Global Psychology from Indigenous Perspectives: Visions Inspired by K. S. Yang [1st ed.] 9783030351243, 9783030351250

Table of contents :
Front Matter ....Pages i-xxi
Introduction (Louise Sundararajan, Kwang-Kuo Hwang, Kuang-Hui Yeh)....Pages 1-6
Front Matter ....Pages 7-7
My Academic Journey with Kuo-Shu Yang: Traveling More Widely and More Deeply into Chinese Culture (Michael Harris Bond)....Pages 9-32
Pioneer of Chinese Indigenous Psychology: Prof. Kuo-Shu Yang (Kuang-Hui Yeh)....Pages 33-44
Philosophical Reflection on Prof. K.S. Yang’s Vision of Global Psychology and Indigenous Compatibility (Kwang-Kuo Hwang)....Pages 45-75
Combined Essays (Chi-jeng Yeh, Mei Chih Li, Li-Jun Ji, Kung-Yu Hsu, Kenneth Wang, William K. Gabrenya Jr.)....Pages 77-91
Front Matter ....Pages 93-93
The Role of Reason in Cultural Interpretation: Some Talmudic Distinctions for Indigenous and Cultural Psychology (Richard A. Shweder)....Pages 95-110
Yang’s Global Psychology and Beyond (Carl Martin Allwood)....Pages 111-128
Forgiveness in Indigenous Psychological Research: A Trojan Horse, a Western Knockoff, or a Traditioned Sensibility? (Alvin Dueck, Ruizhe Song, Michael Marossy)....Pages 129-143
Psychology for the Global 99% (Margaret J. Hendricks, Fathali M. Moghaddam)....Pages 145-157
The Impossible Conditions of the Possibility of an Alter-Global Psychology (Thomas Teo, Bilal Afşin)....Pages 159-174
Front Matter ....Pages 175-175
A Commentary on Commentaries on the Prospects for a More Equitable Global Psychology (James H. Liu)....Pages 177-188
From Indigenous Psychologies to Cross-Indigenous Psychology—Prospects for a “Genuine, Global Human Psychology” (Rogelia Pe-Pua)....Pages 189-223
Global Psychology: Symphony or Elephant (Rachel Sing-Kiat Ting, Justine Jian-Ai Thong)....Pages 225-244
Front Matter ....Pages 245-245
Taking Stock and Moving Forward from IP to GP: Building on the Legacy of K. S. Yang (Louise Sundararajan)....Pages 247-264
Back Matter ....Pages 265-295

Citation preview

PALGRAVE STUDIES IN INDIGENOUS PSYCHOLOGY

Global Psychology from Indigenous Perspectives Visions Inspired by K. S. Yang Edited by Louise Sundararajan · Kwang-Kuo Hwang · Kuang-Hui Yeh

Palgrave Studies in Indigenous Psychology

Series Editors Louise Sundararajan Independent Researcher Rochester, NY, USA Kuang-Hui Yeh Institute of Ethnology Academia Sinica Taipei, Taiwan Alvin Dueck School of Psychology Fuller Theological Seminary Pasadena, CA, USA Thomas Teo Department of Psychology York University Toronto, ON, Canada Jeffrey Paul Ansloos Ontario Institute for Studies in Education University of Toronto Heidelberg, Baden-Württemberg, Germany

Palgrave Studies in Indigenous Psychology aims to introduce psychologists and social scientists to the indigenous psychology movement and to major theoretical and practical issues discussed in this tradition. It publishes books that make significant contributions to psychology in the era of globalization by asking important questions about the discipline, profession, and practice of psychology. The series critically appraises cultural assumptions and theoretical frameworks; sheds light on the dialectics of the universal and the particular in human subjectivity; goes beyond Western psychology in researching the ontological, epistemological, ethical, spiritual, and aesthetic dimensions of the mental life; addresses issues of structural oppression in the globalizing era; and explores possibilities for a more equitable global psychology. Given the interdisciplinary nature of indigenous psychology, this book series welcomes contributions from all disciplines in the social sciences and the humanities. In particular, it welcomes scholarship that embodies a critical thinking that is informed by the local knowledge, and inspired by the spiritual strivings of a culture.

More information about this series at http://www.palgrave.com/gp/series/15445

Louise Sundararajan · Kwang-Kuo Hwang · Kuang-Hui Yeh Editors

Global Psychology from Indigenous Perspectives Visions Inspired by K. S. Yang

Editors Louise Sundararajan Rochester, NY, USA Kuang-Hui Yeh Institute of Ethnology Academia Sinica Taipei, Taiwan

Kwang-Kuo Hwang Department of Psychology National Taiwan University Taipei, Taiwan Kaohsiung Medical University Kaohsiung, Taiwan

Palgrave Studies in Indigenous Psychology ISBN 978-3-030-35124-3 ISBN 978-3-030-35125-0 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-35125-0 © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2020 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. Cover illustration: StevanZZ shutterstock.com This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland

Foreword by Jong-Tsun Huang

Professor Kuo-Shu Yang (1932–2018) is my mentor even after his passing away. He was a personality and social psychologist with a strong belief that the betterment of the society could be achieved through a series of effective reforms. He believed that some prevailing mainstream paradigms, politically or academically, must be removed or modified and the cure is to reinstate indigenous concern and strengthen civic engagement. In this deep sense, he was not only an academic person in the university but also an intellectual in the society. It’s like a midnight conscience call to remind him work harder for the establishment of a new and civil society. His professional career was evolved through these two arenas, one is in the university and the other in the society. K. S. Yang served as the Editor-in-Chief for a political review journal The Intellectual in the year 1971–1973 when he was a full professor at the Department of Psychology in the National Taiwan University. Taiwan was still under the practice of martial law, it is thus by no means the easy days for free talks concerning Taiwan democracy. The Intellectual, however, was made under strong determination of the intellectuals as one of the most powerful incubators for promoting democracy in the society at that critical time. The commitment and devotion of K. S. Yang on this track continued until mid-1990s. He was instrumental to enhance the mutual understanding among opposing forces in the changing society. He joined the liberal scholars to facilitate the establishment of Democratic Progressive Party in 1986. He was also a well-known symbolic participant v

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in a handful of civic and educational movements during this period. It’s reasonable to conclude from this record of civic participation that he had been deeply rooted within the social-cultural and historical context of the changing society. The inspirations from this intense interaction with the society might then be accommodated into his research activities on the study of personality and social psychology. Taiwan martial law was finally lifted in 1987. K. S. Yang began his successful founding of Taipei Society in 1989, which is a gathering of Taiwan intellectuals inspired by the operation of British Fabian Society. Later on, he spent most of his time to define the domain and push forward the movement to launch the discipline of indigenous psychology, including a periodical of the first of its kind journal of indigenous psychology (Indigenous Psychological Research in Chinese Societies ) in 1993. In sum, it seems to be a dual track of career development for Professor Yang, but not a surprise to me, it’s two sides on the same coin. The innovative part of psychology on his due could simply be a continuation or an echo from both his dedication toward the Taiwan democracy and the long-lasting thinking to put the social-cultural relevance back to his psychological framework. His first systematic involvement in the study of Chinese personality in 1972 and the sinicization of social and behavioral science research in 1982 set the beginning phase to pave the way toward the conceptualization of indigenization. Terminology like Chinese and Sinicization had been modified afterwards as Chinese people and Indigenization to extend to broader and pluralistic domains. More relevant issues were explored concerning indigenization of social and behavioral science research in Chinese societies. The systematic endeavor flourished from the latter part of 1980s and launched the professional journal in 1993. The two strands of development could be conceived as mutually interactive and they might reinforce each other. After the indigenous psychology movement had been well-received in mid-1990s, K. S. Yang retreated from the political arena and moved intentionally to a broader academic community to call for a global (human) psychology. For some distinguished masters, they can step out for social engagement and walk in for academic career in distinct ways. Noam Chomsky for example, is famous for his masterpiece of defending the universality in the emergence of syntactical structure and in language learning, while he was speaking for the cultural diversity in various social dialogues. But this is not the case for K. S. Yang. He was committed and contributed to the

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early development of democracy in Taiwan. About at the same time frame, he formulated the backbone of indigenous approach and emphasize the social and cultural context, namely, the notion of indigenous compatibility. A continuity seems to be established between social dialogues and academic innovations. It is at first revolutionary to create a tension with the mainstream in the society or in the academy then comes evolutionary to be reconciled and integrated with the mainstream in a modified form. The narrative is very much like the reform and development of Taiwan democracy. In the same vein, indigenous approach was suggested first, then world psychology. The notion of indigenous compatibility was first proposed to refer to a psychological explanation or narrative that must be grounded on the social-cultural context that is relevant with the target problems in discussion, like face, serendipity, filial piety, religious piety, and human destiny issues. After fulfillment of the basic requirements of indigenous compatibility, global (human) psychology can then hopefully be reconstructed from diverse and characteristic indigenous psychologies. Common themes can thus be extracted from the solid extensions that are all based on the narratives with sufficient indigenous compatibility. At its best, the extraction and integration could be achieved like a orchestrated symphony. It is more equitable and pay respect to diverse human ecologies. More than that, it’s also the real science behind the genuine study of these human phenomena. Although not all but many of human phenomena are contextualized along social-cultural dimensions, they should not be studied in vacuum or in isolation. One of the unsatisfactory professionalism is the lazy application of the dominant or so-called mainstream theory in hands. Although some of the key elements of the approach are still in debate, the above-mentioned concepts have been suggested before 1993 and made popular later through the innovative efforts of K. S. Yang and colleagues. In this respect, his initial contribution is comparable to the influential approach for the guiding principles of ecological optics and ecological perception at its first formulation by James J. Gibson (1904– 1979) in mid-1960s. Both of these approaches began with a creative attack on the mainstream but later developed into a solid part of the mainstream. K. S. Yang was a social reformer rather than a social activist. He is a public intellectual and a mentor to the society. He was committed to finding the relevant social and political issues then engaged with the

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society to find the solution. From this line of comparison, he was consistent in his approach both the reform of the society and the promotion of indigenous and world (human) psychology. One more thing deserves mention, the book title Global Psychology from Indigenous Perspectives: Visions Inspired by K. S. Yang catch nicely the zeitgeist of Professor K. S. Yang’s long-lasting commitment toward finding the lost paradise back to the mainstream. Jong-Tsun Huang Professor Emeritus Department of Psychology National Taiwan University Taipei, Taiwan University Professor Graduate Institute of Biomedical Sciences China Medical University Taichung, Taiwan

Foreword by Chi-Yue Chiu

Celebrating the Legacy of K. S. Yang: A Letter to the Readers Dear readers, May this volume be a weighty tome; for it carries loads of affection and lots of inspirations—affection for a nurturing mentor and inspirations from an enlightening sage! In this reading journey, you will indulge in the many moving stories about the big heart of a great mind, and be absorbed in the captivating dialogues among an intellectual giant and those standing on his shoulders. The centerpiece of this volume is Prof. K. S. Yang’s last but not least published article on global psychology. This masterpiece is an aweinspiring execution of conceptual cubism, accomplished by bringing together seemingly disparate conceptual views to create a futuristic vision of global psychology from indigenous perspectives. Captured in the present volume are lively colocutions concerning the desirability and prospect of this vision. To render this extended conversation trail tractable, I shall spare you a commentary on the commentaries of the commentaries of this masterpiece. Instead, to emulate Prof. Yang’s intellectual playfulness, I will venture beyond the writing convention for forewords and introduce variations to the symphonic composition of Prof. Yang’s protrait contained in this volume.

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Contributors to this volume have portrayed Prof. Yang as a perfect example of a virtuous scholar (君子Junzi), a benevolent mentor, a champion of democracy in Taiwan, and a trailblazer of indigenized global psychology. This portrait aptly captures Prof. Yang’s persona. Nevertheless, to me, Prof. Yang was also a magnificent maverick, a rebel, and a round peg in the square hole. He was someone who cared to imagine and dared to change things. He explored, created and inspired. Because of these qualities, he would not be ignored, and he could push knowledge and society forward. I also remember Prof. Yang as a noble hero (Daxia 大俠). He passed away on July 18, 2018. The next day, I composed a poem (see Appendix) to pay homage to his chivalric nobility (俠骨). In my memory, he was a fighter for universal values and their institutionalization in the political system of his society and the intellectual tradition of his academic discipline. He had defended these values with conviction, determination, bravery, courage, and grit. In his campaign for the establishment of a culturally inclusive psychology, Prof. Yang had tirelessly reminded us to situate the processes of knowledge creation and idea diffusion in a global sociopolitical context. In the post-war era, the world witnessed a high concentration of economic and military power and rapid growth of intellectual prowess in the United States. A major contributing factor of the US success story is the popularized American dream—the shared belief (or cultural myth) that America values and supports success through hard work. In a deregulated neoliberal market, competition is free from public intervention; opportunities for success are open to all individuals who are willing to apply themselves; and status ranking is based on meritocracy. Individual psychology matters in the neoliberal logic, because possession of psychological qualities (knowledge, skills, abilities, beliefs, and values) that buttress resilience and sustained effort is regarded as a key determinant of personal success or failure. When a person fails, blame the person, not the society. Is this brand of US-made neoliberal psychology applicable in all sociopolitical contexts? Imagine a society that values neoliberal meritocracy but does not have institutionalized means to support and reward hard work. Imagine a society where the face and favor logic in its power game trumps application in the determination of citizens’ life outcomes. Imagine a society where the marginal return of capital far exceeds that of labor. Imagine a society where nepotism and corruption have eclipsed

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legal protection of equal opportunities. Imagine a society where citizens value self-transcendence and self-expression more than they do competition, performance, achievement, and success. Would a US-made neoliberal psychology rooted in vertical individualism be applicable in these contexts? This is an empirical question, you may say. This is a legitimate question, Prof. Yang insisted. As globalization advances, the hegemonic influence of US-made psychology grows around the globe. US-made psychology has been dressed up as “mainstream” psychology, whereas indigenous psychological theories are sometimes treated as alternative non-scientific folk knowledge. Prof. Yang did not just obstinately resist the hegemonic influence of US-made psychology in Chinese societies. Instead, he started a revolution. His ambition was not to present global psychology as an alternative to the so-called mainstream US-made psychology, but to replace it with a culturally inclusive system of contextualized psychological knowledge. Although Prof. Yang deceased before the revolution comes to fruition, his legacy will last. When the revolution comes to fruition, Prof. Yang, we assure you, psychology will be released from the confinement of psychological reductionism. Our discipline will bond with other sciences and social sciences to reveal the social nature of personhood. Psychology will be an open, culturally respectful discipline. Psychologists will no longer denigrate local knowledge. Instead, they will humbly seek inspirations from indigenous wisdom. Indigenous psychologies will not be labeled as alternative, non-scientific folk psychologies, to be differentiated from mainstream (US-made) scientific psychology. Psychological research will exploit the global relevance of indigenous constructs and connect them to form a global science of human psyche. Researchers will not make sweeping generalizations about human personhood and sociality based on USgenerated research findings. Psychologies in developing regions will be liberated from the hegemonic influence of US-made psychology. Psychological knowledge that is relevant and actionable in local contexts will be constructed. I know I am not describing a utopia, because Prof. Yang has shown us the embryonic forms of this global psychology in his work on traditionality and modernity, filial piety, socially oriented achievement motivation, and many other enlightening research examples.

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My dear readers, please enjoy this reading voyage, and pick up the baton when you are ready. The revolution must go on! Prof. Yang’s legacy must live on! Yours truly, Chi-yue Chiu The Chinese University of Hong Kong Sha Tin Hong Kong

Postscript 悼念國樞先生 國士辭邦悲鶴唳 哲人其萎掩金杯 游俠銷魂唯別矣 歸靈何處思徘徊 楊國樞先生於2018年7月17日早上辭世。 先生身居台灣，心繫軒轅，畢生 任俠於两岸三地，曾客仕香港中文大學社會科學院，一代宗師，國士無 雙 。還記得與先生共飲我平生第一杯花雕，得到先生第一次點撥，那已 是整整三十年前的事了。 如今棟傾樑折，哲人其萎，此後金樽誰共?華庭鶴唳，能不黯然銷魂?思 念徘徊，今夜不知先生靈歸何處，是在家鄉東眺寶島，還是在台灣西望 神州?一峽碧水，兩岸青山，滿載著先生的哲思與俠影… 志裕 July 2018

Praise for Global Psychology from Indigenous Perspectives

“This volume is an incredible tribute to Professor Kuo-Shu Yang’s lifetime contribution to indigenous psychology. It features reflections from renowned scholars, showing how they thought Prof. Yang’s work has provided a vision for global psychology and a culturally inclusive psychology. Any students of indigenous psychology cannot miss reading this volume.” —Ying-yi Hong, Professor of Marketing, The Chinese University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong “The shift from a Western vision of psychology to the appreciation of multiple, indigenous psychologies is momentous in its potential. How then are we now to bring about a coherent, global psychology? As a tribute to the path-finding works of Kuo-shu Yang, the present volume launches an international forum to explore this significant question. A stellar cast of culturally concerned psychologists offer keen insights, sparkling debate and a deep appreciation of the importance of bringing cherished differences into a just and inclusive whole. Such groundbreaking deliberation provides a window into the profound challenge of how the world’s peoples can achieve a form of unity that will enable us to survive.” —Kenneth J. Gergen, author of Relational Being: Beyond Self and Community (2011)

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“Prof. Yang left the most valuable legacy in Asian indigenous psychology. This volume shows the way for researchers in Asia and beyond to pursue. The debates among international scholars are extremely inspiring.” —Susumu Yamaguchi, Emeritus Professor of Social Psychology, University of Tokyo, Japan

Contents

1

Introduction Louise Sundararajan, Kwang-Kuo Hwang, and Kuang-Hui Yeh

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Part I Introduction to Prof. Yang 2

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4

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My Academic Journey with Kuo-Shu Yang: Traveling More Widely and More Deeply into Chinese Culture Michael Harris Bond

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Pioneer of Chinese Indigenous Psychology: Prof. Kuo-Shu Yang Kuang-Hui Yeh

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Philosophical Reflection on Prof. K.S. Yang’s Vision of Global Psychology and Indigenous Compatibility Kwang-Kuo Hwang

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Combined Essays Chi-jeng Yeh, Mei Chih Li, Li-Jun Ji, Kung-Yu Hsu, Kenneth Wang, and William K. Gabrenya Jr.

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CONTENTS

Part II International Critique of Prof. Yang’s Model of Global Psychology 6

The Role of Reason in Cultural Interpretation: Some Talmudic Distinctions for Indigenous and Cultural Psychology Richard A. Shweder

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Yang’s Global Psychology and Beyond Carl Martin Allwood

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Forgiveness in Indigenous Psychological Research: A Trojan Horse, a Western Knockoff, or a Traditioned Sensibility? Alvin Dueck, Ruizhe Song, and Michael Marossy

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Psychology for the Global 99% Margaret J. Hendricks and Fathali M. Moghaddam

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The Impossible Conditions of the Possibility of an Alter-Global Psychology Thomas Teo and Bilal Af¸sin

Part III 11

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13

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111

129

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Critique of International Readings of Prof. Yang

A Commentary on Commentaries on the Prospects for a More Equitable Global Psychology James H. Liu From Indigenous Psychologies to Cross-Indigenous Psychology—Prospects for a “Genuine, Global Human Psychology” Rogelia Pe-Pua Global Psychology: Symphony or Elephant Rachel Sing-Kiat Ting and Justine Jian-Ai Thong

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CONTENTS

Part IV 14

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Conclusion

Taking Stock and Moving Forward from IP to GP: Building on the Legacy of K. S. Yang Louise Sundararajan

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Appendix

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Index

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List of Contributors

Bilal Af¸sin York University, Toronto, ON, Canada Carl Martin Allwood Department Gothenburg, Gothenburg, Sweden

of

Psychology,

University

of

Michael Harris Bond Faculty of Business, Polytechnic University of Hong Kong, Hung Hom, Hong Kong Alvin Dueck Fuller Graduate School of Psychology, Pasadena, CA, USA William K. Gabrenya Jr. Florida Institute of Technology, Melbourne, FL, USA Margaret J. Hendricks Georgetown University, Washington, DC, USA Kung-Yu Hsu Department of Psychology, National Chung-Cheng University, Chiayi County, Taiwan Kwang-Kuo Hwang Department of Psychology, National Taiwan University, Taipei, Taiwan; Kaohsiung Medical University, Kaohsiung, Taiwan Li-Jun Ji Queen’s University, Kingston, ON, Canada Mei Chih Li Department of Psychology, National Chengchi University, Taipei, Taiwan

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LIST OF CONTRIBUTORS

James H. Liu School of Psychology, Massey University, Auckland, New Zealand Michael Marossy Fuller Graduate School of Psychology, Pasadena, CA, USA Fathali M. Moghaddam Georgetown University, Washington, DC, USA Rogelia Pe-Pua The University of New South Wales, Kensington, NSW, Australia Richard A. Shweder Department of Comparative Human Development, University of Chicago, Chicago, IL, USA Ruizhe Song Fuller Graduate School of Psychology, Pasadena, CA, USA Louise Sundararajan Rochester, NY, USA Thomas Teo York University, Toronto, ON, Canada Justine Jian-Ai Thong Department of Psychology, Jeffrey Cheah School of Medicine and Health Sciences, Monash University Malaysia, Subang Jaya, Selangor, Malaysia Rachel Sing-Kiat Ting Department of Psychology, Jeffrey Cheah School of Medicine and Health Sciences, Monash University Malaysia, Subang Jaya, Selangor, Malaysia Kenneth Wang Fuller Theological Seminary, Pasadena, CA, USA Chi-jeng Yeh Department of Sociology, National Taiwan University, Taipei, Taiwan Kuang-Hui Yeh Institute of Ethnology, Academia Sinica, Taipei, Taiwan

List of Figures

Fig. 2.1 Fig. 2.2 Fig. 2.3 Fig. 5.1 Fig. 12.1

Fig. 12.2

Professor Kuo-Shu Yang in Hong Kong, November 1979 (Taken by the chapter author) 16 Our last chat in Taipei, Taiwan, June 2012 (Taken by the chapter author) 27 Fragment from a poem by Bo Wang (Tang Dynasty) 28 The author (Mei Chih Li) and Mrs. Yang at Teacher Yang’s memorial service on 2018/9/1 (copyright by the author) 81 A schematic diagram of uni-national dominance in psychology (Indigenization from without) (from Enriquez, 1992) (Re-produced with permission from the University of the Philippines [publisher]) 201 Towards a global psychology through a cross-indigenous perspective (Enriquez, 1992) (Re-produced with permission from the University of the Philippines [publisher]). Note The direction of arrows indicates “indigenization from within” 202

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CHAPTER 1

Introduction Louise Sundararajan, Kwang-Kuo Hwang, and Kuang-Hui Yeh

Professor Kuo-shu Yang (1932–2018) passed away in his sleep in the early morning of July 17, 2018. He was a real junzi (君子), the ideal Confucian gentleman-scholar. He was an activist who had participated in many programs of political, social, and educational reform in his youth, with significant contributions to the democratization of Taiwan. He was a leader who had initiated several major academic movements in his midlife, with profound influence on the scientific community of both Taiwan and mainland China.

L. Sundararajan (B) Rochester, NY, USA K.-K. Hwang Department of Psychology, National Taiwan University, Taipei, Taiwan e-mail: [email protected] Kaohsiung Medical University, Kaohsiung, Taiwan K.-H. Yeh Institute of Ethnology, Academia Sinica, Taipei, Taiwan e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s) 2020 L. Sundararajan et al. (eds.), Global Psychology from Indigenous Perspectives, Palgrave Studies in Indigenous Psychology, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-35125-0_1

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L. SUNDARARAJAN ET AL.

He was a scholar who had devoted all his efforts to the development of Chinese indigenous psychology (IP) that has inspired many followers in East Asia. He was a pioneer and pathfinder in the field of IP with a vision of global psychology (GP) that is to be built on a different foundation and voice than mainstream Western psychology. His last English publication was an article (see Appendix, Yang, 2012) addressing the historical relations of IP, Westernized psychology, indigenized psychology, imposed-etic, cross-cultural psychology, and crosscultural quasi-indigenous psychology—culminating with the vision for a “genuine” GP. To honor the memory of Professor Yang is, therefore, to publish a memorial volume dedicated to the pursuit of his ultimate concern—a GP that is more equitable than the current agenda based on mainstream psychology.

