What Do Social Groups have to Do with Culture? The Crucial Role of Shared Experience

In an eloquent article in a recent volume of American Psychologist, Cohen (2009) evoked a contentious question: what are the boundaries of culture? To Cohen, the extant psychological literature has been too limited in its almost exclusive emphasis on independent-interdependent self-construal as the prime psychological process characterizing cultural variation, with the variation being limited itself to nationalities and an East–West division. Cohen argued that cultural processes are more complex and diverse, and cultural boundaries are more fine-grained. Cohen's apt critique noted that many forms of culture are overlooked when psychologists are so limited in their scope. To expand the conceptual space, Cohen urged psychologists to consider other cultural identities such as religion, socioeconomic status, and regional locale, as well as their possible intersections. Signifying " cultural " identities that have nominal labels as potential markers for culture may be interpreted to suggest that group membership is synonymous with cultural processes. Cohen's view is more sophisticated than that. However, the emphasis on nominal groupings such as religion and SES – to which we could add race, ethnicity, sexual orientation, disability status, etc. – does raise the question: What do these social groups have to do with culture? We argue that a focus on shared meanings of experiences , rather than nominal social groupings, is a more appropriate and productive path toward achieving Cohen's goal of expanding and refining our understanding of cultural-psychological processes. There are several issues that we believe are pertinent to the relations between social groups and culture. One is the important recognition that all nominal groupings are themselves cultural constructions: social schemas that emerged through social interaction in particular contexts to fulfill conceptual and practical functions in ritualized social life. The meanings of these nominal groupings have very fuzzy boundaries that render group inclusion criteria messy; they change continuously; and they reflect the purposes of those employing the categories more than the characteristics of the group members. Clearly this is the case with the more obviously malleable categories: low SES means quite different things and the category would include people with different economic characteristics depending on the country, the historical period, the political result of deliberations among economists, the purpose of the researchers, and the access to different kinds of data. But, even social categories that in layper-son terms have essential properties, such as gender, have previously taken on different meanings and continue to have fuzzy and dynamic …