By Eric Santosa
This is an Introduction to Cultural Psychology Part 1. Click here to go to part_2, part_3, part_4, part_5
Cultural psychology has been delivered in Cultural Psychology course at the Faculty of Psychology Atma Jaya Catholic University Jakarta for several years since 2004. Starting the year 2012 the course is not offered to the students anymore because of the change in psychology curriculum at the faculty. This article is a response for those who asked and still want to have material and discussions on the topic. Here I would like to make a brief sketch about what cultural psychology is which previously has been discussed in the course.
Why Cultural Psychology?
I am often asked what my cultural psychology is about, why I am quite passionate on this topic. Let me illustrate with a case. If you belong to middle class segment living in big cities like Jakarta chances are that you may have visited and bought a cup of coffee at Starbucks which may cost around thirty thousand rupiah or more. Certainly Starbucks is not the only place you can find quality coffee. There are more other places you can find coffee with similar quality with cheaper price. The question is why people keep buying coffee at Starbucks despite higher price? Assuming that human can make rational decisions, what is it that people buy beyond coffee products at Starbucks? To answer those questions cultural psychology will direct our discussions into the concept of human experience. What is it that people buy? It is certain experience which is offered intentionally or not at Starbucks. This experience maybe delivered through brand communications, the products, packaging, design interiors or others that when coordinated and managed well are able to deliver certain unique experience that people may find only at Starbucks.
Cultural psychology is about understanding human experience and things that may work for delivering certain experiences for them. It is first of all about how humans understand themselves and their world, how they reason their mind and behavior, how they may be able to make themselves intelligible for other minds, and how they may change their mind and behavior.
Students will have a better understanding if they get also involved with three other courses: interpretive-qualitative research method; cultural change strategy and management; media and persuasions. Cultural psychology course consist of discussions on the approach and basic concepts, while the other three are discussions on research method and applications of cultural psychology. I plan to write articles on these topics as well later.
Cultural psychology as an approach is basically not new. Its root can be traced back to the time when Wilhelm Wundt founded his laboratory in Leipzig in 1879. Wundt himself around the same period has written several volumes of Völkerpsychologie in which he offered an approach, quite different from experimental psychology, to study human cultures. To have complete pictures of human phenomenon one must use both approach. They should not be considered as conflicting with each other.
Later on in early twentieth century Vygotsky has raised similar concerns about psychology as science and profession. His works were aimed to build a unified general psychology that offer a more integrated approach to understand human mind and behavior. In his times already psychology has been segregated into several schools of thought that have not only their own approach but also their own object of study. His work focused on finding a more appropriate unit of analysis as an object of psychology.
In the times where psychology and social science as scientific study are still dominated by positivist and experimental approach, a more interpretive approach to study human mind and behavior is needed to balance and enrich the way we understand ourselves and our contemporary world.
In fact in people's daily life the way we understand ourselves and people around us is heavily interpretive. We understand our social life more through interpreting other people's behaviors rather than through comparing and testing them in laboratory or psychological test settings. Professional counselors does not seem to have difficulties to understand her clients without applying psychological tests. The term empathy for example which is heavily discussed and become a basic concept in many counseling courses is basically an interpretive and phenomenological process. Despite that, very little we have discussions on how we can understand ourselves and other people's mind and experience.
I write this article with the hope that the discussions will continue. I do not expect myself to cover all the material to properly understand cultural psychology in this article. What I write is the kind of cultural psychology that I usually discussed in my courses. My thinking in this area is very much influenced by three broad sources: 1. Jerome Bruner's cultural psychology, John Searle's philosophy of mind, speech-act theory, semiotics of Charles Sanders Peirce and Ferdinand de Saussure, and literary theory of Roland Barthes; 2. Marxist psychology with Vygotsky, A.N. Leontiev, Evald Ilyenkov and Ÿro Engeström's cultural historical activity theory; and 3. Comparative mythology of Joseph Campbell and Jungian psychology.
I'm also very much influenced by discussions with friends, colleagues and clients, both brand owners and professionals in marketing communications industry who have stimulated my thinking through posing me many interesting and challenging problems from business point of view. Besides people in public sectors, to my eyes they are in a real business of managing strategic cultural and behavioral change in our civil society. I would be satisfied when this article can move more people to ask questions and to explore more on the topic. It's still a long way to make what I'm presenting in this article more useful and workable for managing cultural change both in the context of marketing communications or in public sectors. I prefer to see the journey as a collective enterprise with a common vision: for us both in private and public sectors to be able to manage our civil society in more strategic ways.
What is cultural psychology?
Cultural psychology is an approach to understand human mind and behavior through studying the social cultural contexts in which it occurs. Even further it is claimed that it is impossible to understand them without considering its cultural and historical contexts.