The Floor Plan The purpose and intent of this volume is to create an international forum for further development of Professor Yang’s initiative. More specifically, this volume is an experiment by which we seek to demonstrate the feasibility of Professor Yang’s vision of a more equitable GP. For this purpose, we used Professor Yang’s (2012) paper to initiate an international dialogue among scholars who have high impact in the field of IP. The content of this volume is developed along two dimensions— affective and cognitive. Along the affective dimension, cultures are lived experiences; and mentalities, lived worlds. In this dimension, Professor Yang is presented as a person or a soul whose impact was life changing or transformative. This dimension of Professor Yang is articulated in the first section of the volume, as well as in the analysis of the concluding chapter. Along the cognitive dimension, we focus on critical thinking which can set IP free from habits of thought that no longer serve the field. This is the function of the stimulating and critical debates in the second and third sections of the volume that center on Professor Yang’s (2012) article. In combination, this volume presents the appreciation for Professor Yang’s contributions to the field of IP, with a critical review of the current state of the field, along with visions for developing the GP of tomorrow. In sum, the content and scope of this volume is wide ranging—from the heart-warming personal experiences of the students and colleagues

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of Professor Yang to the intellectually stimulating debates and dialogues among the scholars. At the same time, we make sure that there is enough organization to keep things from being scattered. For one thing, all the discussions share as one common thread—Professor Yang’s article of 2012, which is required reading for all contributors in sections two and three. A better sense of the structure of this volume can be gleaned from the organization of the chapters below.

Organization and Content Part I. Introduction to Professor Yang. Based on their own personal experiences as Professor Yang’s students or colleagues, scholars were invited to contribute to the central theme of “I remember Professor Yang.” Synopsis. Chapter 2 by Michael Harris Bond gives an account of personal memories and knowledge about Professor Yang’s biography, thinking, and personality through long term collaborations and exchanges; Chapter 3 by Kuang-Hui Yeh outlines the major milestones in Professor Yang’s career as a pioneer in Chinese IP; Chapter 4 by Kwang-Kuo Hwang attributes the shaping factors behind his intellectual development to not only the pedagogies of, but also important disagreements with his mentor, Professor Yang. Chapter 5, by Yeh, C.-j.; Li, M. C.; Ji, L.-J.; Hsu, K.-Y.; Wang, K.; and Gabrenya, W. Jr., is a collection of anecdotes of Professor Yang’s personal life that had a transformative impact on his former colleagues and students in so many ways. Part II. International Critique of Professor Yang’s Model of GP. International scholars with high impact on IP were invited to critique Professor Yang’s (2012) paper, with special focus on the following questions: 1. What do you think Professor Yang meant by “genuine” GP? 2. Give a summary of Professor Yang’s model for GP: What are the components? What are the conditions/requirements for its implementation? 3. Critique Professor Yang’s version of GP: Strengths, weaknesses, and ramifications for psychology as a human science. 4. Offer your version of GP, which can be an expanded version of Professor Yang’s (in case you agree with him), a modified version of Professor Yang’s (in case you are partially in agreement with him),

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or a completely different version from Professor Yang’s (in case you reject his ideas). Synopsis. Chapter 6 by Richard Shweder explains in detail the often cited but not well understood dictum of “one mind many mentalities”— along the way, Shweder poses a key question for our critical reflection of the field: What is the role of reason in IP?; Chapter 7 by Carl Martin Allwood gives a careful reading of Professor Yang’s article and raises some important questions; Chapter 8 by Dueck, Song, and Marossy calls attention to the issue of neoliberalism that hides in the Trojan horse of Western psychology; Chapter 9 by Hendricks and Moghaddam calls attention to the relevance of the global poor to IP; lastly, Chapter 10 by Teo and Af¸sin points out some inherent contradictions in Professor Yang’s agenda. Part III. Critique of International Readings of Professor Yang. Critiquing the critics, scholars who are familiar with Professor Yang’s work were invited to critique the international papers in Part II. These critiques will address the following questions: 1. According to your understanding of Professor Yang, his vision of GP is best summed up, the least understood, or can best be complemented by whose critique, or can best be extended by whose proposal in Part II. 2. Is there a common theme that emerges from the international reading of Professor Yang? 3. In what way is your vision of GP similar or different from Professor Yang’s? 4. In what way can your vision of GP contribute to the international debate on this topic? 5. What are the issues in GP that warrant further debate? Synopsis. Chapter 11 by James Liu offers some insights about the life and work of Professor Yang, while pointing out the disparity in academic backgrounds between Professor Yang and his international critics; Chapter 12 by Rogelia Pe-Pua engages in further critical reflections on Professor Yang’s agendas for IP and GP, and shares the vision of a crossindigenous psychology; Chapter 13 by Ting and Thong shares the vision of a GP that complements reason with compassion (humanitarianism), and that aspires to transcend certain fetishes in IP, such as points of origin and nationalism.

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Part IV. Conclusion. In this last chapter, Louise Sundararajan distilled from the foregoing discussions a few critical issues that may determine the extent to which IPs will be able to participate actively in the international endeavors toward the making of a more equitable GP for the twenty-first century.

An Overview of This Volume Our goal was to involve as many IPs as possible to discuss the issues concerning Professor Yang’s agenda for IP and GP. Recruiting contributors for Parts II and III has not been easy. Many were called; only a few responded. The skewed distribution in scholarship in this volume reflects not our neglect to recruit widely in the field of IP, so much as the isolation and mutual neglect among IPs (required reading of the article by another fellow IP was a hard sale). Crossing disciplinary boundaries constitutes another difficulty in recruiting contributors for Part III, besides the amount of required reading (of all the five papers in Part II). In spite of all these limitations, however, we managed to deliver our promise. As an experiment to model Professor Yang’s vision of a more equitable GP, this volume paid special attention to two elements of Professor Yang’s GP agenda—balance in knowledge production and global in scope. To model balance in knowledge production, we made sure that the international dialogue is not a one-way street, in which knowledge and information flow from West to the rest, as it tends to be the case in mainstream psychology. This was accomplished structurally—the work of an Asian IP (Yang, 2012) was critiqued by a team of international scholars, whose critiques were in turn evaluated by Asian IP scholars. To demonstrate the challenges and promises of adding a global dimension to IP, we invited contributors with diverse cultural and intellectual backgrounds for a stimulating debate. The result is a rich tapestry of ideas, stimulated by Professor Yang’s life and work, out of which important issues can be identified (see the concluding chapter) for further development of Professor Yang’s initiative toward “a genuine, balanced global human psychology” (Yang, 2012, p. 11). Overall, the contributions to this volume converge on the idea that to honor Professor Yang is not necessarily to replicate his agenda so much as to continue his mission, and to extend his vision with new ideas and creative solutions. We believe that in honoring Professor Yang as one of the founders of IP, there is nothing more appropriate than initiating the

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next phase of IP as harbinger for a global community of psychologies in the twenty-first century. In conclusion, this unprecedented international debate among leaders in the field of IP will likely become an important document for anyone who wishes to understand the movement from within—the thinking and the vision of those who are the driving forces behind the movement. Ten years from now, any scholar who wishes to understand why IP is flourishing or declining, should be able to find some of the answers in the insightful analyses by the contributors, as well as in the stimulating debates among them.

Reference Yang, K.-S. (2012). Indigenous psychology, Westernized psychology, and indigenized psychology: A non-Western psychologist’s view. Chang Gung Journal of Humanities and Social Sciences (長庚人文社會學報), 5(1), 1–32.

PART I

Introduction to Prof. Yang

CHAPTER 2

My Academic Journey with Kuo-Shu Yang: Traveling More Widely and More Deeply into Chinese Culture Michael Harris Bond

Introduction to Our History Beginning with Thanks After expressing my thanks to the three editors of this memorial volume orchestrated in remembrance of Kuo-Shu Yang, I would like to quote a sentence in “Tao te ching”《道德經》 ( ) which expresses the essence of this essay. “…all things bear the shade on their backs and the sun in their arms; By the blending of breath from the sun and the shade, equilibrium comes to the world” (萬物負陰而抱陽, 沖氣以為和) (R. B. Blakney [trans.]). This translation by Blakney, a Westerner who lived in China, captures the dynamic engagement of our intellectual partnership.

M. H. Bond (B) Faculty of Business, Polytechnic University of Hong Kong, Hung Hom, Hong Kong e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s) 2020 L. Sundararajan et al. (eds.), Global Psychology from Indigenous Perspectives, Palgrave Studies in Indigenous Psychology, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-35125-0_2

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Professor Kuo-Shu Yang was a foundational influence in my career as a cross-cultural social psychologist and a wellspring of guidance in my intellectual development from our first meeting in 1978 to the present, and I expect, into the future. Prof. Yang provided living inspiration for reading widely, writing clearly, disciplining an intellectual search, and opening oneself to the thoughts and experience of different others. For those scholars who could engage with him in the Chinese language rather than English, he was perhaps even more of an inspiration, the complete shifu (師傅). Our editors invited me to “contribute a paper on the theme, ‘I remember Prof. Yang’, based on (my) own personal experiences as his friend or colleague.” In accepting their invitation, I expected that reflecting on my experience of working with Yang Kuo-Shu would help me clarify who I have become as a practicing academic social psychologist. So it has. Paired Footprints on Our Career Pathways Our conversations began as face-to-face exchanges, in English I must point out, when we became next-door colleagues of the Psychology Section at the Chinese University of Hong Kong (CUHK) in 1978. The first time we met, Professor Yang said, “Mike, call me Kuo-Shu,” and I will do so throughout the rest of this memoir. We conversed about socialpersonality psychology and research almost daily during his year as Section Head, sparking ideas for research through our many exchanges. Following his return to Taiwan, we corresponded by mail about our ongoing joint research (Bond & Yang, 1982; Chinese Culture Connection, 1987; Yang & Bond, 1980, 1990) and his many contributions to edited books on Chinese psychology that I initiated in my quest to present the psychology of the Chinese people to an international audience (Yang, 1986, 1988, 1996, 1997). After his return to Taiwan in 1979, Kuo-Shu and I met at conferences in Hong Kong or Taipei where we would always arrange some together time for private exchanges about our various ongoing projects. On a conference visit in 2002, we took tea at his favorite tea shop in Taipei, and he gave me Dawson’s, The Chinese Experience (1978), a book by a Westerner whose understanding of Chinese traditions in various domains of culture Kuo-Shu especially prized. Over tea, we discovered that we were both born in the Year of the Monkey, so he promised to introduce me to the Taipei Monkey Club on my next visit. That next visit was not until

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2012 when last conversed at a lunch break during a conference held at the National Taiwan University. These conversations across 34 years included two decades of writing together, either as co-authors of social-personality studies or as KuoShu contributing chapters in handbook-type collections on Chinese psychology that I was editing. Our final project was his writing an autobiography for a collection of auto-biographies by renowned cross-cultural psychologists reflecting on their careers to date in 1997. Thereafter, I followed Kuo-Shu’s prolific English-language writing for the Asian Journal of Social Psychology, the International Journal of Psychology, and various collections on indigenous psychology (e.g., Yang, 2006, 2012). Throughout, Kuo-Shu was my guide into the labyrinth of the Chinese personality, the social dynamics of Chinese interpersonal relationships, and the ecological-historical forces acting to shape Chinese cultural systems in China and throughout the Chinese diaspora. He was my shifu (師傅), presenting a lively, knowledgeable senior to a curious, ignorant novice. He listened respectfully to my enthusiastic outpourings as I strove to figure our Hong Kong and its people; I in turn was his Canadian acolyte, engaging intently with his attempts to ground and refine my early impressions as they developed in that career-shaping year of 1978–1979 and later, in our many writings together. We worked in English, and Kuo-Shu’s was fluent, precise, and clear, albeit complex, requiring close attention. What we missed through my ignorance of spoken and written Chinese I will never know, but I am sure that Kuo-Shu represented his understanding of “the Chinese experience” as best he could in our working medium of English. I understood him readily and, I hope, correctly. Reflecting on our extended “conversations,” I have discovered some important questions for me to ponder. I am, after all, a social psychologist by inclination as well as by career, eager to understand the magic of elevating relationships. How did we come to work together and sustain a productive inter-cultural relationship for so long? My answer is that we shared the same intellectual quest—to understand contemporary Chinese people. This career-quest was approached from our distinctive cultural socializations, respectfully, both together and with other colleagues across our long engagements with Chinese and Western academic institutions. We both wanted to learn from others, and appreciated the wisdom of the Confucian adage, “Three people walking together, one is your teacher”

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(三人行, 必有我師焉)(論語). I learned from Kuo-Shu; he perhaps occasionally, from me. Our shared quest began for each of us before we met. So, to appreciate what we came to know about Chinese people, some personal history will help.

Preparing for Our Conversations Before 1978 Yang Kuo-Shu Kuo-Shu traveled to the United States in 1966 at age 34 “with the hope of becoming a well-trained personality and social psychologist” (Yang, 1997, p. 63). He reflected on his three subsequent years of intense training at the University of Illinois, stating, “I congratulated myself for having received probably the best scientific training in scientific psychology available anywhere in the whole world” (ibid.). Buoyed by this confirmation of his achievement, Kuo-Shu returned to assume a position as Assistant Professor in the Department of Psychology at National Taiwan University in 1969. For the next five years, he worked with his typical intensity, “and maintained a high level of productivity” (ibid.). However, “What I did not realize was that I had been thoroughly ‘brain-washed’, so to speak, to become an almost 100 per cent Westernized psychologist” (Yang, 1997, p. 64). Kuo-Shu, always self-critical and introspective, gradually became discontent with the path unfolding before him. A career-defining insight emerged: I found that almost all the psychological topics I had investigated…were concerning phenomena that Western (especially American) psychologists had already studied. I had just followed their footsteps without asking whether or not these topics were really important or relevant to the everyday life of the Chinese people in Taiwan…in the research process of such a Westernized psychology, only the investigator and the subjects (research participants were termed “subjects” at that time!) were Chinese and all the other major elements were Western…. (p. 64, brackets added)

Then, Kuo-Shu writes a painful lament in assessing his prior work as a psychologist: I felt that the studies I had completed and published did not have enough relevance or make much sense for the explanation, prediction, and understanding of Chinese psychological life…Research of this kind resulted in

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an Americanized Chinese psychology without a Chinese ‘soul’…such an imposed ‘soulless psychology’ would not do much good in explaining, predicting and understanding Chinese behavior because the imported, Westernized concepts, theories, methods, and tools habitually adopted by Chinese psychologists could not do justice to the complicated, unique aspects and patterns of Chinese people’s psychological and behavioral characteristics. (pp. 64–65)

Where was the Chineseness of Chinese people to be found in such an enterprise? Where was the rich legacy of Chinese history and worldview located amidst this intellectual colonization? Was it not self-inflicted cultural disrespect to submit to this aping of Westernization as a Chinese psychologist? Having discovered the source of his intellectual-spiritual discontent, Kuo-Shu wrote that, “my heart lightened and my disillusionment suddenly disappeared” (Yang, 1997, p. 66). Surveying the Taiwanese discipline of psychology at that time, however, he noted, “To my dismay, almost all the other local psychologists had been doing research in the same manner” (ibid.). And further, it seemed to him that a similar “betrayal of Chineseness” infected the whole of Chinese social science. Kuo-Shu refused to submit to this insidious form of the same colonial humiliation characterizing the last two centuries of Chinese history. Kuo-Shu reports that then, “I convinced myself that it was my responsibility to let my fellow Chinese psychologists know that they had been doing research in a rather fruitless way” (Yang, 1997, p. 66). Characteristically, he assumed his innately gifted role of leadership and …began to take action in 1976…I first communicated my ideas about the Sinicization of research in social and behavioral sciences in Chinese societies to my anthropology and sociology colleagues at the Institute of Ethnology, Academia Sinica in Taipei…we came to the conclusion that an academic movement of Sinicization had to be seriously promoted among social and behavioral scientists in Taiwan and in other Chinese societies as well. (ibid.)

Yin (陰) had met Yang (陽) in a classic confrontation of complementarities and the quest for a “truly Chinese psychology” was galvanized. It was against this personal history and intellectual-spiritual commitment that I encountered Yang Kuo-Shu in Hong Kong, August 1978, 40 years ago. But, what personal history and intellectual-spiritual

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commitment had I attained by then in my career as contribution to a possible relationship? Michael Harris Bond I arrived in Hong Kong, fresh from a three-year immersion in Japanese society, a period of time spent researching non-verbal behavior at Kwansei Gakuin University near Kobe. Japan offered me a dramatically different ecological, architectural, and culinary world from the Toronto of my youth, but also the bracing, mind-altering experience of confronting a benign and puzzling social and interpersonal world where, fortunately, I was appreciated for my intellectual skills and educational background in Canada and the United States (Bond, 1997). My cross-cultural quest had begun. It was there at Kwansei Gakuin University, supervising research-based theses with Masters’ students in Social Work, that I encountered a culture full bore (Bond, 1997). Puzzles abounded: How does one communicate about research questions, methodology, and statistical analysis in psychology with research-inexperienced graduate students across the divide of Japanese–English language, written as well as spoken (I was illiterate in Japanese when I first arrived)? How does one translate a questionnaire into the Japanese language from English faithfully? How does one write in English about the Japanese participants’ experience in responding to our experimental scenarios fully and sympathetically? How does the experience of growing up Japanese translate itself into our psychological measures of interest? What are the decisive features of Japanese society that contribute to the Japanese socialization experience? How was that experience distinctive from that of other cultural groups? These were daunting questions for a novice to address, and I felt quite adrift at most times, stumbling in the dark. Amidst these deliberations and after three years in Japan, I relocated to Hong Kong where the offer of a full-time job teaching social psychology presented itself. At CUHK, the academic situation was different from the Japanese: Hong Kong was a British Territory under British administration; students were a disciplined, highly motivated, carefully selected 2% of their age cohort, mostly educated in English; the university leadership was keen to develop a bi-cultural, modern university as counterpoint to the long-established University of Hong Kong; and a psychology program was to be nurtured to full departmental status under the guidance of CUHK’s Department of Sociology. I had survived living and working

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overseas in Japan and was judged to be a safe investment as an initial hire to help build the nascent program in psychology. So, I began my journey into the heart-mind of Chinese culture. But the cultural challenges remained—I had to develop a research program using Hong Kong Chinese participants (called “subjects” then!) and teach my Hong Kong-born students (no international students in the 1970s!) adequately in order to gain tenure (called “substantiation” in British English!). Importantly, the decision about my tenure that was to be made by mostly Hong Kong-born, senior faculty. How was I to successfully navigate this foreign cultural environment successfully? Who were the Chinese people? Were the Hong Kong Chinese distinctive in certain psychological ways? How were they socialized? How had their economic and political histories shaped their priorities in their values, their beliefs, and their practices? Fortunately, I thought, I could work in English and there was a copious literature on Chinese history, philosophy, anthropology, and sociology that I could read, albeit little, indeed almost none, on psychology. I wanted to try and fill that knowledge gap concerning the psychology of the Chinese people as a survival strategy in this job and for my career.

Discovering Yuan Fen (緣份) with Yang Kuo-Shu in 1978--1979 Enter the dragon—The Sociology Department hired Yang Kuo-Shu as a Senior Lecturer to spearhead the development of the Psychology Section at CUHK to departmental status. As recounted in Yang (1997), Kuo-Shu accepted this offer in part to further the development of a Chinese psychology that was respectful of the Chinese experience. Would Hong Kong academics be sympathetic to his emerging agenda for the Sinicization of psychology and the other social sciences? We were natural allies—I was an eager, coltish learner of “things Chinese”; Kuo-Shu was a knowledgeable but critical guide, insistent on crafting an accurate portrayal of Chinese psychological processes, of “getting it right.” (Coincidentally, I encountered Kuo-Shu when I was 34, at the same age as he had encountered America 12 years earlier! As fellow monkeys, we seemed to track one another in 12-year cycles.) As evidenced in this photograph taken during one of our many conversations, he was positive, expressive, and fully engaged, as we explored our various topics of emerging interest (Fig. 2.1).

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Fig. 2.1 Professor Kuo-Shu Yang in Hong Kong, November 1979 (Taken by the chapter author)

Shortly after Kuo-Shu’s arrival, I showed him a paper I had written up describing an experiment about-face (面子), a topic of keen interest on my part after reading Hu (1944) and Lin (1935). He read it over, and the next day said, “Interesting experiment, Mike, but you haven’t quite captured the Chinese concept of face.” This was a deliberate understatement, uttered in a typically gracious Chinese way, but I got the message. Thereafter, we spent considerable conversation time ensuring that our empirical work was responsive and sensitive to the Chinese experience around the various topics we explored together. (That early paper was reworked and published later as Bond and Lee, 1981.) The bilingual-bicultural experience. Kuo-Shu was fascinated by the experience of modernization as it played itself out in Chinese experience and had already begun an extensive study of the two personality dimensions of Traditionality and Modernity as they worked their way into contemporary Chinese social reality (see Yang, 1986, 1988). Hong Kong was an ideal “laboratory” for such explorations, especially because our research participants at that time were university students trained at high school mostly in the English language using a modified British curriculum.

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To exploit these environmental affordances and to meet our demands for realism, Kuo-Shu and I designed an experiment to assess CUHK students’ choice of a modern versus traditional attitudes in a forced-choice paradigm (Yang & Bond, 1980). Being social psychologists, we additionally varied the questionnaire language of English or Chinese and administered the questionnaires to our participants individually with Kuo-Shu, myself, an American colleague, or a Cantonese staff member acting as experimenters. So, participants confronted both language differences and ethnic-cultural differences in the experimental encounter. Using current parlance, we were “priming” our Hong Kong Chinese students with both written and personal primes for Chinese or Western culture. To our surprise, our Hong Kong Chinese participants chose more traditional attitudes when these choices were presented in the English language and by Western experimenters. These findings suggested that confronting out-group social cues, language, and out-group representatives—experimenters speaking in their associated languages—heightened our respondents’ sense of cultural identity and sharpened the cultural boundaries that they drew, a response we termed “ethnic affirmation.” But, not always: some attitude pairs of the 20 used showed reverse effects across languages and the four experimenters each produced different degrees of ethnic affirmation. Exploring the rationale for such discrepancies led us, together (Bond & Yang, 1982), and me separately (Bond & Cheung, 1984; King & Bond, 1985; Pierson & Bond, 1982), to explore how both language and ethnicity of interactant impacts upon my Hong Kong research participants. Our studies done together were all written up and eventually published after Kuo-Shu returned to Taiwan in 1979. Our formative year together had laid the groundwork of mutual trust in one another’s competence as social scientists and our reliability as collaborators. We had experienced many productive conversations that exploited our different cultural backgrounds to produce fascinating research on the bi-cultural experience. I now realize that our magical year of relationship-building had set a standard for me in developing and sustaining extended and vibrant collaborations with other Chinese colleagues, like Kwok Leung, Virginia Kwan, and Sylvia Chen Xiao-Hwa. Call it serendipity or yuan-fen (緣份), I am grateful.

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Our Years Apart but Together After 1978--1979 Kuo-Shu Yang—Going Deeper into the Chinese Experience During his year at CUHK, Kuo-Shu had gathered a group of like-minded colleagues “…to exchange ideas and discuss issues about the Sinicisation of research in social and behavioral sciences in Chinese societies” (1997, p. 66). Before he returned to Taiwan, …a consensus was reached among us that a Sinicisation movement was needed not only but also in Hong Kong and that the Institute of Ethnology, Academia Sinica should take the responsibility to organize an interdisciplinary conference on the Sinicisation of research into the social and behavioral sciences in Chinese societies in the near future. (ibid.)

