Review_Author: Stephanie Drye
Book_Author: Michael Cole
Book_Title: Cultural Psychology
Reference: ..
Date: 2/27/00
Time: 8:53:32 PM
Remote Name: 205.188.198.162
This book challenged my thinking in many ways. I had not realized before just how much of an impact culture had on things we do every day. From the time we get up until we rest at night, culture is ever influencing our actions. For example, many of us go to work or school (and sometimes both) because it is expected of us in our culture. While sitting in rush hour traffic remember that it is our cultural norm to, for the majority, to work 9 to 5 which results in those wonderful traffic delays.
Michael Cole points out that culture greatly effects the way we think. This was important to the discovery that individuals from primitive societies think differently, not less efficiently than those from “civilized”, or modern societies. What one culture may regard as “intelligence” another may not. Those from primitive societies do go through the normal developmental phases, however, they are manifested in different ways.
He also concludes that many experiments in artificial settings do not yield results that would be true in original settings. For example, he finds it important to study children in the most authentic setting possible in order to assure that what takes place is authentic as well. Some experiments have revealed things that would only take place in artificial settings so the implications for schooling by the research could be invalid.
I also realized that culture is not just manifested through people, but through artifacts as well. Artifacts can tell the story of a culture. They can tell us how the people of a particular culture thought. It is as though they are a windows into the past.
I really enjoyed the book despite some problems in understanding far from common terms used in the book. I also appreciated the author’s ability to be objective to many forms of psychology. He writes of two psychologies, the one pertaining mostly to science and biology and the other pertaining to the useful or culture and things other than the first psychology. Though he tends to lean toward the second, he is able to see the importance that both be used to get a fuller understanding of psychology in whole.