What is Culture and what is Cross-cultural Psychology?

1. What is Culture and what is Cross-cultural Psychology? Assoc. Prof. James H. Liu Centre for Applied Cross Cultural Research School of Psychology Victoria University of Wellington

2. Defining Culture I • 'collective programming of the mind' (Hofstede, 1980) • 'the totality of equivalent and complementary learned meanings maintained by a human population, or by identifiable segments of a population, and transmitted from one generation to the next' (Rohner, 1984; pp. 119-120)

3. Defining Culture II • Triandis (1994): “Culture is to society what memory is to individuals. In other words, culture includes traditions that tell “what has worked” in the past. It also encompasses the way people have learned to look at their environment and themselves, and their unstated assumptions about the way the world is and the way people should act. • The most inclusive definition of culture– that culture is the human-made part of the environment– was given by Herskovits”. (p. 1)

4. Where do Cross-cultural Psychologists go to get their data and present their findings? • Professor Colleen Ward: Tourism in Fiji, and International Academy for Intercultural Research (IAIR) in Groningen: Editor-elect of International Journal for Intercultural Research (IJIR)

5. Dr. Ronald Fischer, Assoc Editor Journal of Cross-Cultural Psychology Data collection in Brazil, Presentation at Inter-American Psychology Congress, and regional conference of the International Assn for Cross-Cultural Psychology (IACCP), Mexico City

6. Dr. James Liu, Sec-Gen of Asian Assn of Social Psychology and Editor Elect for Asian Journal of Social Psychology Data collection in China, Japan, and Taiwan, presentation at AASP meeting in Kota Kinabalu, Borneo (Malaysia)

7. Centre for Applied Cross Cultural Research at VUW • 4 full-time staff and 20+ associates all over the country • Around 20 post-graduate students from all over the world • Researching cross-cultural similarities and differences, indigenous psychologies, and diversity and inter-group relations in NZ

8. Social Psychology at VUW • We will be hosting the Society for Australasian Social Psychology’s annual meeting here at Vic March 28-30. Deputy HOS Marc Wilson organizer. • The world (or at least Some Aussies) comes to Wellington

9. Society of Australasian Social Psychologists 33rd Annual Meeting XX-XX April 2007 Wellington, New Zealand