Promoting this development was to occupy Kuo-Shu’s attention, energy, and colleagueships throughout the rest of his career; he was its center of gravity and prime mover. In time, Kuo-Shu came to realize the danger that lurked in using the term, “Sinicization.” So, he changed the term to “indigenization” because of the incendiary, nationalistic overtones of the intellectual movement he was spearheading. As he wrote in 1997, “…the term, ‘indigenisation’ is much more neutral and broader in its denotative and connotative meanings than ‘Sinicisation’ with the latter having the suggestion of Sinocentrism” (p. 68). He wanted to keep political debate separate from academic discourse. A second refinement in Kuo-Shu’s thinking emerged out of his careerlong interest in how contemporary Chinese people accommodated themselves to the forces of modernization (see Yang, 1996). As a sensitive social observer, he realized that this accommodation would take on different forms in the various parts of the Chinese diaspora: …up to 1988, the three major Chinese societies Taiwan, Hong Kong, and mainland China, separated for more than forty years, have already developed their own respective political, economic, social, and cultural characteristics on the basis of the core Chinese culture during the process of social change induced by modernization. (p. 68)

This recognition of distinctive lines of development by different Chinese polities, including Singapore, was reinforced in part by the mapping of

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different Chinese societies in multi-cultural studies of which Kuo-Shu had participated throughout his career, e.g., Chinese Culture Connection (1987). There was no Chinese monolith in terms of citizen characteristics, be it in terms of their values (Bond, 1988) or their social axioms (Leung et al., 2002) or their preferences for mate characteristics (Buss et al., 1990) or their decision-making styles (Mann et al., 1998) or their pace of life (Levine & Norenzayan, 1999), and so forth. Chinese societies and their member’s psychological and behavioral development responded differently to the push of modernization on the basis of their different ecologies and histories. There was, however, a “core Chinese culture” and the functional requirements of modern economies underpinning this differential development at both the societal and psychological levels (Yang, 1996). That core could be used to explain the similarities that emerged; the different ecologies, separate histories, and variable exposure to modernizing influences could be used to explain the divergence across Chinese polities. This resolution could easily have led Kuo-Shu toward contributing toward the development of a multi-cultural, “universal” psychology by elaborating the Berry “eco-cultural model” (Berry, Poortinga, Segall, & Dasen, 1992) and applying those eco-cultural indices to the psychological level (see Bond, 2018). But no. Kuo-Shu’s “Harvard experience” intervened. There, at the Seminar on Personality in China, Japan, and India hosted by Arthur Kleinman, he was asked by Jerome Kagan this perspective-altering question: “What kind of psychology would have been developed by Chinese psychologists if there had not been any Western psychology?” (Yang, 1997, p. 69) He was “shocked” by this invitation to reimagine the intellectual history of psychology. As Kuo-Shu reflects, …Kagan’s question gave me a chance to look more closely and squarely at the naked reality that little was left in Westernized Chinese psychology after those elements that had been borrowed from, or influenced by, Western psychology were taken away. I began to realize that North American psychology, the most developed in the world, was an endogenous kind of indigenous psychology in the sense that its major concepts, theories, methods, and findings have originally and spontaneously evolved…mostly from the cultural and social-philosophical matrix of the American society. (p. 69)

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Following this foundational insight to its obvious conclusion, Kuo-Shu reasoned, If American psychologists could have their own indigenous psychology, why did not we Chinese psychologists have our own indigenous psychology? American indigenous psychology had made its contribution to global psychology why should not Chinese indigenous psychology do so in the future? (p. 69)

To create a truly global psychology, Kuo-Shu proposed that, “…local psychologists in various societies should develop their own indigenous psychologies, which would then be integrated to form a genuine global psychology” (p. 70). Eager to fill in the Chinese contribution to that global psychology, Kuo-Shu returned from the United States to Taiwan in August 1988, “with the new dream of developing a Chinese indigenous psychology” (Yang, 1997, p. 70). Refocused, he “set out to do anything I thought beneficial to the development of a Chinese indigenous psychology” (ibid.). Kuo-Shu immediately began writing manifestos for his newly discovered mission. Characteristically rallying like-spirited social support, Kuo-Shu reports that subsequently, My colleagues and I have speeded up the tempo of promoting Chinese indigenous psychology with an indigenized research strategy…In such a strategy or paradigm, the concepts, theory and method adopted have to be so developed or devised that they can accurately reveal, or effectively reconstruct, Chinese psychological and behavioral processes, mechanisms, and patterns closely embedded in the political, economic, cultural, and historical context of a Chinese society. (pp. 70–71)

These activities included hosting local meetings and international conferences on indigenization, promoting the supervision of research by many scholars on indigenous themes, editing collections of papers in Chinese on these topics, writing himself on specific indigenous topics (e.g., Yang & Ho, 1988), eventually taking his case for indigenizing to an international audience in English (Yang, 1997, 1999, 2000, 2006, 2012). Assessing his progress up to 1997, Kuo-Shu concluded, …we have made considerable progress not only in the clarification of conceptual and methodological issues concerning the indigenisation (including

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Sinicisation) of psychological research but also in the indigenous study of theoretical and empirical topics in about thirty research areas including…. (p. 73)

He then lists an encyclopedia of over 20 topics, and I can only marvel, breathless at this litany of achievement. Much more was to follow from this unique movement, as Kuo-Shu continued to promote the refinement and elaboration of Chinese indigenous psychology for the rest of his life. Improving on Yang and Bond (1990). I can detect Kuo-Shu’s push to sharpen indigenous research in his attempt to more fully indigenize our final study (Yang & Bond, 1990). We had long discussed the value of developing instruments for measuring personality from an indigenous Chinese perspective and then comparing results obtained from such locally responsive measures with those developed from the “innocently indigenous,” Western perspective. In that work, we found that, “Of the 5 Chinese factors, 4 could be adequately explained by varying combinations of the 5 imported factors” (Yang & Bond, 1990, p. 1187). Although there was considerable overlap in the results produced, the cultural provenance of the instrument made some difference in the results obtained; there was an elusive fifth factor of Chinese personality perception that was not encompassed by the imported version of the supposedly universal Big Five model derived from Western research. Kuo-Shu was provoked by this feature of our findings. He then mobilized a quest to discover the fuller portrayal of Chinese personal perception: what was the elusive Chinese fifth factor, and were there other indigenous Chinese factors? In the last fifteen years or so, a few psychologists with an indigenous perspective from the three major culturally Chinese societies have begun to question the universality assumption seriously, and have embarked upon identification of basic Chinese indigenous personality dimensions and development of new indigenized tests and inventories to measure them. (Yang, 2006, p. 292)

Tenacious in pursuit of the fullest Chinese representation, Kuo-Shu orchestrated an extensive series of studies in Taiwan over the next fifteen years. Based on their results, he concluded, “These findings clearly revealed that while three of the basic personality factors of the American

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Big Five do have more or less corresponding factors in the Chinese Big Seven, three Chinese factors are beyond the coverage of the American models” (Yang, 2006, pp. 295–296). This diligent unearthing of three distinctive Chinese dimensions of personality confirmed Kuo-Shu in his belief that the Chinese experience was different when exposed by indigenous rather than by imported instruments. He then set out to examine the cultural rationale for these distinctive three dimensions. He began with this assessment of Western approaches to the study of personality by claiming that, “Traditionally, psychometrically oriented personality psychologists, especially those in Euro-American societies, have limited their search for basic personality dimensions to the domain of temperamental traits in a broad sense, usually excluding the domain of culture-specific, complex psychological syndromes” (Yang, 2006, p. 298). This focus on individual temperament arose from the individualistic bias informing the worldview of Western psychologists (Sampson, 2000). Relating these judgments to his research findings that eight factors underpinned Chinese personality perception, Kuo-Shu continued, …most temperamental traits (e.g., Competence vs. Impotence, Extraversion vs. Introversion, Stable vs. Unstable) identified by one or more of the three research programs in search for basic Chinese personality dimensions may be classified as individual-oriented personality constructs. Among the social-oriented constructs identified by F. M. Cheung et al. (1996), some (e.g., Harmony, Ren Qing Orientation) may be classified as relationship-oriented constructs, some (e.g., Family Orientation, Leadership) as group-oriented constructs, and others (e.g., Face, Ah-Q Attitude) as other-oriented constructs…. While psychologists in individualist cultures have been more interested in identifying and measuring personal-oriented personality attributes, indigenous-oriented psychologists in collectivist cultures have been more interested in identifying and measuring social-oriented ones. (ibid., pp. 298–299)

This is a brilliant integration of the research traditions generated out of the individualistic and the collectivistic worldviews! It provides an answer to Kagan’s provocative question about what a psychology developed out of Chinese cultural traditions would look like—in essence, we would have a more social personality psychology, informed by the interpersonal awareness of connectedness and relationality that underpin our

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lives together anywhere on this planet. A working definition of personality would be enlarged and socialized thus, personality is a kind of structural system resulting from a person’s continuous effort to maintain a uniform, stable, and beneficial psychological stability of dynamic equilibrium involving both personal-internal and socialrelational factors in daily life. The social-relational aspects of personality, just as those of jen, are gradually structured through a person’s transactions with other persons separately or collectively in his or her specific sociocultural environment…a normal personality representing the most optimal level of psychic and social-relational equilibrium will allow the person to adjust to the sociocultural environment more easily and smoothly, without spending too much time and energy on trial-and-error. (Yang, 2006, pp. 309–310)

Such an expanded understanding of personality inspires the study of personality processes that lead to more interpersonally relevant outcomes in social life. Inevitably then and under Kuo-Shu’s charismatic leadership, …indigenous-oriented Chinese psychologists have made considerable effort to assess relational-oriented personality constructs. Indigenized scales and inventories have been developed for the measurement of such constructs as interpersonal harmony, relational determinism, yuan (predestined relational affinity), xiaodao (filial piety), marital enqing (grateful love or affection). (ibid., p. 299)

This vigorous exploration of indigenous emphases continues today in the work of Kuo-Shu’s many students. It arises out of his dogged pursuit of a truer representation of the Chinese experience in the study of personality. Michael Harris Bond—Going Wider from the Chinese Experience During our year as next-door office mates from 1978 to 1979, Kuo-Shu and I had discussed the Sinicization of social-personality psychology and how to realize research studies that would more sensitively reflect and “ring true” to the Chinese experience. Thereafter, we continued on our intellectual-academic trajectories, informed by the heritage of our relationship. As documented above, Kuo-Shu went deeper, shepherding the growth of indigenous Chinese psychology, indeed setting a prime example for doing an indigenous psychology of any cultural group’s experience

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(Yang, 2012); I went wider, trying to integrate the Chinese worldview into a multi-cultural perspective. There were three major lines of development in my subsequent development as a cross-cultural social psychologist that I can trace as emerging from my magical year working so closely with Kuo-Shu. Through our collaborations and his manner throughout our exchanges, he educated me in the process of working effectively with Chinese scholars and realigned my focus in research, i.e., Kuo-Shu influenced me in the process of doing psychology with Chinese psychologists and in the content of what our different approaches were to reveal. A mentee of process considerations. I came to recognize that if I wanted to reflect “the Chinese experience” more fully in my research and other writing, I had to ensure that a Chinese “voice” was integrated with mine. Doing so required that I craft a “relational space” with each of my Chinese colleagues where they perceived that their Chinese voice was encouraged within our working relationship. I soon realized that these relationships had to be developed out of Chinese dynamics surrounding hierarchy. Confucius had answered the question, “Master, how shall the state be governed?”, with the guiding logic that, “The king must be king, and the subject must be subject.” Accordingly, I began asking the question in my interactions, “Who was I with my Chinese other?” I intuited that I had to know my proper place in these collegial collaborations, and then help craft a working harmony resulting in a mutually beneficial output. In a few of these working relationships I was the obvious junior, e.g., King and Bond (1985), Yang and Bond (1990); in most, I was the obvious senior, given that I was collaborating with my students on my personal interests and they were my juniors, e.g., Bond and Cheung (1984), Bond and Lai (1986). But, having collaborated attentively with Kuo-Shu, I had learned to grant my students pride of place because they so frequently made the major contribution to our intellectual-academic production, e.g., Leung and Bond (1984), Kwan, Bond, and Singelis (1997), Chen and Bond (2010). I actively worked toward “finding my place” in the inevitable relational hierarchy in relationships, a hierarchy to which Chinese -socialized persons are especially sensitive (Bond, 1996). Of course, the cultural details for enacting benevolence and fairness differ somewhat (Huang, 2012), and I strove to get these details “right” in all my subsequent relationships with Chinese colleagues.

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Explaining bi-cultural differences by personality. I graduated as a social psychologist with a Ph.D. who was deeply skeptical about the study of personality. I had learned about personality at Stanford under Walter Mischel, reading the page proofs for his forthcoming assault on personality and its measurement (Mischel, 1968). Thereafter, I became committed to conducting experiments where I manipulated features of the socialinterpersonal situation to assess their effects on behaviors of interest, e.g., Bond (1972); personality factors were irrelevant. Then I met Kuo-Shu and began taking upon myself the challenge of explaining Chinese social behavior more faithfully. Well before our encounter, I had been noticing a “strangeness” to Chinese social behavior and was puzzled about how to make sense of my observations (see e.g., Bond, 1979). Kuo-Shu’s position, of course, was that any attempt to understand and explain Chinese social behavior required some consideration of the special characteristics of the Chinese experience that had left their imprint on Chinese dispositions and temperament. Particularly important to him at the time was his fascination about the Chinese encounter with modernity, and his development of a personality measure for assessing Chinese Traditionality-Modernity (Yang, 1996). One way to explain why Chinese behaved somewhat differently than say, Americans, is to assume that they respond cognitively to the situation confronting them somewhat differently. So, for example, Hong Kong Chinese might react somewhat differently to the level of performance or maintenance inputs of a partner doing a task. They would then reward their partner somewhat differently than would the Americans, as indeed we found (Bond, Leung, & Wan, 1982; Leung & Bond, 1984). This approach was typically of social psychology at that time, because it relies on measuring the participant’s cognitive reaction to a social psychological situation, then correlating that reaction to the psychological outcome of interest. Cultural differences in that outcome of interest arise because of somewhat different cognitive reactions to the same situation. But, socialcognitive responses were personality-by-a-different-name. In explaining such bi-cultural comparisons, I was focusing on cultural differences in personality to “unpackage” cultural differences in social behavior. As a social psychologist, I continued doing so, e.g., Bond, Wan, Leung, and Giacalone (1985). The differences we observed were then “explained” by some reference to the putative “collectivism” of Chinese persons, who were claimed to be more moderate or more authoritarian in their responses to interpersonal situations than Americans. This mode of

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reasoning was consistent with Kuo-Shu’s conclusion about cultural collectivism that, “…social-relational contexts in collectivist cultures are highly complicated, and a person functioning in such a culture tends to have highly complicated daily experiences that finally lead to the formation of complicated dispositional patterns for better adjustment in such a culture” (2006, p. 304). We were providing plausible explanations for our observed differences in social responding. But, my collaborators and I had not directly measured these putative dispositional differences between Hong Kongese and Americans in our research, so we could not be sure of our explanations for the observed differences in any social behavior, be it allocation of reward, or judgments of a superior’s “aggressiveness” in criticizing a subordinate. It took me more than a decade to begin doing so (Kwan et al., 1997). Thereafter, my colleagues and I would continue doing so, up to the present (Chen et al., 2017). In selecting which dispositional concepts of personality to use to unpackage these bi-cultural differences, we would refer to Kuo-Shu’s warning that the appropriate personality constructs to use may be more socially oriented: …social-oriented constructs, unlike the individual-oriented ones, are apparently highly contextualized in interpersonal relationships, important groups, or non-specific others. Personality psychologists in individualist cultures have devoted much of their time and energy to studying individual-oriented dispositions. Psychologists in collectivist cultures should put more effort into studying social-oriented syndromes, which have long been neglected by non-Western psychologists who conduct research from a Westernized perspective. (2006, p. 304)

Accordingly, we would use more “collectivist, social-oriented” constructs, like interdependent self-construal (Kwan et al., 1997; Singelis, Bond, Sharkey, & Lai, 1999), in our cross-cultural work to more adequately tap into “the Chinese experience.” Kuo-Shu’s guidance shaped my attempts to explain the results of my cross-cultural work with Chinese persons by using socially oriented personality dispositions. Going multi-cultural as a social psychologist. Kuo-Shu collected data for the Taiwanese contribution to the 22-society study of Chinese values (Bond, 1988). Indeed, it was his early thinking about the slavishness to Western psychology evident in prior Chinese studies of value and

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his chapter on Chinese personality (Yang, 1986) that had inspired the development of the Chinese Value Survey (Chinese Culture Connection, 1987). Part of what emerged from that 22-nation comparison was the realization that persons in different Chinese societies—Hong Kong, Singapore, and Taiwan (China came later)—were somewhat different from one another in their value profiles. This discovery was explainable by applying Kuo-Shu’s thinking about differential responses of these Chinese societies to the forces of modernization, as outlined in Yang (1988, 1996). I looked more widely at the spread of national responses across the range of 22 national samples, wondering about the full range of societal characteristics had led to the national profiles revealed. What were the ecological, historical, economic, and institutional factors at play? What socialization processes were assembled in these various societies to produce the human capital required to make that society function, sustain and extend itself? We psychologists were focusing on the end-point of these converging factors when we examined the different patterns of values (Bond, 1988), beliefs (Bond et al., 2004), and norms (e.g., Gelfand

Fig. 2.2 Our last chat in Taipei, Taiwan, June 2012 (Taken by the chapter author)

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et al., 2011) endorsed by persons in those societies. But, what was their origin? If one was to travel across multiple cultures psychologically, that became The Question, one that continues to intrigue me (Bond, 2018). So, over time I came to journey more widely across cultural systems; Kuo-Shu came to journey more deeply into Chinese culture. We were both fascinated by the endless mystery and enchantment of our respective quests, both arising from our shared attempt to explain “the Chinese experience.” In our separate ways, we have both contributed toward promoting “a more global psychology” (Fig. 2.2). This photo was taken during my last academic conversation with KuoShu, fully 34 years since we began our explorations into “the Chinese experience.” We were sitting together in the foyer outside the conference hall at the Academia Sinica, chatting after lunch about the state of the indigenous psychology movement. The similarities with my earlier photos of Kuo-Shu are striking—as always, he is animated and engaged,

Fig. 2.3 Fragment from a poem by Bo Wang (Tang Dynasty)

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shaping some line of argument with his hands, weaving some new ideathreads into a persuasive pattern. What new construct might emerge, leading to what new hypothesis connecting that construct to what established constructs, leading to what larger portrayal of “the Chinese experience”? What new intellectual tapestry would Kuo-Shu weave? Kuo-Shu clarified his mission as a Chinese psychologist in the 1970s. Thereafter, he stayed true. I met Kuo-Shu during those 1970s and, by collaborating with him, discovered my mission as a cross-cultural psychologist. I, too, hope to stay true. He is gone now, but I remain, holding his inspiration close (Fig. 2.3).

References Berry, J. W., Poortinga, H. H., Segall, M. H., & Dasen, P. R. (1992). Crosscultural psychology: Research and applications. New York, NY: Cambridge University Press. Bond, M. H. (1972). The effect of an impression set on subsequent behavior. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 24, 301–305. Bond, M. H. (1979). Winning either way: The effect of anticipating a competitive interaction on person perception. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 5, 316–319. Bond, M. H. (1988). Finding universal dimensions of individual variation in multi-cultural studies of value. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 55, 1009–1015. Bond, M. H. (1996). Chinese values. In M. H. Bond (Ed.), The handbook of Chinese psychology (pp. 208–226). Hong Kong, China: Oxford University Press. Bond, M. H. (1997). Two decades of chasing the dragon: A Canadian psychologist assesses his career in Hong Kong. In M. H. Bond (Ed.), Working at the interface of cultures: 18 lives in social science (pp. 179–190). London, England: Routledge. Bond, M. H. (2018). Traveling from the past into the future of cross-cultural psychology: A personal-scientific journey. In D. Matsumoto & H. C. Hwang (Eds.), Oxford handbook of culture and psychology (2nd ed., pp. 45–67). New York, NY: Oxford University Press. Bond, M. H., & Cheung, M. K. (1984). Experimenter language choice and ethnic affirmation by Chinese trilinguals in Hong Kong. International Journal of Intercultural Relations, 8, 347–356. Bond, M. H., & Lai, T. M. (1986). Embarrassment and code-switching. Journal of Social Psychology, 126, 179–186.

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Bond, M. H., & Lee, P. W. H. (1981). Face-saving in Chinese culture: A discussion and experimental study of Hong Kong students. In A. King & R. Lee (Eds.), Social life and development in Hong Kong (pp. 288–305). Hong Kong, China: Chinese University Press. Bond, M. H., Leung, K., Au, A., Tong, K. K., De Carrasquel, S. R., Murakami, F., … Boen, F. (2004). Culture-level dimensions of social axioms and their correlates across 41 cultures. Journal of Cross-Cultural Psychology, 35, 548– 570. Bond, M. H., Leung, K., & Wan, K. C. (1982). How does cultural collectivism operate? The impact of task and maintenance contributions on reward allocation. Journal of Cross-Cultural Psychology, 13, 186–200. Bond, M. H., Wan, W. C., Leung, K., & Giacalone, R. (1985). How are responses to verbal insult related to cultural collectivism and power distance? Journal of Cross-Cultural Psychology, 16, 111–127. Bond, M. H., & Yang, K. S. (1982). Ethnic affirmation versus cross-cultural accommodation: The variable impact of questionnaire language on Chinese bilinguals in Hong Kong. Journal of Cross-Cultural Psychology, 13, 169–185. Buss, D. M., Abbott, M., Angleitner, A., Asherian, A., Biaggio, A., BlancoVillasenor, A., … Ekehammar, B. (1990). International preferences in selecting mates: A study of 37 cultures. Journal of Cross-Cultural Psychology, 21, 5–47. Chen, S.-X., & Bond, M. H. (2010). Two languages, two personalities? Examining language effects on the expression of personality in a bilingual context. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 36, 1514–1528. Chen, S.-X., Ng, J. C. K., Buchtel, E. E., Guan, Y., Deng, H., & Bond, M. H. (2017). The added value of worldviews over self-views: Predicting modest behavior in Eastern and Western cultures. British Journal of Social Psychology, 56, 723–749. Chinese Culture Connection. (1987). Chinese values and the search for culturefree dimensions of culture. Journal of Cross-Cultural Psychology, 18, 143–164. Dawson, R. (1978). The Chinese experience. London, England: Weidenfeld & Nicolson. Gelfand, M. J., Raver, J. L., Nishii, L., Leslie, L. M., Lun, J., Lim, B. C., … & Yamaguchi, S. (2011). Differences between tight and loose cultures: A 33-nation study. Science, 332, 1100–1104. Hu, H.-C. (1944). The Chinese concepts of “face”. American Anthropologist, 46, 45–64. Huang, X. (2012). The romance of motivational leadership: How do Chinese leaders motivate employees? In X. Huang & M. H. Bond (Eds.), Handbook of Chinese organizational behavior: Integrating theory, research and practice (pp. 184–208). Cheltenham, England: Edward Elgar.

