8.5 Some evaluative comments on Confucianism and indigenous psychology.

Confucian society placed great value on “having face” derived from distinctive achievement in helping relationships and consequent social status. Chen (1988) developed a scale that measured the significance a person places on honorable experiences in life and alternatively their sensitivity to disgrace. This concern to maintain face can be easily understood within Western psychology as a form of impression formation and therefore not unique to Confucian society (Tedeschi & Riess, 1981). A unique factor in Confucian theory is the strong emphasis on filial piety that seems to have no similar comparative place in Western thought. The main difference between Confucianism and Western ideas grew out different conceptions of the origin of life. In Christianity each individual is seen as independently created by God whereas in Confucianism the individual is seen as the continuation of parents and indeed the preceding ancestors. That conception of the individual led to the idea of the “greater self” since in Confucian culture people experience shame and glory together. However, that argument must be modified by the fact that the need to preserve face is probably universal, however manifested in different ways in varying cultures (Keil, Im, & Mahring, 2007). For example, “keeping face” is probably one way we can understand luxury consumption in both Confucian and Western societies (Qian, Razzaque, & Keng, 2007).

As we observed earlier the interest in Confucian theory and psychological concepts grew out of the dissatisfaction by non-Western psychologists with what seemed to them the domination of Western paradigms in world psychology. This assessment brought about a number of efforts to incorporate non-Western concepts and cultural factors into cultural and cross-cultural psychological research (Hwang, 2005a, b). The first wave called modernization theory was really a surrender to Western culture since it argued that the psychology in any society had to be modernized (and become more similar to U.S. and European personalities and dispositions) in order to facilitate the progress of society (Inkeles, 1966). Hofstede (1980) through his work on cultural work values later helped shift attention away from Western cultures. In the research that emerged the study on individualism and collectivism had a significant heuristic impact (Oyserman, Coon, & Kemmelmeier, 2002).

However, since the research on individualism and collectivism takes American or Europe society as reference points, how can we really understand collectivistic thinking? From these criticisms an indigenous psychology emerged in a search for non-Western psychological interpretations. The effort to create indigenous psychologies was partly motivated by the broader cultural influence of nationalism, and in particular by academic anti-colonialism (Kim, 2000).

The focus of indigenous psychologies however, also came under criticism. For example Triandis (2000) noted that anthropologists have used similar methods as those promoted by indigenous psychologies without producing results that significantly impacted scientific psychology. Further, the question might be asked about how many indigenous psychologies are optimal and should be developed? If every culture required a specific psychology we would not only have a confusing many, but it would represent ethnocentrism in reverse (Poortinga, 1999). Any psychology must also take into account the rapidly changing world that has produced concepts like the “global village”. It is doubtful that there is any pure homogenous or distinctive culture and it could be argued that there is a broader frame of human commonness that supports a universal psychology. In fact some authors argue that the ultimate goal is to develop a more universal approach from which to understand cultural variations (Kim & Berry, 1993; Ho, 1998; Yang, 1999). That proposition suggest that regardless of cultural variation there also exist in the human mind an underlying deep universal structure that functions the same in all societies, but over time have developed into different mentalities because of the cultural environment.