This assertion is not limited to cultural psychology. Ecological and social psychology in general have quite similar assertions that human behaviors are influenced by their social context. Cultural psychology in contrast asserts that human mind and behavior, is not only influenced, but more fundamentally constituted by their social cultural contexts. This means that they exist and intelligible only when they are treated as texts and put in their contexts.
Let me give a very simple example: the act of raising hand in a classroom. Anybody who is born and grew up in modern world would understand what it means when somebody sitting in a chair among a group of people in a classroom raises his hand. It means he intends to ask questions or make comments. The question is how is it possible that everybody understand this action? The very same act of raising hand, when it is put in other contexts would mean differently. For example at the bus stop when a man raises hand that would mean that he intends to stop a bus or taxi. The driver who never previously talked to him would know what he means and will pull over his taxi
In the language of mainstream positivist social psychology the behavior of the taxi driver of pulling over his taxi is influenced by the man's behavior. The man's behavior becomes the stimulus and the driver's the response. In contrast cultural psychology would say that first of all the act of the man's raising hand is intelligible for the taxi driver and others nearby since the act comes up in the context of commuting activity. In itself the raising hand when it is decontextualized would be meaningless.
Furthermore the act of the taxi driver that follows after the man's raising hand is in accordance with a kind of subconscious cultural scripts such that when they are disrupted everybody else nearby would have questions in their mind. Such subconscious cultural scripts are things that people take for granted, and will not get their attention unless they are disrupted. For example when the driver does not pull over his taxi, the man will have a question and demand an explanation why he does not do so. When nobody provides him with enough explanations, he will try to reconstruct in his mind for himself many possible stories to explain the driver's act. It maybe the taxi is heading home to its taxi pool; or that since it's late at night and the road is empty the driver fears of crime. The function of these stories are basically providing possible contexts that will help for mitigating the disruption the taxi driver's action has induced.
Take another example from marketing communication industry. A mosquito repellent brand is showing a picture of a mosquito repellent tube and its brand name on a big billboard with white background across the street. No other visual cues are there on the billboard. Like the act of raising hand in classroom the act of the brand owner putting the picture on the billboard will induce expectations among the audience. People who grew up in urban setting and happen to see the billboard will know that this is an ad, and that means the brand is trying to tell something to its audience. Seeing an ad people would expect that the brand would tell something new, something they don't know, or something that may disrupt their taken-for-granted experience.
Unlike the act of raising hand at the bus stop however there are no cultural scripts that dictate how the audience should respond to the ad. Depending on what the brand owner would like to achieve the ad should provide more cues for the audience to reconstruct possible stories in their mind that enable them to get meaningful take-outs from the ad. If the target the brand owner would like to achieve is to get the audience interested to buy the product, the billboard certainly would not be able to do it. Among so many billboards near the mosquito repellent ad it will not be able even to get the attention of the audience. The most that this ad can achieve is to get the audience aware that the product exists.
To help the audience reconstruct a meaningful story in their mind, let's consider to provide two alternative sets of visual cues by utilizing cultural contexts which are available and recognizable in modern people's life. The first alternative set is adding a picture of a young mother in nightgown with two of her kids lying asleep on the bed as background. The picture shows the mother holding a repellent tube trying to kill mosquitoes in the bedroom. These additional visual cues will help the audience to reconstruct a familiar story of a mother's efforts to make her kids more comfortable sleeping. The second alternative set is a picture of a young mother dress up with a GI army-look apparel trying to protect her two kids who stand behind her from something dangerous. She is combating against mosquitoes which attack her like a squad of fighter aircrafts. She has two repellent tubes. One she holds on her belt like a hand gun, and the other she is using to repel the mosquitoes. Similarly these second set of visual cues will help the audience to reconstruct a story of a young mother's effort to protect her kids from harm.
Which of the two alternative stories is more effective to get the audience attention or even further to induce the audience to buy the product, it is still debatable and will need more research to decide. The second set of visual cue may get more attention compared to the first since it contains disruptions from familiar scene of a mother taking care of her kids, though it will depend on its fit with the psychography of the target audience. The point we are going to make here is that by providing visual cues that help the audience reconstruct cultural contexts in their mind the ad is becoming more meaningful and enable the brand owners to get the respond that become its targets.
In real life settings people make use of such visual and verbal cues which are available in their environments to understand themselves and the world. Going back to our Starbucks case, it is the context which exists at Starbuck that help the guests having certain unique experience when they visit the place. The context is maybe delivered through brand communications, products, packagings, services, design interior, the kind of people doing the operations and also the kind of people visiting the place. Question that remains for us to discuss is what makes the difference between the experience people may have when they visit Starbucks compared for example Angkringan in Jogjakarta. The kind of concrete activities people are doing at Starbucks and Angkringan maybe similar, that is drinking coffee, having chats with acquaintances etc, but the experience maybe quite difference. We will keep this question in mind for our next discussions.
No comments:
Post a Comment