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King, A. Y. C., & Bond, M. H. (1985). The confucian paradigm of man. In W. S. Tseng & D. Y. H. Wu (Eds.), Chinese culture and mental health: An overview (pp. 29–45). Orlando, FL: Academic Press. Kwan, V. S. Y., Bond, M. H., & Singelis, T. M. (1997). Pancultural explanations for life satisfaction: Adding relationship harmony to self-esteem. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 73, 1038–1051. Leung, K., & Bond, M. H. (1984). The impact of cultural collectivism on reward allocation. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 47, 793–804. Leung, K., Bond, M. H., de Carrasquel, S. H., Muñoz, C., Hernández, M., Murakami, F., … Singelis, T. M. (2002). Social axioms: The search for universal dimensions of general beliefs about how the world functions. Journal of Cross-Cultural Psychology, 33, 286–302. Levine, R. V., & Norenzayan, A. (1999). The pace of life in 31 countries. Journal of Cross-Cultural Psychology, 30, 178–205. Lin, Y.-T. (1935). My country and my people. New York, NY: Reynal & Hitchcock. Mann, L., Radford, M., Burnett, P., Ford, S., Bond, M., Leung, K., … Yang, K. S. (1998). Cross-cultural differences in self-reported decision-making style and confidence. International Journal of Psychology, 33, 325–335. Mischel, W. (1968). Personality and assessment. New York, NY: Wiley. Pierson, H. D., & Bond, M. H. (1982). How do Chinese bilinguals respond to variations of interviewer language and ethnicity? Journal of Language and Social Psychology, 1, 123–139. Sampson, E. E. (2000). Reinterpreting individualism and collectivism: Their religious roots and monologic versus dialogic person–other relationship. American Psychologist, 55(12), 1425–1432. Singelis, T. M., Bond, M. H., Sharkey, W. F., & Lai, C. S. Y. (1999). Unpackaging culture’s influence on self-esteem and embarrassability: The role of selfconstruals. Journal of Cross-Cultural Psychology, 30, 315–341. Yang, K.-S. (1986). Chinese personality and its change. In M. H. Bond (Ed.), The psychology of the Chinese people (pp. 106–170). New York, NY: Oxford University Press. Yang, K.-S. (1988). Will societal modernization eventually eliminate crosscultural psychological differences? In M. H. Bond (Ed.), The cross-cultural challenge to social psychology (pp. 67–85). Newbury Park, CA: Sage. Yang, K.-S. (1996). Psychological transformation of the Chinese people as a result of societal modernization. In M. H. Bond (Ed.), The handbook of Chinese psychology (pp. 479–498). New York, NY: Oxford University Press. Yang, K.-S. (1997). Indigenizing Westernized Chinese psychology. In M. H. Bond (Ed.), Working at the interface of cultures: Eighteen lives in social science (pp. 62–76). London, England: Routledge.

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Yang, K.-S. (1999). Towards an indigenous Chinese psychology: A selective review of methodological, theoretical, and empirical accomplishments. Chinese Journal of Psychology, 41, 181–211. Yang, K.-S. (2000). Monocultural and cross-cultural indigenous approaches: The royal road to the development of a balanced global human psychology. Asian Journal of Social Psychology, 3, 241–264. Yang, K.-S. (2006). Indigenous personality research: The Chinese case. In U. Kim, K.-S. Yang, & K.-K. Hwang (Eds.), Indigenous and cultural psychology: Understanding people in context (pp. 285–314). New York, NY: Springer. https://doi.org/10.1007/0-387-28662-4_13. Yang, K.-S. (2012). Indigenous psychology, Westernized psychology, and indigenized psychology: A non-Western psychologist’s view. Chang Gung Journal of Humanities and Social Sciences, 5(1), 1–32. Yang, K.-S., & Bond, M. H. (1980). Ethnic affirmation by Chinese bilinguals. Journal of Cross-Cultural Psychology, 11, 411–425. Yang, K.-S., & Bond, M. H. (1990). Exploring implicit personality theories with indigenous or imported constructs: The Chinese case. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 58, 1087–1095. Yang, K.-S., & Ho, Y.-F. (1988). The role of yuan in Chinese social life: A conceptual and empirical analysis. In A. C. Paranjpe, D. H. F. Ho, & R. W. Rieber (Eds.), Asian contributions to psychology (pp. 263–281). New York, NY: Praeger.

CHAPTER 3

Pioneer of Chinese Indigenous Psychology: Prof. Kuo-Shu Yang Kuang-Hui Yeh

Prologue Professor Yang received his bachelor’s degree from National Taiwan University and began his academic career as a teaching assistant in 1959. For the next five decades, he dedicated his life to developing the field of psychology. The longevity of his career may seem unimaginable and unachievable for young scholars today. However, even more impressive is his perseverance throughout his entire career in promoting the development of Chinese psychology. He fostered mutual support and growth among Asian psychologies and emphasized the complementarity between Eastern and Western approaches to psychology. Professor Yang also promoted the indigenization of social science by integrating the academic communities of contemporary Chinese societies. In this memorial essay, I briefly review the five phases of Professor Yang’s career, and introduce

K.-H. Yeh (B) Institute of Ethnology, Academia Sinica, Taipei, Taiwan e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s) 2020 L. Sundararajan et al. (eds.), Global Psychology from Indigenous Perspectives, Palgrave Studies in Indigenous Psychology, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-35125-0_3

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Professor Yang’s four major contributions to Chinese psychology, especially in the field of social and personality psychology, as well as his deep concern for the future of Asian psychology and global psychology.

The Five Phases of Professor Yang’s Academic Career According to Professor Yang, his teaching and research work within the field of psychology can be categorized into five phases: exploration, imitation, suspicion, transformation, and convergence. The most obvious characteristic of his scholarship throughout his career was his continued willingness to engage in critical reflection on himself and his own research. This rigorous scholarship not only facilitated his originality in theory construction, but also guided research trends in the field of Chinese psychology. The Exploration Phase (1959–1966) During his exploration phase, Professor Yang had only a rough idea of what psychology is and had still not determined which specific subfield of psychology he would devote himself to. He aspired to help his people and to reform Taiwanese society through the application of psychological knowledge. At that time, his understanding of social problems and their possible solutions was superficial. His research during this period covered a wide range of topics, including comparative psychology, learning psychology, experimental/cognitive psychology, personality psychology, and social psychology. It lacked a clear focus. He decided to improve his knowledge and capacity for the social reform by studying abroad. The Imitation Phase (1967–1973) Professor Yang received a grant from the National Science Council of Taiwan (now the Ministry of Science and Technology) and went to the United States for further education in 1966. He took only three years to obtain a Ph.D. at the University of Illinois, and then returned to Taiwan to join the faculty at National Taiwan University. Professor Yang built on what he had learned abroad to publish numerous papers investigating the psychological characteristics of Chinese people. However, the concepts, theoretical frameworks, methodology, and measurement he applied

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in these “Chinese national character” studies were limited to the mainstream research paradigm of Western psychology. In other words, at that time his studies of Chinese psychology entailed testing Western theories in a Chinese society. The interpretation of similarities or differences in psychological functioning in the Chinese samples completely depended on Western theories and findings, which were treated as the baseline for comparison, or as the ideal model, for all societies. In the process of imitating and duplicating the Western psychology research paradigm, Professor Yang began to reflect critically on the values and implications of his own studies. He began to doubt whether psychological knowledge of Chinese people established in this way could achieve the goal of helping Taiwanese people and improving society. The Suspicious Phase (1974–1980) Professor Yang next entered a phase in which he began to suspect that there were problems inherent in his past research using a Western paradigm. In addition to questioning the wisdom of transplanting Western theories and knowledge to a Chinese society, he realized that researchers who adopted this approach often unconsciously repressed their own point of view in order to fit in with the paradigm of Western mainstream psychology. Professor Yang became aware of a cognitive dissonance with the Western approach, which required reforming the understanding of Chinese society to intentionally ignore the influence of socio-cultural factors on individual psychological functioning and behavior. Professor Yang also recognized that the academic atmosphere in the field of psychology in the 70s in Taiwan was generally dominated by American experimental psychology. He did not know how to articulate his own doubts and questions in a way that the psychological community in Taiwan could accept. However, two academic experiences during this period became a turning point in his career development. These two experiences both involved interdisciplinary interaction and collaboration: one was his joint appointment fellowship at the Institute of Ethnology at Academia Sinica in Taiwan in 1973; the other was his visiting fellowship in the department of sociology at the Chinese University of Hong Kong (CUHK) from 1978 to 1979. During his visit, Professor Yang was responsible for planning how to establish a department of psychology at CUHK. The faculty at both of his fellowships consisted

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of scholars with a background in anthropology and sociology. Although at the time these two disciplines were also heavily dependent on a Western research paradigm, in contrast to psychology their research focus put much greater emphasis on the influences of socio-cultural contextual factors. Professor Yang’s argument for the indigenization of psychology was acceptable to these anthropology and sociology scholars. Professor Yang organized many seminars with anthropologists (such as the late Professors Yih-Yuan Li and Chien Chiao) and sociologists (such as Professors Yeo-Chi Kim and Chung-I Wen) from Confucian societies to discuss the methodological issues of indigenization. In 1980, Professor Yang held a conference on the indigenization of social and behavioral science research in Chinese societies. The conference papers were published the next year as a book entitled The Sinicization of Social and Behavioral Science Research (社會及行為科學研究的中國化) (Yang & Wen, 1982). The Transformation Phase (1981–1991) After the book was published, Professor Yang recognized that he had found a clear direction for proceeding with his research in Chinese psychology. Consequently, he proposed that local researchers adopt an indigenous approach to research on the psychology of Chinese people instead of transplanting Western mainstream psychology theories. The key feature of his indigenous approach to research was his emphasis on including consideration of the socio-cultural conditions in psychological studies. Specifically, an indigenous approach to research emphasizes putting the psychological phenomenon of interest back into the historic socio-cultural context in which it emerged, rather than imposing Western theories on Eastern contexts. At this time, the indigenous approach to research was in its initial stage of development and lacked a comprehensive methodological guideline or strategy for conducting empirical studies. Although the idea of Chinese indigenous psychology was sparking considerable discussion and debate, it was not yet a trend. The Convergence Phase (1992–2018) Beginning in 1991, Professor Yang led a group of scholars and students from Taiwan and Hong Kong in organizing a series of workshops on Chinese social psychology. These workshops were held in China over the course of eight years and were open to any young scholars and graduate

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students in social science. They were aimed at facilitating the reestablishment of the local academic community, and at developing the discipline of social psychology for the Chinese people. In 1993, Professor Yang and some colleagues in Taiwan established and funded an academic journal entitled “Indigenous Psychological Research in Chinese Societies.” It was the first journal to provide opportunities for those who were interested in the indigenization of Chinese social science to share their research findings and experiences with peers. As a result, a research group gradually formed around Professor Yang and this journal. It has yielded remarkable research achievements in Chinese indigenous psychology since the 1990s. These developments converged to form the Taiwan indigenous psychology movement, which has played a significant role in leading the field of psychology in Chinese societies and even the whole of Asia. The enthusiasm and contributions of Professor Yang and his research group gained the attention of the Taiwanese government. For instance, Taiwan’s Ministry of Education and National Science Council selected Professor Yang’s team as one of the most promising research teams in Taiwan. They provided long-term research grants (funded by the Program for Promoting Academic Excellence) from 1999 to 2007. Taiwan’s indigenous psychology movement raised many important and relevant issues in China and Hong Kong, and was recognized by several well-known academic journals such as Asian Journal of Social Psychology, Journal of Cross-Cultural Psychology, and International Journal of Psychology. The credit for most of the progress and expansion of Chinese indigenous psychology must go to Professor Yang, who always supported and promoted the development of all kinds of indigenous psychologies.

Major Research Achievements Professor Yang’s achievements throughout his academic career can be categorized into four major areas: Chinese characteristics; Chinese indigenization of psychology and social science; individual modernity and traditionality; and the four-part theory of the Chinese self. These four research topics are not independent, but complementary with each other. They can be integrated into a psychological knowledge system consisting of the personality structures and processes of Chinese people, and the methodology of indigenization. The following is a concise overview of Professor Yang’s theoretical positions and the conceptual framework for each of these four topics.

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Research on the National Character of the Chinese Research on Chinese personality and the national character of the Chinese people represents Professor Yang’s early career. It provided a solid foundation for his subsequent work. Initially, Professor Yang thought that the backwardness of Chinese society was due to national character, and that psychological knowledge of the Chinese character might be the best way to solve social problems from their root cause. In Professor Yang’s work, the concept national character meant more than personality traits. It extended to values and common patterns of thinking and behavior. His book entitled The Character of Chinese People, which was coedited with the anthropologist Yih-Yuan Li (Li & Yang, 1972), was the first interdisciplinary monograph on the idea of indigenization. It provided some preliminary empirical findings from his important earlier works. This book also supported and promoted a larger indigenous academic movement in Taiwan. Over the course of his career, Professor Yang subsequently proposed three theories relevant to the topic of Chinese characteristics. In 1981, Professor Yang published in the Journal of Social Psychology his theoretical framework of the Chinese social-oriented self, which contrasts with the individual-oriented self of western culture. From the perspective of both cultural ecology and ecological psychology, Professor Yang linked the distinctive socio-economic features of traditional Chinese society (including intensive agriculture, family’s common property, patrilineal descent, and hierarchical social order) to four functional feature of the Chinese social-oriented self (family, relationships, authority, and other-orientation). Based on this work, Professor Yang’s team also reconceptualized a series of Western constructs (such as self-fulfillment, achievement motivation, etc.) into social-oriented forms. Both his framework and its derived concepts are still being applied today. In 1990, Journal of Personality and Social Psychology published Professor Yang’s theory and empirical examination of the basic dimensions of Chinese personality. His factor analysis of respondents’ evaluations of six different target figures using 150 personality adjectives in Chinese identified five fundamental dimensions of Chinese personality: (1) social orientation/self-centeredness, (2) competence/impotence, (3) expressiveness/conservatism, (4) self-control/impulsiveness, and (5) optimism/neuroticism. These five bipolar factors constituted a raw version of the indigenous Big Five and still required refinement. Thus, a decade later, Professor

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Yang cooperated with Beijing University’s Professor Dengfeng Wang to expand both the adjective pool and the sample sources. They extracted seven fundamental dimensions of Chinese personality from the data: (1) extraversion, (2) industriousness, (3) large-mindedness, (4) otherorientation, (5) competence, (6) agreeableness, and (7) pessimism (for the Taiwan sample) or utilitarianism (for the China sample). Although these results were not completely consistent, Professor Yang pointed out that both the five- and seven-dimension models lacked an obvious oneto-one correspondence with the western Big Five. He concluded that the Western Big Five is not an appropriate framework for characterizing the basic personality of the Chinese social-oriented self. Professor Yang’s seven-dimensional model for Chinese personality not only served as a counterpart to the Big Five, but also reinforced Professor Yang’s path toward indigenous psychology. In 2003 at the Nebraska Symposium on Motivation, Professor Yang proposed a preliminary version of his double-Y model of basic human needs, which revised Maslow’s culture-biased theory of basic human needs and integrated Chinese geneticist Y. Yu’s Y model of gene function. According to Yu, a gene has three basic functions: survival, expression, and transmission. Yu diagrammed these functions with a Y-shaped structure. Arranged on the stem of the Y are Maslow’s physiological needs (excluding sexual needs) and safety needs, which correspond to the gene function of survival. On the left arm of the Y are some significant psychological needs (such as interpersonal and belongingness needs, esteem needs, and the self-actualization need), which are fulfilled by the gene function of expression. On the right arm of the Y are sexual needs, childbearing needs, and parenting needs, which are involved in the gene function of transmission. Professor Yang pointed out that the needs for genetic survival and transmission are universal, but that the need for genetic expression is culture-bound. He indicated that the genetic expression arm of the Y further formed two branches due to specific socio-cultural contextual influences. Professor Yang constructed two separate Y models with different ways of fulfilling important psychological needs (i.e., genetic expression functions), one for people in collectivist cultures and the other for those in individualist ones. The double-Y model as a whole represents a systematic attempt to integrate theoretically and empirically the biological and cultural influences on basic motivational states and propensities. This theory reflects the more integrative and mature style of Professor Yang’s

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later career. It allows analysis of different cultures, societies, and groups, even at the intra-individual level. The Chinese Indigenization of Psychology and Social Science Professor Yang advocated the indigenization of psychology and social science in order to criticize the knowledge monopoly of Western psychology (especially American psychology), and to self-reflect on Chinese researchers’ tendency to allow the Western academic paradigm to dominate. However, he did not intend for indigenization to result in exclusionism or isolation. Instead, Professor Yang was searching for a mature road toward academic autonomy and innovation. Although since the 1980s Professor Yang gathered together scholars with different backgrounds to support the indigenization movement, only researchers from psychology have made considerable progress and continue to pay attention to indigenous research issues today. This result can be attributed to Professor Yang’s devotion to basic research (such as Chinese indigenous theory construction), to his fostering of young scholars, and to his sharing of his research experience. Professor Yang expected that indigenous psychology would not only become a sub-discipline of psychology, but could also serve as a new methodology, and even as a serious academic movement aimed at developing a more culturally sensitive and context-embedded knowledge system of psychology. From Professor Yang’s perspective, indigenization is the original research issue in the Chinese psychological community. He believed it had the potential to trigger an academic movement, and thus was worthy of long-term investment. Professor Yang published extensively regarding the issues of indigenization. Most of his articles appeared in journals that he himself established, such as Indigenous Psychological Research in Chinese Societies (本土心理學研究), or in other important international journals such as Asian Journal of Social Psychology, Journal of Cross-Cultural Psychology, and International Journal of Psychology. For a comprehensive overview of Professor Yang’s views on the methodological concerns and theoretical position of indigenous psychology, please refer to some representative monographs, such as Indigenized Research on Chinese Psychology and Behavior (華人心理的本土化研究) (Yang, 2018), Chinese Indigenized Psychology (華人本土心理學) (Yang, Hwang, & Yang, 2005), and Filial Piety of Chinese People: A Psychological Analysis (中國人的孝道 : 心理學的分析) (Yeh & Yang, 2008).

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Chinese Individual Modernity and Traditionality With the industrial revolution, modernization brought about a series of dramatic changes in economic, political, social, and cultural aspects of societies all over the world. It also simultaneously deeply affected the view of values, life ideology, and lifestyle habits. As a psychologist, Professor Yang focused on individual or psychological modernization, rather than on structural or societal modernization, which was treated as a fundamental contextual factor in psychological modernization. In 1969, Professor Yang proposed a complete theoretical framework and developed a theorybased standardized measure for empirically investigating the psychological modernity and traditionality of Chinese people. Professor Yang was interested in various emerging phenomena due to the late modernization of Taiwan and other societies, and he tracked trends in these variables. In about 1985, Professor Yang made a first wave of modifications to his theoretical assumptions about Chinese individual modernity and traditionality: (1) Individual modernity and traditionality are not two opposite poles of a psychological continuum but two independent and coexisting psychological properties, (2) Individual modernity and traditionality are not unidimensional concepts, rather they each have a set of corresponding components, (3) Multi-dimensional individual modernity and traditionality can combine in various patterns rather than just all-or-none expression, and (4) The distinction between individual traditionality and modernity is not based on a differentiation of indigenous and universal components. Both should be seen as indigenous psychological constructs for Chinese people rather than as universal ones. Professor Yang also provided new descriptions of the possible changing trends in these two psychological mindsets. Due to the extent and rate of social change with globalization, his previous conceptual framework of psychological modernity and traditionality seemed out of date due to its lack of coverage of some emerging components of these two psychological mindsets. Thus, Professor Yang made a second-wave revision in about 2004. He focused on broadening the components and the corresponding measurement of both psychological modernity and traditionality based on a more comprehensive contextualized understanding. Using both college student and adult samples from Taiwan and China, Professor Yang found five main components of Chinese individual traditonality, including male superiority,

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fatalism, respect to parents, zhongyong (中庸) orientation, and relationship orientation. He also identified five main components of Chinese individual modernity, including independence and autonomy, fairness and justice, internal-control orientation, consumption orientation, and innovation/change-seeking and planning/leaning. Both the theoretical framework and the corresponding measures are still frequently cited in studies of Chinese social psychology. The Four-Part Theory of the Chinese Self Ever since the well-known conceptualization of independent/interdependent self-construal was proposed, indigenization of the concept of self has been a sort of holy grail in cultural psychology. The proper conceptualization of the Chinese self is another significant issue into which Professor Yang put lifelong effort. From his perspective, the concept of self in Chinese culture should emphasize the flexibility to meet the different requirements of various situations rather than a solid and unified self across all situations (which is what is valued in Western culture). In other words, the core of the Chinese self is embedded in the different contexts of various social situations and relationships, and thus may manifest multifaceted and even contradictory properties. Professor Yang also paid a lot of attention to other researchers’ empirical findings on self-concept, self-process, and self-evaluation. He used them as a platform for theoretical integration. Based on his earlier work on the social characteristics of Chinese people, which focused on the social-oriented self, and his long-term and in-depth investigation of individual-level modernization of the Chinese people, Professor Yang proposed a four-part theory of the Chinese self. This theory specified that the Chinese social-oriented self contains an individual-oriented self plus three additional types of self (relationshiporiented self, familistic/group-oriented self, and other-oriented self). The individual-oriented self focuses on personal autonomy and independence. The relationship-oriented self focuses on the self within individual-toindividual interaction. The familistic/group-oriented self focuses on the self within important social groups, and the other-oriented self focuses on other people. Professor Yang compared the similarities and differences among the four types of self with respect to the following 15 psychological aspects:

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(1) dominant trend of adaptation, (2) target of interaction, (3) contextualization, (4) role involvement, (5) object of identification, (6) type of identity, (7) sense of responsibility, (8) mode of self-consistency, (9) primary motivation, (10) essential affection, (11) target of emotional attachment, (12) type of self-actualization, (13) type of self-concept, (14) type of self-esteem, and (15) type of happiness. He also provided a detailed picture of possible types of conflict, the integrating mechanisms and processes, and the forms of coexistence among these four modes of self. For a systematic review of Professor Yang’s research findings and the latest progress on the Chinese self, please refer to a monograph entitled The Chinese Self: A Psychological Analysis (中國人的自我:心理學的分析) (Yang & Lu, 2008).

Epilogue Professor Yang’s career and research achievements over the past 55 years are closely connected to the development and transformation of Chinese indigenous psychology, especially in the area of social and personality psychology. His lifelong efforts improved both the quantity and quality of psychological studies on culturally Chinese samples. His academic charisma attracted many young researchers to dedicate themselves to the Chinese indigenization of psychology, and opened up a brand new road in Asian and global psychology. This outcome reflects Professor Yang’s persistent goal that indigenous psychology as an academic movement should break through the limitations of any specific culture and improve the uneven development of psychologies around the world with a crosscultural approach capable of building an integrated global psychology. This essay is a tribute to Professor Yang and is dedicated to all those who have taken part in the Chinese indigenization of psychology. In memory of Professor Yang and his contributions, we carry the movement forward.

References Li, Y.-Y., & Yang, K.-S. (Eds.). (1972). The character of Chinese people. Monograph series no. 4. Taipei, Taiwan: Institute of Ethnology, Academia Sinica Press. Yang, K.-S. (2018). Indigenized research on Chinese psychology and behavior. Taipei, Taiwan: National Taiwan University Press.

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Yang, K.-S., Hwang, K.-K., & Yang, C.-F. (Eds.). (2005). Chinese indigenized psychology. Taipei, Taiwan: Yuen Liao Press. Yang, K.-S., & Lu, L. (Eds.). (2008). The Chinese self: A psychological analysis. Taipei, Taiwan: National Taiwan University Press. Yang, K.-S., & Wen, C.-I. (Eds.). (1982). The sinicization of social and behavioral science research in China. Monograph series no. 10. Taipei, Taiwan: Institute of Ethnology, Academia Sinica Press. Yeh, K.-H., & Yang, K.-S. (2008). Filial piety of Chinese people: A psychological analysis. Taipei, Taiwan: National Taiwan University Press.

CHAPTER 4

Philosophical Reflection on Prof. K.S. Yang’s Vision of Global Psychology and Indigenous Compatibility Kwang-Kuo Hwang

After World War II, the Cold War made Taiwan dependent on the United States not only politically and economically, but also for science and technology. The Nationalist government held a chair in the United Nations under the title of the “Republic of China” and maintained an allied relationship with the United States until the beginning of the 1970s, when it lost the U.N. seat to China. The history of close connection with the United States has made Taiwan highly dependent on America for educational and academic resources: American textbooks or their translations were widely used, many teachers were educated in America, and many graduate students chose American institutions for advanced study. As a consequence, psychological research in Taiwan was Americanized. Many scholars sought research topics from “hot issues” in American

K.-K. Hwang (B) Department of Psychology, National Taiwan University, Taipei, Taiwan e-mail: [email protected] Kaohsiung Medical University, Kaohsiung, Taiwan © The Author(s) 2020 L. Sundararajan et al. (eds.), Global Psychology from Indigenous Perspectives, Palgrave Studies in Indigenous Psychology, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-35125-0_4

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journals, applied Western instruments and research methodologies to Taiwanese subjects, and attempted to interpret their findings in terms of popular American theories. Most research was published in local journals. Few individuals were able to publish articles in international academic journals with any frequency. Whether the contents were useful for the local society or whether there was a connection between the subject matter and the indigenous context were questions of secondary importance. Naive positivism, which assumed that there must be some truth in the advanced theories constructed by Western social scientists, was very popular in the scientific community of psychology in Taiwan.

