Culture in Minds and Societies: Foundations of Cultural Psychology

Abstract

Cultural psychology is a hybrid of social and developmental psychology on the one hand, and of cultural anthropology on the other.In this paper I will analyze the collectivecultural processes that set the stage for individual citizens of a society to develop trust in the benevolence of its social institutions.I will demonstrate that such trust is a necessary organizational illusion that functions as a promoter of social cohesiveness of social groups and guides the internalization of the acceptance of the meta-level "just world" sign-field by individual persons.Guided by such field, persons are likely to take the risk of trusting the public communicative messages of social institutions and become involved in both constructive and destructive acts.Such non-reflexive "basic trust" in the social authorities is both needed for a social system to function, and for individual persons to legitimize their actions.Yet civil society cannot remain non-reflexive, and it is through the development of social reflexivity that the basic characteristic of human survival-basic distrust in the social institutions-is developed.The latter is illustrated by the Galis and Haviv model of discursive inaction in case of genocides.What can cultural psychology say about society in general-and of civil society in particular?At the first glance it would be inappropriate all together for anybody working in psychology to say anything about society.The two areas of investigation--into the human psyche and into the social worlds--may be best treated in their own rights as two qualitatively distinct forms of organization.However, a perfectly legitimate research target is the relationship between these two distinct levels.There is the connection-real human beings make up "the society" and then treat it as a power to which they need to obey (Valsiner, 1998(Valsiner, , 1999)).Personal need to obey may be supported by their protests against that very obeying-while involved in the act of obeying (cf.Milgram, 1974).Persons change themselves through the society by assuming prescribed roles and acting accordingly (Haney, Banks & Zimbardo, 1973).Last-but not least--they may act upon the subjective feelings of one's personal duties in relation to "the society" (Moghaddam, 2003).All these varied

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