultural groups. For instance, Western conceptualizations of intelligence are focused on academic, scholastic intelligence.