Research on Individual Modernity and Traditionalism In the 1960s and 1970s, modernization theory was popular in the Western scientific psychological community. Modernization theory entails the belief that in order to facilitate the modernization of a state or nation, it is necessary to modernize the personalities, dispositions, and psychological characteristics of the individuals in that society (McClelland, 1955, 1961). Inkeles (1966) of Harvard University was the first to propose the idea of “the modernization of man.” He conducted a series of empirical studies to identify the distinguishing characteristics of modernized people from the perspective of psychology (Inkeles, 1969; Inkeles & Smith, 1974). Around that same time, many psychologists also tried to develop various versions of a modernity scale for use in various non-Western societies (Armer & Youtz, 1971; Dawson, 1967; Doob, 1967; Guthrie, 1977; Inkeles, 1968; Schnaiberg, 1970). Yang was a young researcher who embraced an optimistic attitude toward modernity at the beginning of his academic career just like many Chinese intellectuals who advocated for New Culture Movement before and after May Fourth 1919. They took the position that Mr. Democracy and Mr. Science are two foreign “Buddhas” that can save China. These intellectuals believed that modern civilization originating from the West stood in sharp contrast to traditional Chinese culture. In fact, they thought that these two cultural systems were located at the two extremes of a construct and were incompatible with one another (Lin, 1979). Working under such an intellectual tradition and Zeitgeist, Yang might have been influenced by the ideas of earlier Chinese scholars who advocated modernization, as were many of his contemporaries. This influence

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was in all likelihood reflected in his earlier empirical research on modernity and traditionalism. Individual Traditionality and Modernity Scale As an active leader of liberal intellectuals, Kuo-shu Yang was the first scholar to devote himself to the study of modernity and traditionalism from a psychological perspective in Taiwan. He developed the Individual Traditionality–Modernity Scale in the 1970s and completed a series of empirical studies using this scale as an instrument of measurement (Yang, 1981, 1985, 1986; Yang & Hchu, 1974). In Hchu and Yang’s (1972) earlier stage of research, a total of 212 items for the individual modernity scale were adopted from two main sources: (i) items of related questionnaires developed by foreign psychologists that were suited to Chinese people and (ii) items designed through consideration of the social and cultural situation in Chinese society at that time. In order to ensure that each item was related to modernity, they invited 14 researchers to judge each item with respect to whether its content was valid for measuring modernity (Hchu & Yang, 1972). Yang believed that this approach “had taken into consideration the contents of individual modernity for cross-cultural universality and indigenous local culture” (Yang, Yu, & Yeh, 1991, p. 385). Ratner (1999) suggested that there are three strategic approaches in cultural psychology: “symbolic,” “individualistic,” and “activity” theory. As the individualistic approach focuses on the study of the universality of human behavior, it will not be discussed in detail in the present paper. However, the symbolic and activity theory approaches can both contribute to answering the question of how to set about studying modernity and traditionalism. The structure of a designated culture can first be analyzed using the symbolic approach to construct a micro-world in a theoretical model. The theoretical model can then be used as a framework for research in the various domains of life with the activity theory approach. Experts’ Judgments In the earlier stage of the modernization study, Yang did not use the symbolic and activity theory approaches. He neither analyzed the structure of Chinese culture at a cultural level nor explained what modernity means at a theoretical level. Instead, he followed an empirical approach and defined

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modernity and traditionalism on the basis of experts’ judgments and consensus. It is necessary to collect data through first-hand experience and to consult experts’ opinions in developing such an instrument of psychological measurement. Nevertheless, it is also necessary to have a sound theoretical framework to guide the direction of data collection. Any attempt to measure such broad and complicated constructs as modernity of traditionalism might be incomplete without a convincing theoretical framework. Unfortunately, in his earlier work of measuring modernity and traditionalism, K. S. Yang seems to have fallen into such a trap. He does not seem to have taken seriously the possibility that intellectual experts are likely to belong to a modernized, Western-influenced social class that differs from most other people in a non-Western country (Allwood, 2020). In the 1980s, the international academic community strongly criticized the modernization theory. Many sociologists began to interrogate the connection between individual and social modernization. They pointed out, for instance, that the lifestyle of urban residents in the big cities of Latin America is highly modernized and similar to that of Western countries, while their countries had not similarly progressed along the path of modernization. In fact, their politics and economics had deteriorated to a disadvantaged position in the world economic system (Dos Santos, 1970; Evans, 1974; Frank, 1971; O’Brien, 1975). As a result of the rise of world system theory (Wallerstein, 1976, 1979), the tide of research on individual modernity gradually declined in the Western scientific psychological community. Neoliberalism In their comments on Yang’s advocacy for IP, Dueck, Song, and Marossy (2020) indicated that uncritically accepting neoliberalism’s unspoken assumptions regarding society, morality, and the human person may make psychology complicit in sustaining a form of ideological colonialism that continues to erode non-Western forms of indigeneity in today’s ever-globalizing world. Neoliberalism is broadly defined as a “theory of political economic practice that proposes that human well-being can best be advanced by liberating individual entrepreneurial freedoms and skills within an institutional framework characterized by strong private property rights, free market and free trade” (Harvey, 2007, p. 2). The adoption of such practices by dominant Western nations has begun in the final decades of the twentieth century, the pervasive force of global capitalism

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has disseminated neoliberal forms of governmentality into non-Western nations, transformed their economic and political structures, and changed the conceptual frameworks and thought patterns of indigenous traditions and cultures as well. It seems that Yang made only passing reference to the role of neoliberalism. In fact, he devoted himself to the advocacy of modernization theory, an earlier version of neoliberalism. After using his measurement instrument of empirical research for 15 years, Yang observed that he “might have made several serious mistakes at the first stage of his research,” and that “some of these mistakes can also be found in many studies conducted by Western researchers” (Yang et al., 1991, p. 245). He then made significant changes to several aspects of his early conceptualization of individual modernity and traditionalism: 1. In the early stage, Yang regarded individual modernity and traditionalism as two extremities of a continuum linked together to compose a bipolar construct. Individuals higher in modernity would be lower in traditionalism, and vice versa. Later, Yang (1986, 1988) recognized that some traditional traits are preserved in modern societies. Traditionalism and modernity are neither in opposition to one another nor are they two different stages of rectilinear development in the process of modernization. 2. Like most scholars who have studied individual modernity (Dawson, 1967; Inkeles & Smith, 1974), in his early stage, Yang considered the bipolar construct of individual modernity and traditionalism to be unidimensional, with the components constituting an individual’s modernity organized into a coherent syndrome. Yang changed his mind in the later years. Now, he regards individual traditionalism and modernity as two different sets of combinations of psychological and behavioral traits composed of several dimensions (Yang et al., 1991). Entrepreneurial Self? By the same research method of his first stage study, Yang and his colleagues collected two sets of items, and then reviewed the appropriateness of their content. After deleting items with repetitive or ambiguous meanings, 299 items were obtained for measuring traditionalism and 256 items for modernity. A sample of 819 university students in Taiwan was

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used to pretest the traditionality scale, and 891 were used to test the modernity scale. Factor analysis revealed five factors on each scale. The five factors of the Multiple Traditionality Scale were: 1. Comply with Authority. 2. Filial to Parents and Worship Ancestors. 3. Self-content and Conservative. 4. Fatalism and Self-protection. 5. Male Superiority. The five factors of the Multiple Modernity Scale were: 1. Egalitarian and Open-minded. 2. Independent and Fending for Oneself. 3. Optimistic and Aggressive. 4. Valuing Affections. 5. Sexual Equality. It is interesting to find that, as revealed by factor analysis, most of these two sets of five factors can be paired: Comply with Authority/Egalitarian and Open-minded, Self-content and Conservative/Optimistic and Aggressive, Male Superiority/Sexual Equality. Why might these results have been obtained despite Yang’s statement that he didn’t consider traditionalism and modernity to be the two extremities of a continuum? As a technique for analyzing data, factor analysis is only as good as the quality of the data being analyzed. As mentioned before, Yang’s conceptual framework of traditionalism and modernity traits easily lends itself to being perceived as a set of polar extremities. Thus, the resulting five paired and opposing factors should be no surprise, and it is not difficult to see the similarity between the personality traits of modernity and that of an “entrepreneurial self” to prioritize “personal attributes aligned with enterprise culture, such as initiative, self-reliance, selfmastery, and risk taking” as discussed in the article by Dueck et al. (2020).

Indigenization Movement and Anticolonization The indigenization movement of psychology in Taiwan was first initiated by K.S. Yang who organized a conference on “Sinicization of Social and

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Behavioral Sciences” at Academia Sinica in December 1981. In the preface of the proceedings of the groundbreaking conference, K. S. Yang and Wen (1982) wrote: The subjects whom we studied are Chinese people in Chinese society, but, the theories and methods we used are mostly imported from the West or of the Western style. In our daily life, we are Chinese; when we are doing research, we become Western people. We repress our Chinese thoughts or philosophy intentionally or unintentionally, and make them unable to be expressed in our procedure of research. … Under such a situation, we can only follow the West step by step with an expectation to catch up their academic trend. … Eventually, our existence in the world community of social and behavioral science becomes invisible at all. (p. ii)

Harvard Experience The decision to make psychology more meaningful to Chinese people was reinforced by an episode that happened in 1988 when he was invited to Harvard to give a talk on his research on Chinese personality. In the discussion session after his presentation a well-known developmental psychologist Kagan asked him one question: “What kind of psychology would have been developed by Chinese psychologists if there had not been any Western psychology?” Yang said that he was shocked by this question and admitted that Kagan’s question gave him a chance to look more closely and squarely at the naked reality that “little was left in Westernised Chinese psychology after those elements that had been borrowed form, or influenced by, Western psychology were taken away”. The ‘Harvard experience’ stimulated him to consider seriously the possibility and legitimacy of developing a Chinese indigenous psychology. He felt that the most developed North American psychology, was a kind of indigenous psychology in the sense that its major concepts, theories, methods, and findings have originally evolved partly from the European intellectual traditions but mostly from the cultural milieu of American society. To treat American indigenous psychology as the psychology of all human beings was a big mistake. “If American psychologists could have their own indigenous psychology, why did not we Chinese psychologists have our own indigenous psychology?” (p. 69)

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Yang’s decision to promote IP was stimulated by his Harvard experience of embarrassment, but not by reflection on his research methodology. The Appeals of Anti-colonialism In order to promote the indigenization movement, Yang organized an Interdisciplinary Symposium on Chinese Psychology and Behavior every two years since 1981; established a Laboratory of Research for Indigenous Psychology; inaugurated the Journal for Indigenous Psychological Research in 1993; and invited comments from several scholars who had been engaged in or had paid close attention to the progress of indigenous psychology over a long period of time. A historian, Fu (1995) identified the spirit of anti-colonialism in the movement and pointed out that indigenization was a slogan popular in the Taiwanese academic community, not limited to psychology. Some opposed the West from the viewpoint of Chinese, others opposed China from the viewpoint of Taiwan; they were all in opposition to being colonized. For instance, K. S. Yang’s (1993) article advocated that: In order to popularize indigenous psychology effectively, indigenous psychologists should advise their colleagues earnestly and kindly, and let them know the necessity of indigenization in psychology; we should remind them the reason why Western psychologists emphasize that there is no hegemony and no national boundary in academic activities, because it is favorable for Western psychology to be accepted by non-Western psychologists, so their theories, thoughts, and methods can be easily exported to non-Western countries or societies. (p. 58)

Fu (1995) pointed out that this kind of argument is a direct accusation of anti-colonialism. “If Western scholars read this paper, they may think that indigenous psychologists propose this kind of argument to avoid the challenge from the Western academic community” (p. 350), and “always neglect that there remains academic domination and hegemony in their own country” (p. 327). Ideological Grounds K. S. Yang (1993) proposed 7 “Don’ts” and 10 “Dos” as guidance for developing indigenous psychology. Some of his “Dos” are as follows:

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2. Be typically Chinese when functioning as a researcher and let Chinese ideas, values, and ways of thinking be fully reflected in his or her research thinking process. 3. Take the psychological or behavioral phenomenon to be studied and its concrete, specific setting into careful consideration before assessing the possibility of adequately applying a Western concept, variable, theory, or method to Chinese subjects. 5. Give priority to the study of culturally unique psychological and behavioral phenomena or characteristics of the Chinese people. 8. Let research be based upon the Chinese intellectual tradition rather than the Western intellectual tradition (p. 37). Fu pointed out that, in the West, the academic center is never fixed; it transfers from one place to another in history. The rise of a new academic center is seldom achieved by calls for indigenization from native scholars who strongly advocate anti-colonialism, and bring such spiritual inspiration as 7 Don’ts or 10 Dos. So far as the sinicization of research in social and behavioral science is concerned, “many of their problems cannot be solved by a spirit of anti-colonialism and independence” (Fu, 1995, pp. 349–350). Viewing from theories of intergroup relations, Hendricks and Moghaddam (2020) indicated that Yang’s (2012) conceptualization of three types of psychology, namely, indigenous psychology, Westernized psychology, and indigenized psychology, is providing useful and stimulating debate about psychology around the world. This debate would benefit by giving more attention to the ideological grounds of contemporary mainstream psychology as well as its grounds on “the outdated positivist models of science.” Unfortunately, it seems that Yang’s scheme of indigenous psychology was proposed on similar ideological grounds of anti-colonialism and philosophy of positivism.

Indigenous Compatibility Yang proposed the concept of indigenous compatibility in the first issue of the journal, hoping to use it as a criterion for evaluating indigenous research (Yang, 1993). According to K. S. Yang’s (1993) original definition, indigenous compatibility means:

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Owing to the same cultural and biological influence, it tends to form a compatible state between the researcher’s activity of research and knowledge system as well as local people’s psychology and behaviors. This state of being tightly matched, tied, connected, or compatible, existing between local researcher’s concepts as well as local people’s psychology and behaviors. (p. 24)

Criterion of Science Accompanied with his concept of “indigenous compatibility,” K. S. Yang (1993) also proposed an argument about the methodology for indigenous psychology. He cited the distinction made by the Filipino indigenous psychologist Enriquez (1989) between exogenous indigenization (indigenization from without) and endogenous indigenization (indigenization from within) and considered that psychology built through the approach of exogenous indigenization adopts culture and history in other societies (usually the Western countries), but not their own as their origin of thinking. It is roughly a kind of deformed Western psychology, and fails to represent validly the characteristics and genuine phenomena of local society, culture and history. So I don’t admit it as real indigenous psychology. What we mean by indigenous psychology is restricted to endogenous indigenous psychology, and that is what we seek. (Yang, 1993, p. 44)

Yang (1993) indicated that exogenous–indigenous psychology fails to validly represent the characteristics and genuine phenomena of local society, culture, and history. Z. H. Lin (1995, p. 328), who specializes in philosophy of science, argued that academic research needs a “neutral criterion,” which is independent from all theories, to determine what are real characteristics and genuine phenomena. Otherwise, psychologists who follow various schools or adopt different theoretical framework may claim that their own theory represents the real characteristics and genuine phenomena. In that case, what should be the “neutral and independent criterion”? Worldview of Positivism In responding to Yang’s earnest calling in which he advised social scientists to “adopt more indigenous concepts,” “to avoid adopting Western

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concepts habitually,” and “to use folk terms and concepts as far as possible in order to maintain original facts of the phenomena to be studied” (Yang, 1993, p. 37), Lin (1995, p. 328) pointed out that Yang didn’t indicate clearly if the researcher should adopt indigenous concepts as far as possible only when he is describing the phenomena or even when he is interpreting the data. If it is the latter case, indigenous psychological theories will use a great many indigenous concepts. These concepts could be understood correctly only by the specialists who are very familiar with indigenous society, culture, and history. In this case, “how can indigenous psychologists from different areas of the world communicate with each other?” “How can we build global psychology or human psychology on the basis of regional indigenous psychologies?” The adequacy of indigenous compatibility had been questioned by many scholars either within or outside the camp of indigenous psychology. They took the same view to indicate that Yang’s criterion represents a worldview of positivism which is very popular among non-Western psychologists. Bottom-up Model-Building Paradigm With an intensive review on related literature, Hwang (2005) indicated that the controversies caused by K. S. Yang’s 1993 article resemble those faced by other non-Western psychologists who have been trying to develop indigenous psychology in their own societies (Enriquez, 1993). Most indigenous psychologists advocated “a bottom-up model-building paradigm” (Kim, 2000, p. 265) to study people as “the interactive and proactive agents of their own actions” that occur in a meaningful context (Kim, Park, & Park, 2000, p. 71), and they believe that indigenous psychology is “the study of human behavior and mental processes within a cultural context that relies on values, concepts, belief systems, methodologies, and other resources indigenous to the specific ethnic or cultural group under investigation” (Ho, 1998, p. 94). Through “the scientific study of human behavior that is native, that is not transported from other regions, and that is designed for its people” (Kim & Berry, 1993, p. 2), they are able to obtain “a psychological and practical system based on and responsive to indigenous culture and indigenous realities” (Enriquez, 1993, p. 158), in an expectation to develop a psychology whose “concepts, problems, hypothesis, methods, and test emanate from, adequately

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represent, and reflect upon the cultural context in which the behavior is observed” (Adair, Puhan, & Vohra, 1993, p. 149). Such advocacy for the indigenization of psychology was criticized by mainstream psychologists who argued that the advantages of indigenous approach are also claimed by anthropologists. Accumulating culturespecific data by this approach may have no direct implication for the progress of scientific psychology (Triandis, 2000). If the difference in behavioral repertoires across cultural populations implies that we need an indigenous psychology, how many indigenous psychologies will we have (Poortinga, 1999)? Global Psychology In order to meet the challenge, most indigenous psychologists have argued that the development of numerous psychologies is not their final goal. Rather, they are working toward the development of an Asian psychology (Ho, 1988), a global psychology (Enriquez, 1993), or a universal psychology (Berry & Kim, 1993; Kim & Berry, 1993). Even K. S. Yang (1993) also advocated that the final goal of developing indigenous psychologies is to establish “a human psychology” or “a global psychology.” The ideal of global or universal psychology is laudable, I do believe that most psychologists tend to honor such an idea (Allwood, 2020; Dueck et al., 2020; Hendricks & Moghaddam, 2020). But, it seems to me that any proposal for achieving this goal must be evaluated from the perspective of Western philosophy of science. I would like to elaborate my stance from my own experience of graduate education in Taiwan and Hawaii.

Philosophical Reflection on Prof. Yang’s Academic Vision Prof. Yang was my academic advisor when I worked for my Master’s degree in National Taiwan University. In those days, psychology had been defined as “behavioral science.” The most influential paradigm in psychology was Behaviorism, Personality was conceived as a “black box,” and culture had no position at all in its formation. I obtained a scholarship from East–West Center which enabled me to work for my Ph.D. degree in the University of Hawaii from 1972 to 1976. During that period, I experienced a “cultural shock” for selfreflecting on the meaning of doing research in psychology: We had a

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famous professor Arthur W. Staats in UH who published a book entitled Social Behaviorism and tried to explain all social behaviors in terms of several principles of S-R psychology. But the textbook for our class of social psychology had a subtitle emphasizing that it adopts “a cognitive approach” (Stotland & Canon, 1972). My academic advisor Anthony Marsella was interested in studying psychopathology in various cultures, and we also had an eminent professor L. Lauden (1978) who advocated for the psychology of pragmatism in the department of philosophy. The experience of multiple approaches in psychology enabled me to be aware that a “paradigm shift” was going on in the field of psychology, and various paradigms in psychology have their own philosophical grounds. Philosophy of Science My experience of studying abroad has had profound influence on my research orientation after I returned to Taiwan and began my academic career in National Taiwan University since 1976. Prof. Kuo-Shu Yang initiated an indigenization movement of psychology during the early 1980s (Yang & Wen, 1982), I soon realized that most Western theories of psychology had been constructed on the presumption of individualism, but most non-Western cultures emphasize the importance of interpersonal relationship which had been relatively neglected by Western psychologists. Therefore, I constructed a Face and Favor model to describe the mechanism of dyad interaction between two parties of various relationships (Hwang, 1987). Then I used this model as a framework to analyze the content of Confucianism and published a book entitled Confucianism and the Modernization of East Asia (Hwang, 1988). Because my approach was very different from the “typical” ones of doing psychological research, it had been strongly questioned by others within the camp of indigenous psychology in Taiwan. The experience of debating with others reminded me of the relationships between Western psychology and philosophy of science which I had learned in UH. Because philosophy of science is a product of Western civilization, it is very hard for Chinese scholars to understand the dialectical relationships among various paradigms of philosophy. So I decided to write a book by myself for the sake of helping other Chinese scholars to understand the meaning of my approach for promoting the progress of indigenous psychology.

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I spent more than ten years writing the book Logics of Social Science (Hwang, 2001, 2003, 2018a), which addresses different perspectives on crucial issues of ontology, epistemology, and methodology proposed by eighteen Western philosophers since the beginning of the twentieth century. The first half of this book discussed the philosophical switch of nature science from positivism to post-positivism. The second half expounded the philosophy of social science, including structuralism, hermeneutic and critical science. Contextual Indigenous Compatibility Four years after the publication of K. S. Yang’s 1993 article, he published another target article in Indigenous Psychological Research. Hence K. S. Yang’s (1993) emphasis on locality in defining the concept of indigenous compatibility had been challenged, he agreed that “in some specific conditions, foreign scholars can also do indigenous research” and revised his definition as follows: The investigators’ research activities (including topic selection, conceptual analysis, research design, and theory construction) must be sufficiently congruous with, compatible to, or in harmony with the native people’s studied psychological or behavioral elements, structures, mechanisms, or processes as rooted in their ecological, economic, social, cultural, or historical contexts. (Yang, 1997b, p. 87)

K. S. Yang (1997b) differentiated two kinds of indigenous compatibility: focal indigenous compatibility “stresses the congruity of the researcher’s theory, methods, and results with the studies of psychological or behavioral phenomenon itself, without taking its context into direct consideration”; while contextual indigenous compatibility “places emphasis on the congruity of the theory, methods, and results with the studied phenomenon-in-context as a whole, rather than with the phenomenon in isolation from its context” (see also Yang, 2000, p. 250), Second-Degree Interpretation In their comments on Yang’s arguments about “indigenous compatibility,” both Hwang (1997) and Yeh (1997) cited Schutz’s (1962) differentiation between “first-degree of interpretation” and “second-degree of

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interpretation,” and pointed out that Yang’s definition has an implication that a researcher’s interpretation should be kept as close to the subject’s first-degree of interpretation as possible. This is not the purpose of academic research. Yeh (1997, p. 127) pointed out that the researcher’s second-degree of interpretation about the actor’s subjective meaning is neither the restoration of the actor’s conscious interpretation (i.e., the first-degree of interpretation) originating from his personal interest in his daily life, nor the interpretation in accordance with the theory that is familiar to, preferred by, or identified with the researcher. A researcher should not reduce his interpretation of the phenomena to the subject’s recognization, interpretation, or feeling of one’s own experience without any reservation or modification. What we expect a researcher to provide us with is a systematic knowledge that must be more than, and different from, the common sense of ordinary people (Yeh, 1997, p. 126). Therefore, the crucial aspect is: “how a researcher can manage the subject’s psychology and behavior adequately so as to present their cultural and social meanings in an illuminative way” (Yeh, 1997, p. 127). Rational Construction Hwang (1997) argued that “knowledge” and “experience” are completely different. The living experience of human beings is basically in a state of chaos. When a researcher attempts to construct a substantial theory on the basis of his subject’s experience, he should transform the subject’s experience into knowledge through “rational reconstruction” but not “rational representation.” He can represent neither his own experience nor his subject’s experience. Hwang (1997, p. 169) indicated clearly that the current mainstream psychology is a product of a unique way of thinking, which has emerged from Western civilization since the Renaissance. Contemporary psychologists are urged to adopt Western paradigms for research and to evaluate their research products with rigorous academic criteria. He argued that indigenous compatibility can be regarded as a guiding principle for the indigenization movement of psychology, but it cannot be used as an academic standard for evaluating the quality of research. “I wonder if Prof Yang will agree with my argument or not?” (Hwang, 1997, p. 169). In K. S. Yang’s (1997c, p. 198) response, he admitted that his discourse about what is “matched, fitted, and compatible” is undeniably

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ambiguous. He argued that parts of what he means by “matched, fitted, or compatible” could be interpreted further by Yeh’s statement. However, Yang opposed Hwang’s suggestion, stating: There are many standards for evaluating the quality of research. What has been mentioned frequently in textbooks about methodology or research methods includes, at least, the (theoretical and practical) importance of research topic, the adequacy of conceptualizing the phenomena, the reasonableness of research design (in terms of subjects, methods, and instruments), the (theoretical and practical) importance of research findings, the illumination from discussing the research findings, and the achievement of theoretical development. Those are common standards for evaluating the quality of research. In order to promote the idea of indigenous psychology, indigenous compatibility must be added to these standards so as to transform the Westernized research, which might be evaluated as “good” or “fair” by those standards, into a real indigenous one. (Yang, 1997c, p. 211)

Pyramid Model K. S. Yang (1997c) emphasized that he has differentiated indigenous psychology into “monocultural indigenous psychology” and “cross-cultural indigenous psychology.” He believes that Westernized or Americanized psychology is also a “monocultural indigenous psychology.” Constructing theories of regional psychology can rely not only on monocultural indigenous research but also on cross-cultural indigenous research, as well as the integration of knowledge from several related indigenous psychologies. Four years later, he also proposed four methods of integration in cross-cultural indigenous psychology, namely, empirical integration, theoretical integration, assimilative synthesis, and accommodative synthesis (Yang, 2000). Yang proposed a pyramid model to illustrate his bottom-up approach for developing global psychology. The first step of his model is using the developed IP knowledge systems, including their research findings, “to develop the indigenous psychologies of progressively larger populations defined in terms of regional, national, ethnic, linguistic, religious, or geographic considerations” (2000, p. 246). The pyramid model “integrates progressively broader indigenous psychologies arranged with respect to societal, cultural, national, ethnic, and religious scope” (2000, pp. 257– 258). Eventually, “the highest indigenous psychology, a universal, or more properly a global, psychology for all human beings on the earth will be formed by integrating lower-level indigenous psychologies” (p. 246).

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This is the final step in his process of constructing what Yang (2012) meant by a genuine and balanced global psychology. Inductive Approach In his debates with colleagues for a route to develop indigenous psychology, Yang (2000, p. 246) argued for the adoption of the principle of multiple paradigms: “Under the principle, different indigenous psychologists in the same society may be encouraged to apply different or even conflicting paradigms, such as those distinguished by Guba and Lincoln (1994), to their own research.” “It implies a tolerant and open attitude with respect to research methods” (Allwood, 2018), but Yang admitted that he is a positivist and his own approach is an inductive one (Yang, 1997a). Viewing from the perspective of philosophy of science, the method of induction had been regarded as the main approach for acquiring knowledge by positivism. For instance, Wittgenstein (1889–1951), whose earlier works had profound influence on the Vienna Circle in the 1920s, maintained in his famous writing Tractatus Logico Philosophicus that the main activity of science is to use language to describe the world. Atomic facts should be described with elementary propositions in a scientific theory that can be verified with empirical methods. Through the logical deduction of truth functions, elementary propositions can be combined into a scientific proposition. A proposition is a picture of reality, and the totality of true propositions reflects the nature science as a whole (Wittgenstein, 1922/1961). Wittgenstein’s earlier philosophy takes a position of copy theory or photo theory, insisting that a scientific proposition has to copy or record atomic facts and their structure clearly and correctly. Elementary propositions describe atomic facts repeatedly experienced by human beings, and scientific rules are established on the basis of these repeated empirical facts. Elementary propositions, which are the fundamental components of a theoretical proposition, are induced from past experience. Popper’s Evolutionary Epistemology With active promotion by the Vienna Circle, logical positivism had an extraordinary influence on the thoughts of the scientific community from 1930–1950. When it reached the peak of academic prestige, it

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began receiving criticism from its academic opponents. The first challenge came from Karl Popper’s (1902–1994) evolutionary epistemology. Popper (1963) argued that scientific theories are not induced from empirical facts, but deduced by scientists with critical rationality. The procedure of scientific research should begin with a problem. When a scientist finds new empirical facts that cannot be explained, or inconsistencies in preexisting theories, a tentative solution or theory may be proposed to solve the problem. Potential errors are eliminated by examining the theory against empirical facts in the world. The deductive method Popper advocated is not the traditional deduction grounded in axiomatic premises. Popper argued that the premises of deduction for a tentative theory of scientific conjecture should be repeatedly subjected to empirical examination. This method is called deduction with examination. Popper (1963) suggested, “Our intellect does not draw its laws from nature, but tries-with varying degrees of success - to impose upon nature laws which it freely invents” (p. 191). According to one of Popper’s analogies, the water bucket of scientific theory will not be spontaneously full so long as scientists work hard to fill it with accumulated empirical facts. Instead, theory is like a searchlight. Scientists must continuously bring up problems and make conjectures, so as to cast the light of theory on the future (Popper, 1972, pp. 431–457). If a theory records only previous findings, and nothing can be deducted from it except preexisting facts, what is the use of the theory? “One Mind, Many Mentalities” But, such a criticism does not deny the value of the epistemological goal of indigenous psychology, namely, the goal of developing a global psychology, universal psychology or human psychology. In his critique on the epistemological goal of indigenous psychologies, Poortinga (1999, p. 419) strongly suggested that “differences in behavioral repertoires across cultural populations should be understood against the background of a broader frame of commonness.” He argued that over-emphasis on cross-cultural differences in behaviors and negation of important invariance in psychological functioning across different cultures is not only “factually incorrect,” but also “theoretically misleading” (Poortinga, 1999, p. 425). His viewpoint is very similar to that of cultural psychologists who proposed a distinction to explain their fundamental view of human nature:

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“One mind, many mentalities” (Shweder, 1996, 2000; Shweder et al., 1998). It indicates that the psychological functioning or mechanisms of the human mind are the same all over the world, but that people may evolve various mentalities in different social and cultural environments. For the sake of developing a universal or global psychology, indigenous psychologists should incorporate both cultural variation and cross-cultural invariance into their research schemes. This goal cannot be achieved by the inductive approach as suggested by those indigenous psychologists who insist on the philosophy of positivism. The reason is revealed by a closer examination of the meaning of the terms “mind” and “mentality.” Impossible Mission According to Shweder’s definition, mind means “the totality of actual and potential conceptual contents of human cognitive process,” and mentality denotes “the cognized and activated subset of mind” (Shweder, 2000, p. 210). A mentality is owned or exercised by some group of particular individuals, so it can be a subject for research in cultural psychology. In contrast, mind refers to all the conceptual content that any human being might ever cognize and activate. This universal mind cannot become the subject of research in cultural psychology. If indigenous psychologists want to achieve the goal of universalization with the inductive approach, they would have to carry out a very large-scale research program by traveling around the globe to investigate all indigenous psychologies. Moreover, they would have to take into account all that has been manifested in the past history and even the future of each culture (Wallner & Jandl, 2001). Obviously this is an impossible mission. In consideration of the philosophical switch from positivism to post-positivism (Hwang, 2016), Allwood (2018) is correct in indicating that “Yang (2000, 2012) did not elaborate on the issue of what problems GP might take on. This is a limitation since the problems that researchers explore are one of the most important aspects of research.” Yang’s (1993) criterion of indigenous compatibility and his insistence on the stance of positivism (Yang, 1997b, c) make his pyramid model (Yang, 2012) impractical. This might be the reason why Allwood (2020) concluded that Yang’s approach to global psychology is broad and sketchy that the “it does not provide much specific detail about how the different ways of integration should be carried out, nor about how the different avenues should be combined.

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He only notes that the ‘empirical’, assimilative, and CCI approaches are more useful at the pyramid’s lower level and that the theoretical and cross-indigenous method is more useful at its higher levels.”

An Alternative Outlet: Cultural System Approach Based on their analysis within Western about the integration of Western theories and many suggestions for solving this problem, Teo and Af¸sin (2020) tried to answer a series of divergent questions: “Why did the global psychology the way Yang envisioned not happen? Why is it not happening? Why it is to happen in new future? What are unlikely the conditions the one needs for achieving a global psychology and are they possible?” I generally agree with their analysis of the first three questions done within the context of Western psychology. Here I would like to provide my answer to the fourth question from the perspective of philosophy of science, and discuss how can indigenous psychologists achieve the goal of a global psychology. Two Kinds of Epistemological Task Taking logical empiricism and Popper’s evolutionary epistemology as two representative philosophies of positivism and post-positivism, respectively, Hwang (2016) indicated that the ontology, epistemology, and methodology of those two philosophies are incommensurable to one another. Positivism adopts a position of radical empiricism and argues that the only reality is the facts experienced by sensory organs. The concept of person in post-positivism is opposite to that. A scientist cannot passively await the accumulation of empirical data collected through sensory experience. S/he must be actively engaged in the tasks of criticism, construction of theory to explain the reality behind the observed phenomena, and the validation of his/her theoretical explanation. Viewing from the perspective of philosophy of science, indigenous psychologists should abandon the inductive approach advocated by positivists, adopt the philosophical assumptions of post-positivism, construct formal theories about the psychological functioning of the human mind on the basis of previous findings using critical rationality (Popper, 1963) or creative imagination (Hempel, 1966), and then use these theories to analyze the particular mentality of a people in an indigenous culture. In

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other words, they should assume that the functioning of the human mind is invariant across different cultural populations, but that the contents and manifestations of this functioning may vary to a great extent in responding to the diversity of the cultural context (Berry, Poortinga, Segall, & Dasen, 1992; Poortinga, 1997). In order to achieve the goal of a universal psychology, indigenous researchers should construct formal theories illustrating the functioning of the human mind that are applicable to various cultures and use them to study the particular mentalities of the people in a given culture by examining their psychology and behaviors in daily life. Two Steps for Developing IP Following this line reasoning, Hwang’s (2019) epistemological strategy for the future development of indigenous psychologies consists of two steps: First, constructing the universal models of self (Hwang, 2011) and social interaction (Hwang, 1987, 2012) to represent the functioning of human minds at the level of global psychology; Second, using these two models as framework to analyze a give culture (here is pre-Qin Confucianism) so as to construct “culture-inclusive theories” at the level of community psychology (Hwang, 2015a, 2015b). Recently, the Mandala model of (small) self has been integrated with Jung’s psychology of (big) Self, so as to construct a psychodynamic model of Self-nature (zixing,自性) or the nature of human beings (Hwang, 2018b), which had been widely discussed in Confucianism and Chinese Buddhism (漢傳佛教). It seems to me that East Asian philosophies of study on the human nature of mind (心性之學, xin xing zhi sue) contains abundant cultural heritage for maintaining one’s mental health. The vast stock of knowledge on Confucianism, Taoism, and Buddhism can be transformed into modern language of psychology if and only if the universal models of Self-nature (自性, zixing) and social interaction have been constructed on the ground of Western philosophy of science (e.g., Shiah, Hwang, & Yit, 2017). Kant’s Judgment on Confucian Maxim As it was mentioned in the article by Dueck et al. (2020), we may take empirical research on forgiveness as an example to illustrate the inappropriateness of studying core ideas in a cultural system by pan-cultural

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dimensional approach (Hwang, 2015a). Forgiveness is usually translated into Chinese 寬恕 as or 恕(shu), but 恕(shu) is more appropriately back translated into English as compassion, which occupies a key position in the Confucian ethical system of morality. Tze-kung asked: “Is there one word which may serve as a sale of practice for all of one’s life?” The Master said: “Is must be compassion (恕)! Do not do to others what you do not wish them have done to you.” (Analect, Wei Ling Kung)

Kant was a rationalist. He proposed a single categorical imperative applicable to all rationalists: Act so that the outcome of one’s conduct is “the universal will.” Principles derived from an individual’s feelings, affections, dispositions, or preferences may not be universally applicable to others, and should be considered merely subjective principles. The fact that an individual following the silver rule must rely on personal feelings and preferences led Kant to include a footnote in his book Metaphysik der Sitten pointing out that this Confucian maxim cannot be a universal law, for it: contains no basis for prescribing duties to oneself or kindness to others (e.g., many people would agree that others should not help him or her if they don’t expect help themselves), or clearly demarcated duties toward others (otherwise, the criminal would be able to dispute the judge who punished him, and so on). (Kant, 1964, p. 97)

This conflict exemplifies the inappropriateness of simply transferring constructs from a Western ethical system to a Confucian-based system. In his Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals, Kant (1785/1949, 1964) argued that it is wrong for traditional metaphysics to treat ideas as the target of recognition. In the section of Kritik der Vernunft that deals with transcendental dialectics, he indicated that traditional metaphysics contains rational psychology, rational cosmology, and rational theology; their targets are Seele, Welt, and Gottheit, respectively. He suggested that those Vernunft ideas are das Unbedingte. That is to say, they are free concepts unrestricted by sensory experiences. Therefore, they possess no cognitive meanings and cannot be the target of theoretical reason. Ideas discussed in traditional metaphysics are illusory in the sense of experience.

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The only effective metaphysics is Metaphysik der Sitten constructed by practical reason (Kant, 1785/1949). Metaphysik der Sitten Metaphysik der Sitten aims to seek the conditions of real Goodness as morality. Kant suggested that behaviors motivated by the will for Good should meet three conditions: 1. They originate solely from obligation rather than from an individual’s utilitarian preferences. 2. Obligatory behavior is regulated by the principle of will without external motivations. 3. Obligation implies behavioral inevitability which is a consequence of respecting moral principles. Kant suggested that all moral principles are presented as categorical imperatives distinct from hypothetical imperatives: the former being a transcendental formal imperative without empirical conditions. The universal Maxime is mandatory; it is an obligation that can be applied to any rationalist. The latter (hypothetical imperative) is a conditional statement which tells an actor the possible consequences of his behavior. For example, “if you want to be rich, you must work hard.” The proposition states the relationship between a specific means and its goal without any moral implications. An individual is autonomous so long as s/he regulates her/his own behavior using the will for Good and practices obligatory moral principles of categorical imperative. On the contrary, behaviors following hypothetical imperatives are regulated by factors other than the will for Good, so they are heteronomous. According to Kant’s formal conditions for Good, moral theories based upon hedonism and utilitarianism are all heteronomous without any universal or transcendental moral implication. Ultimate Goal of Practical Reason in the West Kant suggested that the autonomy of will is the ultimate principle of morality. The will of all rationalists is the legislator of the universal moral law. When one practices the objective, certain, and universal principle of

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morality, one treats one’s own human nature and that of others’ as the goal, instead of means. In order to demonstrate the permanent practicability of moral principle, Kant further proposed three criteria for pure practical reason: immortality of soul, free will, and the existence of God (Kant, 1788/1963). The first criterion (immortality of soul) enables an individual to permanently carry out moral principles; with the second criterion (free will), the will can be independent from the sensible world and human beings can make decisions according to moral principles in the intelligible world, while the third criterion (the existence of God) allows the unification of transcendent morality and permanent happiness. None of the three criteria can be demonstrated in the sensible world. However, they can satisfy human desire for the unification of happiness and morality which is the ultimate goal of practical reason. In other words, the three ideas (soul, freedom, and God) that are negated by theoretical reason— through the three criteria of practical reason—have been turned into the basic ideas of Kant’s moral philosophy. Viewed from a cross-cultural perspective, Kant’s “three criteria of practical reason” as discussed in his Metaphysik der Sitten, including immortality of the soul, free will, and the existence of God, are criteria for practical reason in the Western cultural tradition of Christianity. As such they may not directly apply to other civilizations. All civilizations have their own unique Metaphysi der Sitten, which constitutes their practical reason or practical wisdom for persons in those civilizations. This is the personhood that a person should follow in his/her lifeworld. Metaphysical Foundation of Confucianism In one of my major publications, I indicated that the metaphysical foundation of Confucian morality is dual belief in Heaven and spirits (Hwang, 2014). Pre-Qin Confucians believed that the transcendent Heaven is the source of all moral values. Depending on an individual’s moral performance, one may become a god or a ghost after his death, but it is impossible for him/her to become Heaven. Based on such a metaphysical belief, pre-Qin Confucians established a cultural ideal that “he who possesses a great moral qualities will certainly to corresponding high position; to corresponding great prosperity; to corresponding great name, to corresponding great age” (The Doctrine of the Mean, Ch. 17). Leader of an organization has a heavenly mandate; he must have the talent of using the reason of Zhongyung (the doctrine of the mean) to

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make a distinction between the kingly way (wang tao, 王道) and the hegemonic way (ba tao, 霸道). For a scholar (±) who may work in an organization and assist to achieve the organizational goal. He must have a conscience (良知 or 天良) for managing his professional knowledge and ability to discriminate the public (公) from the private(私) when he is facing the conflict of interest between the collective and the individual. Furthermore, no matter he is a leader, a scholar, or an ordinary person, everybody must understand the discrimination of righteousness and benefit and be able to follow the rule of “Do not do to others what you do not wish them have done to you” for being a jun zi(君子). Conceiving in terms of Hwang’s (2018b) psychodynamic model of Self-nature, when a Chinese makes a decision or judgment in accordance with his/her Heavenly conscience (天良) or conscience (良知), s/he is autonomous. On the contrary, if s/he is acting in consideration of any utilitarian or demonic principle, s/he is heteronomous. But, following Kan’t Metaphysik der Sitten, s/he is heteronomous. The sharp contrast can be illuminated only if the core idea of 恕 (compassion) has been considered carefully in these two cultural systems, respectively. It might be completely neglected in the popular pan-cultural dimensional approach of empirical research. This case can be used to illustrate that intercultural understanding might be subverted by the pan-cultural dimensional approach of not only neoliberalism (Dueck et al., 2020), but also any Western theory of psychology which has been constructed on the presumption of individualism. On the contrary, Hwang’s (2019) epistemological strategy for constructing culture-inclusive theories to understand any cultural system may provide an outlet for those indigenous psychologists who are seeking for cultural identity in their academic research works.

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Wallerstein, I. (1976). A world system perspective on the social sciences. British Journal of Sociology, 27, 243–352. Wallerstein, I. (1979). The capitalist world-economy. New York: Cambridge University Press. Wallner, F. G., & Jandl, M. J. (2001). The importance of constructive realism for the indigenous psychologies approach. Paper presented at Scientific Advances in Indigenous Psychologies: Philosophical, Cultural, and Empirical Contributions, Institute of Ethnology, Academia Sinica, Taipei. Wittgenstein, L. (1922/1961). Tractatus logico-philosophicus (with an introduction by B. Russell; Trans. by D. F. Pears & B. F. McGuinnies). London: Routledge & Kegan Paul. Yang, K.-S. (1981). The formation and change of Chinese personality: A culturalecological perspective. Acta Psychological Taiwanica, 23, 39–55. (in Chinese). Yang, K.-S. (1985). The changes of personality and behavior among Taiwanese people. Sun Yat-Sen Institute for Social Science and Philosophy, Academia Sinica (Eds.), Paper presented at the IVth Conference of Social Science: The Symposium on Modernization and Problems in Taiwan. Taipei: Sun Yat-Sen Institute for Social Science and Philosophy, Academia Sinica. (in Chinese). Yang, K.-S. (1986). Chinese personality and its change. In M. H. Bond (Ed.), The psychology of the Chinese people (pp. 106–170). Hong Kong: Oxford University Press. Yang, K.-S. (1988). Will modernization eventually eliminate cross-cultural psychological differences? In M. H. Bond (Ed.), The cross-cultural challenge to social psychology. Beverly Hills, CA: Sage. Yang, K.-S. (1993). Why do we need to develop an indigenous Chinese psychology? Indigenous Psychological Research in Chinese Societies, 1, 6–88. (in Chinese). Yang, K.-S. (1997a). Indigenous westernized Chinese psychology. In M. H. Bond (Ed.), Working at the interface of cultures: Eighteen lives in social science (pp. 62–76). London: Routledge. Yang, K.-S. (1997b). Indigenous compatibility in psychological research and its related problems. Indigenous Psychological Research in Chinese Societies, 8, 75– 120. (in Chinese). Yang, K.-S. (1997c). The third discussion on indigenous compatibility: A further clarification. Indigenous Psychological Research in Chinese Societies, 8, 197–237. (in Chinese). Yang, K.-S. (2000). Monocultural and cross-cultural indigenous approaches: The royal road to the development of a balanced global psychology. Asian Journal of Social Psychology, 3(3), 241–263. Yang, K.-S. (2012). Indigenous psychology, westernized psychology, and indigenized psychology: A non-Western psychologist. Chang Gung Journal of Humanities and Social Sciences (長庚人文社會學報), 5(1), 1–32.

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CHAPTER 5

Combined Essays Chi-jeng Yeh, Mei Chih Li, Li-Jun Ji, Kung-Yu Hsu, Kenneth Wang, and William K. Gabrenya Jr.

To Sir with Love By Chi-jeng Yeh Retired Professor of Sociology National Taiwan University, Taipei, Taiwan Undoubtedly, Professor Yang is a conscientious and outstanding psychologist who is full of exuberant energy and had a high affinity to attract younger students to follow his footsteps. He is a leader who

C. Yeh (B) Department of Sociology, National Taiwan University, Taipei, Taiwan e-mail: [email protected] M. C. Li Department of Psychology, National Chengchi University, Taipei, Taiwan L.-J. Ji Queen’s University, Kingston, ON, Canada K.-Y. Hsu Department of Psychology, National Chung-Cheng University, Chiayi County, Taiwan © The Author(s) 2020 L. Sundararajan et al. (eds.), Global Psychology from Indigenous Perspectives, Palgrave Studies in Indigenous Psychology, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-35125-0_5

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exudes unparalleled charisma. Here, I want to express in particular that although Professor Yang has criticized traditional Chinese culture (especially Confucian culture) in his various written works, we inevitably find that Professor Yang always treated people with a peaceful attitude and a mind full with understanding. In effect, it is precisely the model with the “benevolence” spirit advocated by Confucian intellectuals (or using the traditional Chinese customary saying, “literati”). Professor Yang’s achievements in his life can be described as diverse and multifaceted. The impact is not limited to Taiwan, but to the Chinese world throughout Asia; not just academics but the entire society. In addition to being a professional psychologist, he also plays the role of a leading public intellectual. In all of these, Professor Yang deserves to be a cosmopolitan type of intellectual-scholar. What I would like to emphasize further is that we cannot evaluate Professor Yang’s professional role-playing as a psychologist simply in terms of his actual academic contributions per se, because the entire external environment (especially the political ones) he got to encounter was quite special. In the 1970s and even early, for a Taiwanese social psychologist with academic conscience and social responsibility, in order to make academic achievements truly successful, he did really need a good deal of courage and perseverance to support, in addition to a spirit of loyalty to academics as a lifelong career. What I try to say is that under the ruling regime with authoritarian dictatorship at that time, any academic movement (or even a small pieces of activity) initiated by scholars from humanities and social sciences in particular would inevitably be put under a close surveillance by a special agency and eventually be suppressed or even persecuted if they felt in need. This was exactly a fatal destiny that Professor Yang must take if he chose to take a firm position to be loyal to academic conscience. And in fact he did without any hesitation which made him earn great support and respect from the members of the academic community and the general public as well.

K. Wang Fuller Theological Seminary, Pasadena, CA, USA W. K. Gabrenya Jr. Florida Institute of Technology, Melbourne, FL, USA

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Since the 1960s, around five academic movements have launched on the campus of National Taiwan University. Professor Yang participated in all of them and played the role of leading promoter for four of these movements. These four mutually related movements were: promoting interdisciplinary integration of social research, engaging in a collective research program on the character of Chinese people, promoting the research on modernity and modernization, and finally initiating the indigenization of behavioral and social science research. As far as the historical process of the development of those ideas is concerned, the concept of interdisciplinary integration is the backbone-like driving force for the collective research on the character of Chinese people, while the research of modernity and modernization is to promote the research on the character of Chinese people as a mutually reinforced agenda. Most importantly, the promotion of indigenization of behavioral and social science research can be regarded as the final achievement of this series of academic movements. What made Professor Yang become a political “conspirator” in the eyes of the KMT regime’s authorities was the movement of the first three ones which apparently were verdicted to violate the ideological taboo of the ruling regime at that time. Professor Yang was then identified as a “special” figure needed to pay a special and close “attention.” The book entitled “The Character of Chinese People” was even banned from publication for quite a period of time. Nevertheless, regardless of the interference of political factors, taking only the impact of the academic movement alone into consideration, the fourth movement is the movement that Professor Yang has exhausted the most, and his greatest contribution to Taiwan and even the entire Chinese academic community. Its influence is still fermenting. Although there are different criticisms come up from the academic circle, there is no doubt that Professor Yang’s many theoretical ideas on “the indigenization of behavioral and social research,” such as cultural–ecological interactionism, theory of dual-Y basic needs, and the so-called “theory of indigenous fitness” are the pioneering arguments that have been proven as the key concepts to guide the development of many theories that follow. Finally, from what he has done to promote these movements alone, we can conclude that Professor Yang is a scholar full of academic mission and passion, and also a practitioner who realizes academic ideals with practical actions. No doubt at all, Professor Yang is a man in action and the spiritual leader of the behavioral and social science research in Taiwan and will be continuously so. Taking the motto “modernization

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is an irreversible historical trend” as a premise, Professor Yang has taken a great step to carry on his mission in conducting academic research and promoting social reform that, as he strongly commit to, will finally induce “indigenization” to weave the dream of academic (and cultural) subjectivity that eventually becomes reality.

My Memory of Teacher Yang Mei Chih Li Retired Professor of Psychology National Chengchi University, Taipei, Taiwan During the time period when Teacher Yang could only lay in bed and had difficulty expressing himself, I had many more opportunities than others to visit him either at his home or at the hospital. When I visited him at home, I usually rode my bicycle along the Jingmei River (景美溪) and locked it on one side of Zhongxing Bridge (中興橋) Then I took about a 15-minute walk to his home across the River. For the last four or five years of his life, the only meaningful thing I could do for him was to massage his legs and arms, as he could not exercise by himself anymore. I learned this skill when I was a child by watching the blind massagers work on my father’s body, so he could feel relaxed after a hard day’s work. Teacher Yang always rewarded me with a pleasant and relaxed facial expression. People who knew Teacher Yang had several different ways to call him: Dr. Yang, Professor Yang, Mr. Yang (楊先生), and Teacher Yang (楊老 師). I only called him “Teacher Yang.” In actuality, I had only taken one course in general psychology from him in 1965, when he was an instructor before he went to the States to pursue his Ph.D. degree in 1966. He returned to Taiwan in July 1969. During his absence from Taiwan, I got my master’s degree in experimental psychology, followed by a teaching position as an instructor at a private college far away from my hometown Taipei. If I had kept my specialty in experimental psychology, I would not have been influenced so deeply by Teacher Yang, whose specialties were personality psychology and social psychology. Later, when I moved to teach in a national university, I was asked to surrender the assignment of teaching experimental psychology to another new faculty member, because I did not have a Ph.D. degree in experimental psychology. I decided to

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change my main specialty from experimental psychology to social psychology and aimed to get a Ph.D. degree in social psychology as well. It took me 17 long years to actualize my goal. At age 44, I applied for a very prestigious and generous three-year full scholarship sponsored by the Taiwanese government to pursue a Ph.D. degree in social psychology in the States. After having gone through three sets of official examinations, I went into the final stage—an oral interview with two psychology professors. Teacher Yang was one of the two. Over all these years, I like to believe that it was Teacher Yang who played a key role in the final decision of my application. I received my Ph.D. degree in social psychology in 1992 and became one of the most active members in Teacher Yang’s “Indigenous Psychology Group,” both academically and socially. Being a member of this group was the happiest and most significant time period of my professional life. However, I had to retire from the academic arena in 2006 because of my failing vision and bone conditions. For that, I always feel sorry to Teacher Yang and the whole Indigenous Psychology Society.

Fig. 5.1 The author (Mei Chih Li) and Mrs. Yang at Teacher Yang’s memorial service on 2018/9/1 (copyright by the author)

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Teacher Yang passed away peacefully in his sleep in the early morning of 2018/7/17. I went to the hospital to see him on 2018/7/12 and 7/13. Somehow I had the feeling it was time to say goodbye. In the afternoon of 7/13, I stayed with his wife in the hospital at Teacher Yang’s bedside for more than three hours. I might have been the last fellow comrade to whom Teacher Yang gave a slight glimpse (Fig. 5.1).

Encounters with a Noble Soul: Remembering Professor Yang Li-Jun Ji Queen’s University, Kingston, ON, Canada I never knew that you could love a place because of a person until it happened to me. That is how I feel when thinking about Taiwan. In our elementary school books, Taiwan was described as a beautiful and exotic island. However, it did not feel close and dear to me until 1993, when I met a group of psychologists from Taiwan, led by Prof. Kuo-Shu Yang. They made a permanent mark on my life and changed it in a meaningful way, for which I am forever thankful. At that time, there were no institutions in China that offered a Ph.D. program in social psychology. Professor Yang took it as his mission to train the future generation of Chinese social psychologists. He raised funds, brought his former students and colleagues—all Ph.D. holders, and offered various graduate courses in psychology during an intense period of 6 weeks in the summer. The program accepted about 40–50 students each summer, selected from across the country. China was still very poor at that time (e.g., my parents made less than 50 US dollars per month), so Prof Yang worked hard to raise funds to cover every cost—the courses were free, accommodation was free, and even travel was covered. Professor Yang dedicated his time and effort to offering the summer school for at least 6 years. I was fortunate enough to be selected to participate in the program in 1993 in Shanhaiguan (Shanhai Pass). This experience has changed my life by inspiring my career and the research I do today. It was the first time I had been exposed to systematic training in psychology. We took various courses, including social psychology, personality, and statistics. The content of the courses was important, but the close interactions and relationships I developed with the professors were even more valuable. It was a hot summer, and the classroom had no air

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conditioning. Prof. Yang and others spent the day with us in the same classroom, had meals with us at the same dining hall, and sometimes went sightseeing with us on weekends. To this day, many of us still remember the countless times Prof. Yang read or wrote papers in the classroom, with sweat on his face and a fan in his hand. Through it all, Prof. Yang remained determined and devoted to his goal to advance Chinese psychology. Like many of my classmates, I wondered what motivated Prof. Yang to take all the troubles—political, financial, and personal, of coming to the Mainland to offer summer school. I found the answer in his own words one day in class. Prof. Yang talked about a book edited by Michael Harris Bond, The Psychology of the Chinese People (published in 1986). Prof. Yang became emotional when saying the following words, “I feel sad that, for a book on the Chinese people, I was the only contributing author who is Chinese. We need more Chinese psychologists to contribute to this field.” That must have been one of the major motivating factors that led him to give all that he had and more to the advancement of Chinese psychology. Like many students in the summer school, I admired him, not only for his scholarship but also for his complete selflessness. His strong sense of mission in advancing Chinese psychology has inspired many of his students to work hard with determination. His effort and expectations have produced fruitful results some 20 years later, as many of the former students from the summer school have become influential researchers at different universities in China. When Michael Bond’s newly edited book, Oxford Handbook of Chinese Psychology, was released in 2010, Prof. Yang must have been elated to see the contributions of many Chinese psychologists, including me and my own students! I maintained correspondence with Prof. Yang after the summer. I have kept all of the letters and postcards he had sent to me. Even nowadays when I read his words, I still feel warm and moved. He was a mentor to me, guiding me in my career and life. He not only encouraged me to pursue research and advance my studies but also kindly offered to help when I experienced financial difficulties. In the summer of 1994, my paper was accepted at a Chinese psychology conference in Hohhot (where Prof. Yang offered his summer school in 1994) but I did not have sufficient funds to attend it. After learning about my situation, Prof. Yang wrote to me that he would cover my trip and accommodation. Unfortunately, I was too busy (preparing to take English exams that summer) to find time to go but appreciated his offer immensely. I was only a master’s student

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at the time and never imaged that Prof. Yang, as busy as he was, would have time to think of me and be so generous to offer financial help. To this day, I am grateful for his thoughtfulness and nurturing spirit. I consider myself a lucky person to have known Prof. Yang. After summer school in 1994, when he returned to Beijing, he invited me to meet him at his hotel and treated me to a nice meal. I told him that I was going to apply to US schools to pursue a Ph.D. degree. He was encouraging, but also cautioned me in the meantime that things might not go as planned due to uncontrollable factors. He advised that I should have a backup plan in case I was not successful in my application. When discussing my future, he was like a father and an advisor: caring, constructive, and patient. I did not ask him for a recommendation letter because I did not want to bother him too much with his busy schedule, although he said he would be pleased to provide one. He was very happy when he learned that I received a full scholarship from the University of Michigan. The Chinese government required me to pay back about 3000 US dollars for the free education I received in China before allowing me to go abroad. Prof. Yang learned of this and told me not to worry about it as he would pay the fees for me. He explained that other people had helped him when he was young. In the letter, he wrote, “… Indeed, I do not only want to help you, I am also trying to help myself to fulfill my wish of advancing Chinese psychology.” He then added, “of course, when you have the resources in the future, you should try to help young people who are in need.” I did not take him up on his offer and borrowed money instead, but his kindness and generosity are kept in my memory forever. Before I left for the United States in the summer of 1995, Prof. Yang and I were planning to meet in Beijing, but his trip had been rescheduled due to other changes, so we unfortunately missed our chance to say farewell in person. He called my home in the summer, giving me advice about studying abroad, like an old friend. I was surprised to receive another phone call from a professor in Beijing. Apparently, Prof. Yang had asked him to give me $1500, as a “farewell gift.” His letter was full of high expectations of me and he asked me to keep it between us. I understood that he did not want people to know about his kind deed. I am sure, though, that he would forgive me for talking about it now. We maintained contact with each other during my graduate studies and the early years of my work (until he got sick). I would call him before the Chinese New Year, and he would share his life, his work, and his

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concerns with me. Whenever I made some small progress in my research, he was so happy and proud to hear about it! Occasionally he would mail me his new papers. I am sure he expected me to return to China after getting my Ph.D. Instead, I chose to stay in North America for a better academic environment, which made me feel a bit guilty in front him, although I am doing my best to contribute to Chinese psychology by studying cultural differences between Chinese people and North Americans, and by helping to train the young generation of Chinese psychologists in China and abroad. I had never been to Taiwan, but knowing such a great and generous man in Taiwan made it feel so dear to me in my heart. When finding out that the Asian Association of Social Psychology was going to have its conference in Taipei in 1999, I was excited and submitted a presentation right away. That was my first trip to Taiwan, but it felt like going home. I was happy to see Prof. Yang at the conference. During our meeting, I was able to return $1500 to Prof. Yang (as I had enough savings with my scholarship). I am sure he would have used the money to help other young people in need. In 2017, I received an invitation to give a workshop at Chang Gung Hospital near Taipei. I accepted the invitation without hesitation. It had been a while since I saw Prof. Yang, and I wanted to go to visit him! My husband had heard all the stories I told about Prof. Yang, and wanted to go with me to pay this great man a visit. As soon as we arrived in Taipei on Nov 6th (after over 20 hours of travel), I called Prof. Chu Ruey-Ling, Prof. Yang’s very first Ph.D. student, who is like a daughter to him, asking about the possibility of visiting Prof. Yang. She said we could try, but was not sure whether Prof. Yang’s condition would be good enough for me to see him. I had heard that his health was deteriorating, and regretted that I had not gone to see him sooner. The following day, Prof. Chu took us directly to the hospital where Prof. Yang was staying. God must have blessed us—Prof. Yang was doing well enough to have us as visitors. He was lying in bed, awake, when we entered the room, which he shared with two other patients. He looked pale and thin, but his eyes looked as wise and thoughtful as before. I started to greet him, although he was barely able to say anything. He noticed my husband, whom he had never met before. I introduced my husband to Prof. Yang, who raised his right hand for a shake, as much of a gentleman as ever. We were asked to leave the room for a while so that the nurse could do some work with Prof. Yang. Shortly after, the nurse came to us, telling us that Prof. Yang was

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looking for us. “Where are they? Where?” he had asked the nurse. He must have been happy to see us, but it was difficult to say goodbye. When telling him we had to leave, he shook my hand for a long, long time, with such strength, even in his condition. Looking at his face, I seemed to see affection, reluctance, and expectations. It was hard to leave, but I thank heaven for giving us the opportunity to see him for one last time, especially during a time when his mind was relatively clear. In early July 2018, I learned that Prof. Yang’s wife had decided to give up further treatment on Prof. Yang. Two weeks later, on July 16th, Prof. Yang passed away peacefully in his sleep at the age of 85. On August 8th, Prof. Yang’s ashes were spread on Dharma Drum Mountain in Taipei, blending in with nature. Whenever I think of his words, his smiles, and what he has done for Chinese psychology and myself, I cannot help but feel tears in my eyes. His great wisdom, generous kindness, and broad mind, just like the mountain he rests on, will stay with me for the rest of my life. Most importantly, his spirit will continue to inspire me to pursue a meaningful life that is beyond my personal self.

Remembering Professor Kuo-Shu Yang: My Years with a Pioneer in the Frontiers of Chinese Indigenous Psychology Kung-Yu Hsu Department of Psychology National Chung-Cheng University Chiayi County, Taiwan “Blaze the trail.” “Don’t be afraid to make a mistake.” “Being brave to develop the theory of yours.” These were what Professor Yang always said to young scholars and students. Then he eagerly elaborated Curly-Beard (虯髯客傳, a traditional Chinese fiction) to encourage and inspire them to devote their energies to pursuing excellence and thinking big for the Chinese indigenous psychology. Those of Professor Yang’s words embedded and echoed in my mind since when I had him as a mentor. As one of his last Ph.D. students, I was privileged to work closely with Professor Yang as he launched a series of research on Chinese personality traits, Chinese self, and modernity. Those experiences shaped my professional career because Professor Yang always tried to help his students become the best version of themselves. My first work under Professor Yang’s supervision involved the establishment of indigenous taxonomy of Chinese Personality traits from

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1995 until 2000. Collaborating with Professor Dengfeng Wang from the Department of Psychology at Peking University, we tried to establish a comprehensive list of Chinese personality traits. We accomplished a lot of things during this five-year research journey. The toughest part of this process was, in my view, to inspect those results of factor analyses visually. To condense these personality adjectives into meaningful dimensions and make them comparable for different Chinese populations, we inspected visually the 2-factor to 10-factor solutions for nine sets of data that come from more than two thousand college students and adults in Taiwan and mainland China. We spent three to five hours at each meeting and had a meeting every one or two weeks for nearly two years to make the final decision. When we met to inspect and discuss the factor solutions, Professor Yang was always fully involved and carefully compared different factor solutions and tries to get the meaning of each factor. In addition, Professor Yang often gave new insights about the meaning of a factor, suggested different ways of re-analyzing the data, and pointed out the mistakes or unreasonable parts of solutions in the course of each discussion. “Statistics is important, but not to be led by nose. Researchers need to have his judgments and insights about the data.” he always reminded me. The most impressive to me was Professor Yang’s perseverance and detail-mindedness. Although Professor Yang was extremely busy as the Vice President of Academia Sinica (1996–2000) during this period, he seldom postponed or canceled the meetings we had scheduled. Sometimes we even held the meetings in his office of Vice President. I felt that due to his love and involvement in this research project (I guessed that it was the same way for his other research topics), it seemed like nothing could hinder him to go forward and “blaze the trail.” On a professional level, Professor Yang was a leading voice that constantly pursued innovation and demanded excellence from himself and his colleagues. On a personal level, he had a kind, compassionate, and broadminded soul who gave each person he met what they needed and asked for nothing in return. I will miss him deeply.

What I Remember of Professor Yang Kenneth Wang Fuller Theological Seminary, USA I was really blessed to be Prof. Yang’s research assistant during 2002– 2003. That was a year when I just started to learn how to conduct research in psychology (as I wasn’t a psychology major in undergrad).

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When I first applied to be Prof. Yang’s research assistant, I wasn’t even aware of his stature, but I quickly picked that up by seeing how well respected he was by others. I gained significant research skills and knowledge by working for Prof. Yang. But most importantly, through reading his articles I gained a deep awareness and understanding of who I was as a person with Chinese cultural roots. In reading his chapter titled, “Theories and Research in Chinese Personality: An Indigenous Approach,” I was fascinated by how he depicted the four dimensions (relationship-oriented, familistic/grouporiented, authoritarian-oriented, and other-oriented self) of his Chinese Social Orientation Theory of Self. For example, through his description of the authoritarian orientation, I realized how my worldview was rooted in this Chinese social context, which was different from my experiences living and studying in the United States. It also explained the cultural struggles that I had encountered in the United States. Prof. Yang’s theory answered lifelong questions of my identity at that point and unlocked a door in my journey of identity searching for who I was. I am forever grateful for the impact Prof. Yang had on me as an emerging psychologist, but even more so as a person. Beyond the work setting, a fond memory I had of Prof. Yang was over a casual lunch. Wanting to know more of him beyond a researcher and to lighten our conversation, I asked him what he did for leisure. He started talking about how he enjoyed watching a tv series set in an ancient Chinese dynasty. As he was sharing, he naturally talked about observations of the tv series that linked with his views of Chinese culture and personalities. The way he segued into Chinese psychology was so genuine and it seemed that research was ingrained in this daily life. I was deeply impressed by his passion for Chinese indigenous psychology, which was not just his research, but his daily focus and lived experiences. He lived it! For a novice like me, I got a taste of what a really good researcher was like. It set the bar really high by witnessing such a giant as my first research mentor. For a long time, I felt like a research imposter compared to him, but in all honesty, I’ve yet to meet another researcher that lived up to that standard. Prof. Yang is greatly missed, but his impact lives on…

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Kuo-Shu Yang Has Shaped My Career for Three Decades William K. Gabrenya Jr. Florida Institute of Technology, USA Nearing the end of my academic career, I look back and wonder what went well, what paths I might better have taken, who made a difference. Yang Kuo-Shu made a difference. I can trace a surprising portion of my current efforts and interests back to him, 38 years after we first met. Dr. Yang organized the 1981 joint conference of the International Association for Cross-Cultural Psychology and the International Council of Psychologists in Taipei. It was an odd conference because the organizational cultures of IACCP and ICP were seemingly incompatible. While IACCP and ICP bickered, Dr. Yang was the ever-gracious host who assured that all participants would enjoy a fine and memorable experience. He obtained funding to send a group of us on an around-the-island tour of the ROC Ten Great Projects (as I recall the name), including a flight to Kinmen (Jinmén/金門) Island featuring a tour of its frontline trenches, a new steel mill in Kaoshiung (Gaoxióng/高雄), the tomb of Chiang KaiShek, a China Youth Corps retreat in the mountains, and other projects that I only barely remember. Despite his political difficulties with the authoritarian Kuomintang government of Taiwan, Yang seemed proud of Taiwan’s accomplishments. Upon my return to the United States, my Taiwanese wife revealed some of his political activities and, astonishingly, I was able to find the journal Thought and Word (思與言) in the Ohio State University library. Dr. Yang was instrumental in helping me obtain a visiting faculty appointment at National Taiwan University and a small research grant for my first sabbatical as an academic cross-cultural psychologist in 1988–1989. That tumultuous year in Taiwan provided an immersive experience in Taiwanese society that influenced my career in several ways. Martial Law had been lifted a year before I arrived, pro-democracy demonstrations were taking place frequently in Taipei and elsewhere, and a lot of barbed wire was being dispensed. It was exciting to witness firsthand a mainly peaceful political modernization just as I became aware of Dr. Yang’s ambitious psychological modernity research program. With Dr. Yang’s help, I developed a new research project studying Taiwan modernization and social change, informed by the sociologist Melvin Kohn’s materialist theory of social class. Using Yang’s TM Scales and

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other methods, I tracked modernity in Taiwan for about 20 years in a long-term, partly longitudinal study. One evening, as I was working late in my NTU office, Dr. Yang stopped by to chat and I learned the details of his family’s escape from Shangdong at the end of the Chinese civil war. From others, I became aware of his brave, principled, probably too-risky attempt to influence the KMT government’s policies from the academy and his near exile to Green Island had it not been for the intercession of his wife’s (Lee Pen-Hwa 李本華) family. Aware of how Dr. Yang’s activism reflected a long tradition of scholarly responsibility in Chinese society, he became my model for what I felt was the proper role of an academic. Most readers of this volume are aware of Dr. Yang’s intellectual and organizational leadership of the Taiwan Indigenous Psychology Movement (TIPM; my term) (e.g., see Gabrenya & Sun, 2015). The TIPM impressed me as such a striking, classic example of an intellectual social movement that it inspired a deep dive into the sociology of science and a research project in which I recruited Taiwan’s psychologists as respondents (e.g., see Gabrenya, Kung, & Chen, 2006). Dr. Yang and Dr. Hwang Kwang-Kuo (黃光國) opened the door to this complicated, intellectually intense community, into which I naively entered and struggled to understand adequately. Back teaching at National Taiwan University in spring 1998 when Dr. Yang retired, I was able to videotape his farewell address. My recording of his Chinese-language talk afforded compelling evidence of one of his defining communication skills, super-fantastic body language! Years later, I had the opportunity to interview him, in English, providing a record of his thinking about indigenous psychology. I experienced my “Yang Kuo-Shu moment,” as I thought of it at the time, in 2003 as I addressed a group of about 50 leaders of local liberal, anti-war, and environmentalist organizations at a workshop I helped organize to coordinate political opposition to the American President Bush. (The US Army had just occupied Iraq, a historically disastrous error.) It was only later that we learned that we had been placed on government “persons of interest” lists and informants had been planted in our organizational meetings—but my activism was hardly comparable to Dr. Yang’s. Over a decade later, at a lunch arranged by Dr. Sun ChienRu (孫蒨如) and Dr. Lin Wen-Ying (林文瑛) at Chung Yuan Christian University, I had the opportunity to relate this epiphanic experience to Dr. Yang. I think he was pleased. It was the last time I saw him.

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References Gabrenya, W. K., Jr., Kung, M.-C., & Chen, L.-Y. (2006). Understanding the Taiwan indigenous psychology movement: A sociology of science approach. Journal of Cross-Cultural Psychology, 37 (6), 597–622. Gabrenya, W. K., Jr., & Sun, C.-R. (孫蒨如) (2015). Kuo-Shu Yang: Scholar and activist. In G. J. Rich & U. P. Gielen (Eds.), International pioneers: Portraits and perspectives (pp. 201–212). Charlotte, NC: Information Age Publishing.

PART II

International Critique of Prof. Yang’s Model of Global Psychology

CHAPTER 6

The Role of Reason in Cultural Interpretation: Some Talmudic Distinctions for Indigenous and Cultural Psychology Richard A. Shweder

When I first encountered Professor Kuo-Shu Yang’s writings about Chinese indigenous psychology they prompted me to think more deeply about the discipline of cultural psychology I was practicing. His writings impelled me to address three questions: (1) What are the differences, if any, between cultural psychology and indigenous psychology?; (2) What is the role of reason in cultural interpretation?; and (3) Do the indigenous psychologies of different peoples have psychological relevance and applications beyond their points of origin; or, in other words, might an indigenous psychology with a “Chinese soul” illuminate the “soul” (and “mentalities”) of members of non-Chinese populations, and vice versa? That particular vice versa—the idea of a mutual illumination of different “souls” across cultural traditions reminds me in this context of fond remembrance of a lovely and memorable conversation I had many years

R. A. Shweder (B) Department of Comparative Human Development, University of Chicago, Chicago, IL, USA e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s) 2020 L. Sundararajan et al. (eds.), Global Psychology from Indigenous Perspectives, Palgrave Studies in Indigenous Psychology, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-35125-0_6

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ago with Kuo-shu Yang during a visit to the Institute of Ethnology at the Academia Sinica in Taipei. I was the visiting guest lecturer of the day and my talk was followed by a Chinese banquet generously hosted by Professor Yang. He and I and my wife Candy Shweder were seated next to each other at a large round table with an inviting variety of Chinese dishes circulating around its center. Dr. Heidi Fung was seated at the table. She and I recently compared our memories of the conversation I am about to report. At some point during the dinner the great one, the “father of Chinese indigenous psychology” turned to me and asked the following question: “Rick, could it be that you are Jewish?” I was not totally astonished by his query, which might have seemed out of the blue had I not been asked that question several times in India over the years. On one occasion a Hindu Brahman and specialist in Ayurvedic medicine had even suggested to me that Jews and Hindus are historical cousins descended from the same ancient holy man and then dazzled me with numerous linguistic examples suggesting that link between Jews and Hindus of this sort: “BRAHMAN” is a variation on “ABRAHAM” and “SARASWATI” a variation on “SARAH WATI.” “Yes, I am Jewish but why do you ask?” I responded to Professor Yang; and then he warmed my soul by saying “We Chinese people like Jewish people. We have so much in common: a love of family, a love of food and a love of the type of intellectualism we associate with the Confucian and Talmudic traditions.” [His comment even led me to wonder more deeply about my own interest in the Hindu Brahmanical tradition.] So, let me try to live up to his expectations by undertaking a short Talmudic reflection (or at least one aimed at drawing some fine distinctions) about the role of “rationality” or “doing things for good reasons” in cultural psychology. The philosopher Thomas Nagel once wrote that “an essential feature of reasoning is its generality” and for reasons to be reasons “they would have to justify anyone else (believing, valuing, or) doing the same in my place.” For someone like myself, who seeks to identify and make explicit the good reasons for doing something that are implicit, immanent within, or inside diverse cultural customs, a great deal turns on how one goes about substantively filling in the notion of generality associated with being “in my place.” This approach to interpreting the meaning of a customary practice by spelling out the good reasons that might lead a reasonable and morally sensitive person to embrace the custom presupposes that not

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every position in the empirical world is a “place” in the sense that would support a claim of reason, although many positions are. That is one way to think about the difference between a “genuine” and a “spurious” culture, as the difference between a “place” that can support a claim of reason and a mere “position,” which cannot. In a moment I will suggest that under certain interpretations of “place,” reason can be made one of the foundation stones for both indigenous psychology and cultural psychology as fields of disciplined inquiry. “Reason” can be made so because it is universally true that (for example) any person who does things for good reasons might want their marriage to be arranged, if you are a young male or female living in a rural Indian village. If one could in fact succeed at enumerating some good reasons— I think I could come up with a few—that would justify anyone in such a position wanting an arranged marriage, then one would have also succeeded at establishing the social position of young men and women in rural India as a “place” supportable by reason. It would no longer be merely a position to be understood solely in terms of the contingencies of power, the inertial force of habit, or the weight of tradition. In other words, cultural psychology, at least as I have practiced it as an anthropologist, can be thought of as the attempt to show that various cultural customs can be rationally justified. The aim of this version of cultural psychology is to show how reason is compatible with genuine diversity in what people believe, value, feel, want, and do. If one is to succeed in this type of scholarly pursuit one must start by carefully documenting the existence of diversity in some practice (e.g., love marriage versus arranged marriage, separate sleeping arrangement versus co-sleeping arrangement for children and adults, variations in the sexual division of labor, filial piety, and so forth) and end by being able to convince anyone who is willing to listen that what is done in that society at that time is done for reasons that no rational person must necessarily reject. The questions I am addressing here—the role of reason and rationality in the interpretation of diverse cultural practices—I have addressed before, for example in a keynote address at the Asian Association of Social Psychology Meetings in Taipei on August 7, 1999. And much of what I say below directly recapitulates or updates my thoughts from back then, which were published in the Asian Journal of Social Psychology (Shweder, 2000). I associate that special occasion and that talk (which was only one of six keynote addresses by eminent scholars addressing the connections between cross-cultural psychology, indigenous psychology, and cultural

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psychology) with Kuo-Shu Yang, who given the location of the meeting and his status at the time was the foremost of all the speakers. I began my own talk by juxtaposing the apparently conflicting views of two academic grand masters, one a Chinese social psychologist and admirer of Confucian insights (namely, Professor Kuo-Shu Yang), and the other a Jewish American cultural anthropologist who had once trained to be a Rabbi and always exemplified for me the critical and interpretive strength of Talmudic reasoning (namely, Professor Melford Spiro). Spiro was a virtuoso at drawing fine distinctions while seeking to construct a picture of the underlying psychic unity of human kind. Professor Kuo-Shu Yang, of course, was the widely recognized leader of the “Indigenous Psychology” movement in Taiwan. Professor Melford Spiro was a widely recognized leader of the “Psychoanalytic Anthropology” movement in the United States. I focused on the creative tension in their perspectives—the encounter between parochialism and ecumenism—which lead me to think that while you can’t live by ecumenism alone (which is one reason I study the local), any defensible parochialism is really an example of what I like to call “universalism without the uniformity.” The identification of meaningful and interpretable differences always presupposes some base set of abstract absolutes or universals whose mark one must come to recognize in diverse local manifestations. Thus the study of the cultural psychology of morality might be thought of as the investigation of the fate of moral absolutes in history. Professor Kuo-Shu Yang (1997, p. 65), who always loved to speak on behalf of the parochial or local, had written quite provocatively as follows: I finally found the reason why doing Westernized psychological research with Chinese subjects was no longer satisfying or rewarding to me. When an American psychologist, for example, was engaged in research, he or she could spontaneously let his or her American cultural and philosophical orientations and ways of thinking be freely and effectively reflected in choosing a research question, defining a concept, constructing a theory and designing a method. On the other hand, when a Chinese psychologist in Taiwan was conducting research, his or her strong training by overlearning the knowledge and methodology of American psychology tended to prevent his or her Chinese values, ideas, concepts and ways of thinking from being adequately reflected in the successive stages of the research process. Research of this kind resulted in an Americanized Chinese psychology without a Chinese “soul.” Research findings in such an imposed, “soulless psychology” would not do much good in explaining, predicting and

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understanding Chinese behavior, simply because the imported Westernized concepts, theories, methods and tools habitually adopted by Chinese psychologists could not do justice to the complicated, unique aspects and patterns of Chinese people’s psychological and behavioral characteristics.

He goes on to say (1997, p. 69), I began to realize that North American psychology, the most developed in the world, was an endogenous kind of indigenous psychology (Enriquez, 1989) in the sense that its major concepts, theories, methods and findings have originally and spontaneously evolved partly from the European intellectual traditions but mainly from the cultural and social philosophical matrix of the American society.

In contrast, Professor Spiro, who always loved to speak on behalf of the ecumenical or universal, often wrote things that added up in effect to an oppositional denial of Professor Yang’s assertions. His following remarks were not explicitly directed at Professor Yang but rather at the famous American cultural anthropologist Clifford Geertz, with special reference to Geertz’s attempt to spell out the indigenous psychology or local cultural psychology of the Balinese people. Nevertheless, Professor Spiro might just as well have been responding to Professor Yang. Here is what Spiro said: I am not sure that if anthropology and psychology had arisen in Bali [read Taipei] that they would have been essentially different from what they are, given their Western origins. I am not referring to folk theories or ethnoself theories because, after all, the theories of the self in psychology and anthropology are not the Western folk theories of the self. I would think that one of the points about science is that it is about demystification – it takes these folk theories and it demystifies them. Although there might be some differences in the contours of Balinese [read Taiwanese] anthropology and psychology, I assume that they too would engage in the process of demystification. And I would like to believe that Balinese [read Taiwanese] and American psychologists and anthropologists would, qua anthropologists and psychologists, arrive at some kind of common view of the nature of human beings and the nature of culture, so that the differences between them would be no greater than the differences within ‘Western’ anthropology and psychology. (quoted in Shweder & LeVine, 1984, p. 16)

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Let’s call his comment “Spiro’s Challenge to Indigenous and Cultural Psychology.” It is a good challenge. Unfortunately, Professor Yang and Professor Spiro never met although I would have loved to observe a conversation between the two of them. Nevertheless, wouldn’t it be a useful exercise and a way to honor Professor Yang for every student of indigenous psychology or cultural psychology to try to point out what he or she thinks is right (if anything) and what he or she thinks is wrong (if anything) with Professor Spiro’s formulation?

What Is Cultural Psychology? In my view Indigenous psychology and cultural psychology are very similar to each other, although perhaps not identical. If I were to point to any potential difference I might tentatively suggest the two disciplines might have somewhat different estimations of the global relevance and significance of local knowledge. But let me be more specific about my conception of the defining characteristics of each approach. Allow me to start with “cultural psychology,” if for no other reason than the fact that I have been one of its many proselytizers (along with Alan Fiske, Jonathan Haidt, Steve Heine, Jacob Hickman, Lene Jensen, Shinobu Kitayama, Robert LeVine, John Lucy, Hazel Markus, Joan Miller and many others). What is the object of cultural psychology? What is its proper aim? What is its proper subject matter? In three essays entitled “Cultural psychology: What is it?” (Shweder, 1990), “Cultural psychology: Who needs it?” (Shweder & Sullivan, 1993), and “The ‘mind’ of cultural psychology” (Shweder, 1996) (see also Shweder, 1991, 1993, 1999; Shweder, Mahapatra, & Miller, 1990; Shweder & Sullivan, 1990; Shweder, Much, Mahapatra, & Park, 1997; Shweder et al., 1998) I described the discipline in all of the following ways, which I shall group into two clusters, namely statements about psychological diversity and statements about the level or unit of analysis for cultural psychology (that is to say, the nature of cultural psychology’s psychological facts). Here, as throughout this brief essay, I reintroduce and recapitulate points from Shweder (2000). Concerning psychological diversity: 1. Cultural psychology is a project designed to reassess the uniformitarian principle of psychic unity and aimed at a credible theory of psychological pluralism. I should note in passing that any theory of psychological pluralism would lack credibility if it staunchly denied

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the existence of any and all absolutes or universals. That is why a credible theory of psychological pluralism, one that honors our true, deep, and significant differences cannot and does not entail the denial of all universals or of our common humanity. Indeed cultural psychology presupposes many universals (see Shweder et al., 1998). However, the search for and the privileging of things that are empirically uniform or universally binding across all peoples and cultures is a project that goes under some other name. It is not cultural psychology, although surely cultural psychology need not be the only game in town. 2. Cultural psychology is the study of ethnic and cultural sources of diversity in emotional and somatic functioning, self-organization, moral evaluation, social cognition, and human development. 3. Cultural psychology is an investigation that constructs a model of a culture’s distinctive psychology by thickly describing the specific sources of non-equivalence and non-comparability that arise when stimulus situations are transported from one interpretive community to another. 4. Cultural psychology is psychological anthropology without the premise of psychic unity. So, as you can see, a central claim of cultural psychology is that there may be multiple diverse psychologies, rather than a single uniform psychology. And a central problematic of the field is to make sense of that provocative claim and to do so, as one must, without denying all universals. As noted earlier, “Universalism without the uniformity” is the slogan I use to characterize cultural psychology and to insulate the discipline from the careless (indeed reckless) suggestion that it is a form of radical relativism (see Cassaniti & Menon, 2017). Concerning the level or unit of analysis issue or the nature of psychological facts in cultural psychology: 5. Any particular cultural psychology is made up out of socially inherited “goals, values and pictures of the world” that have a causal relationship to and help us understand and make sense of the choices, local action patterns, and actual lives of intentional agents or rational meaning-makers who do things for reasons.

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6. Cultural psychologists can be viewed as naturalists who go searching for “mentalities,” carefully describing their distribution and form. In this regard, cultural psychology is the study of local “mentalities” rather than merely the study of a universal “mind.”

Distinguishing “Mentalities” from “Mind” The distinction between the study of “mentalities” (the proper unit of analysis for cultural psychology) and the study of “mind” (a non-cultural phenomenon) can be drawn in the following terms (Shweder, 1996), which I recapitulate here, in slight paraphrase. I use the term “mind” to refer to the totality of actual and potential conceptual contents of human cognitive processes, where “cognitive” refers to any process that enables human beings to represent “ideas” (conceptual content) and to attain knowledge by deriving or computing the implications of those “ideas.” In contrast, I use the term “mentality” to refer to the actual cognitive functioning of a particular person or people. To describe a “mentality” (e.g., the “mentality” of Oriya Hindu Brahmans or Mandarin Chinese) is to get specific about the particular conceptual contents (the “ideas”) that have actually been cognized and activated by that person or people. To describe a “mentality” is also to get specific about the particular mental processes (the particular senses, feelings, memories, desires, inferences, imaginings, etc.) that have been recruited by this or that person or people to make their cognizing and activation of “ideas” (conceptual contents) possible. As noted above, in connection with the idea of psychological multiplicity, it is the assumption of cultural psychology that neither the conceptual content of mental processes nor the way mental processes are used to cognize conceptual content is necessarily or factually the same everywhere you go in the world. It follows from this way of defining things that there is only one “mind” and it is a universal mind, but it is universal in a very special way; and it is not the subject matter of cultural psychology. There can be a Taiwanese or Balinese “mentality” but not a Taiwanese or Balinese “mind.” This is because by “mind” I mean all the conceptual content that any human being might ever cognize and activate or represent. Everything that has ever and could ever be thought is there in that universal “mind.” It is universal not in the sense that it is found here

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and there and everywhere one looks in the world but because it is broader and more encompassing than any one person or people’s actual mentality. In its universality it is not the kind of thing that can be located in space (e.g., in the East or the West) or in time (e.g., pre-modern versus modern). In contrast, a “mentality” is that cognized and activated subset of “mind” that has become the property of, and has been invested in, by some designated person or people. “Mentalities” do exist in time and space, and as a matter of empirical fact they are not uniform in their characteristics or in their spatial or temporal distributions. Cultural psychology, thus, by way of this definition, is the study of “mentalities,” of which there are, and always have been, and always will be many on the face of the earth. This linking of the idea of multiple psychologies with the idea of a “mentality” has a long history, traceable at least to the premise of the eighteenth-century German Romantic philosopher Johann Herder. Herder’s premise was that “to be a member of a group is to think and act in a certain way, in the light of particular goals, values and pictures of the world; and to think and act so is to belong to a group” (Berlin [1976] on Herder). I suspect this is what Professor Yang meant by the “Chinese soul.” Goals include wants, preferences, and motives of various kinds. Values include emotional reactions as well as goods and ends that are thought to be preference-worthy or morally desirable. Pictures of the world include local definitions and categorizations, beliefs about means– ends connections and causal connections and metaphysical and existential premises of various kinds.

What Is Indigenous Psychology? This dual emphasis in cultural psychology on conceptual content (“goals, values and pictures of the world”) as a central unit for psychological analysis and on the multiplicity of mentalities in the world strikes me as very similar to the aims of indigenous psychology. Compare, for example, what I have just said with Professor Kuo-shu Yang’s list of ways to indigenize psychological research. Here are four of Professor Yang’s virtues for the aspiring indigenous psychologist of China. 1. “Give priority to the study of culturally unique psychological and behavioral phenomena or characteristics of the Chinese people.”

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2. “Investigate both the specific content and the involved process of the phenomenon.” 3. Make it a rule to begin any research with a thorough immersion into the natural, concrete details of the phenomenon to be studied. 4. Let research be based upon the Chinese intellectual tradition rather than the Western intellectual tradition. With perhaps the exception of point #4 (I do think there are some forms and rules of logical and critical reasoning that qualify as absolutes) that sounds very much like what I call cultural psychology. To avoid misunderstandings, let me be clear that I do not think that the search for multiple psychologies and the focus on what I have called mentalities as a central unit of psychological analysis is the only legitimate game in town. What I have said does not imply that there is no such thing as human nature or that the idea of human nature is worthless. If you want to search for psychological uniformities across all populations you may even find a few, or even many. It is just that this is not what cultural psychology or indigenous psychology is about. Cultural psychology does not look through cultural variations for the absolute or common psychic core. Its focus is on differences in the way members of different communities perceive, categorize, feel, want, choose, evaluate and communicate that can be traced to differences in salient community-based goals, values, and pictures of the world.

More Talmudic Distinctions: The Rational and the Irrational I would now like to deepen my characterization of cultural psychology by considering one of the oldest disputes in the history of anthropology. Namely disputes over the proper answer to the question “What is the best way to understand the thoughts and actions, beliefs and practices of ‘others’?” In that question the word “others” refers to peoples whose thoughts and actions, beliefs and practices are not only different from one’s own but also seem very strange (even outrageous, barbaric, immoral, criminal or disgusting, or at the very least inefficient). I am raising this issue because in our cosmopolitan multicultural world majority and minority populations bump into each other with some friction and antagonism. Coming to terms with cultural migration

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has become a major public policy problem in many countries. Cultural psychologists are increasingly called upon not only to describe cultural differences but to judge them. Thus one cannot avoid engagement with the project of cultural critique. Family life practices (sex-role differentiation, modes of discipline, socially sanctioned “ordeals” for children, sleeping arrangements, coming of age ceremonies, male and female “circumcision,” etc.) are at the heart of recent controversies about the limits of tolerance in modern multicultural societies. So, I am asking: How should cultural psychologists and indigenous psychologists who study family life in diverse cultural settings react (for example) to a Somali mother living in Seattle or a Shia Muslim Dawoodi Bohra mother who lives in Detroit, Michigan who believes that sons and daughters should be treated equally and both circumcised? How should they react to a West African father living in England who inscribes tribal identity markings on the face of his 9-year-old son? To the Mexican woman living in Houston, Texas, who finds it perfectly natural to leave her 3-year-old at home in the care of an older preadolescent sibling? To a South Asian father living in Chicago who habitually grabs his disobedient son by his ear and drags him out of a store, thereby prompting some upper-middle-class Anglo-American shopper to call the police and accuse him of “child abuse”? Now in the history of anthropology (and in the social and psychological sciences more broadly) there have been two types of answers to the question “How are we to interpret the beliefs and actions of ‘others’”? The first type of answer is that the best way to understand “others” and their alien beliefs and practices is by means of “rationalizations,” and that one of the aims of a social scientist is to produce them in an attempt to render those practices meaningful. By a “rationalization” I mean an explanation that justifies other people’s actions and beliefs by showing that this is the kind of thing that a person who is morally sensitive and does things for good reasons might do or believe. The second type of answer is that the best way to make sense of the alien beliefs and practices of “others” is by constructing what might be called an “irrationalization.” By an “irrationalization” I mean an explanation that (in a sense) excuses other people’s actions and beliefs. It does this by showing that the action or belief is controlled by some causal factor (such as an Oedipal complex, or an authoritarian personality trait, or a neurological problem, or an unconscious wish, or patriarchal domination, or a fear-based, brainwashed, indoctrinated belief, or simply because of

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ignorance) that is not, in and of itself, a good reason or justification for action and belief, but only its cause. I say only its cause because “rationalizations” (the “good reasons” for doing something) also provide a kind of causal explanation for action and belief but they are not only causal explanations. “Rationalizations” are also justifications for actions and beliefs. Rational acts can be both justified and causally explained (by reference to its justification). Irrational acts can only be explained, not justified. An “irrationalization” (e.g., “she killed him because the glucose level in her bloodstream was very high”) may mitigate responsibility for an action or serve as an excuse but it can never justify action, because it never engages the “other” as a moral and rational person. In my image of the discipline of cultural psychology its “subject” is an intentional agent, and the agenda for the exegesis of his or her psychology must begin with the assumption of rationality. Where does indigenous psychology come out on this key issue? I am not sure I really know.

The Mark of Rationality in Actions, Practices, and Persons To clarify the assumption of “rationality” in cultural psychology I must proceed in a Talmudic spirit and draw some distinctions between (1) rational actions, (2) rational practices, and (3) rational persons. This is one way to characterize my conception of cultural psychology, by linking cultural psychology to the issue of “justification” and by defining it in part as the study of the rational psychology of a way of life or set of customary social practices. In that sense, cultural psychology is a type of interpretive analysis of behavior, customs, and social practices, which asks of some traditional way of doing things, “Is that the way someone might behave if they were acting rationally?” Or alternatively it asks, “what are the goals, values, and pictures of the world with reference to which this social practice might be judged to be rational?” To make sense of this type of interpretive undertaking some definitions and distinctions are in order. An action is rational to the extent that there is a good reason that caused it to happen, which can then also serve as its justification. Hence a rational action can both be explained and justified within the terms of a single frame of reference (the reason that both caused it and justifies it).

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A practice is rational to the extent that it is the kind of practice that a person whose actions are caused by good reasons might do. Notice that for a practice to be rational it is not necessary that those who actually engage in the practice do so for good reasons. For a practice to be rational all that is required is that it be the kind of practice that someone who does do things for good reasons might do. People can do the rational thing for the wrong reasons or for “bad” reasons but that does not make the practice less rational. It just means that rational practices can be caused or motivated by other than rational reasons and that the terms of reference for explaining why people engage in the practice may be different from the terms of reference for justifying the practice. For example, it is presumably a rational practice to wear a seat-belt when driving in a car, regardless of the reasons (e.g., fear of a traffic ticket or other forms of punishment) people have for doing it. Finally, a person is rational to the extent they are capable of and are motivated to have good reasons for what they believe, value, and do. In saying this I am following Nicholas Rescher (1988), and many other philosophers, in defining rationality as “the intelligent pursuit of appropriate ends” and in suggesting that rationality be based on at least three types of reasoning: (1) scientific reasoning about what is true; (2) instrumental or means–ends reasoning about what is economical or efficient; and (3) axiological or evaluative reasoning about what is desirable or good (which ends are worthy to pursue?; the “rationality of ends”). The idea of culture as goals, values, and pictures of the world made manifest in practice is an extension of this conception of rationality. And the imagined ideal-typical subject or agent of cultural analysis is that fully cultured person who does the right thing for the right reasons. Of course many, perhaps most, members of any actual and particular cultural community may do the right thing for other than rational reasons (their acts may not be rationally motived or caused but the practices they support may be rational), which is why the study of social control and social motivation is a critical part of any analysis of the cultural psychology of a community. As you can see, rationality has a lot to do with the relationship between subjective judgments and the objective world, between mental states and the world they represent. The idea of rationality is about the relationship between what you believe to be true (a subjective judgment or mental state) and what is true (a feature of the objective world); the relationship between what you want or desire (a subjective judgment or mental state) and what is good or desirable (a feature of the objective world); and the

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relationship between means and ends. Is it true? Is it good? Is it effective? Those are the questions a rational person asks, answers, and acts upon. As the sociologist Raymond Boudon has remarked, rational agents are motivated to do things and believe things because of a justified sense of reality (that’s true, that’s just, that’s cost-effective) and not because they are compelled to do things by causal forces that are not reasons or justifications at all. I hit him because I was in an irritable mood is not a justification for the act, at least not in the subcultures I know best, although it might be used as an excuse.

So, What About Irrationality? So, is there any conceptual room left in this classification of the aspects of rationality for the idea of irrationality? I would certainly say “yes”: Namely, that an irrational person is a person who has lost the capacity or motivation to examine or criticize his or her goals, values, and pictures of the world or to get his or her actions under the influence and control of good reasons. Such a person may not be able to act on his or her preferences. They may not be able to recognize the difference between worthy and unworthy preferences. They may not be able to distinguish subjectivity from objectivity in some domain. They may not be able to, or care to, make use of the information they know to be relevant to some issue at hand. The “irrational” is thus a word for breakdowns of rationality of various sorts, which one could probably classify into types: for example, (1) breakdowns in voluntary control (e.g., compulsive/obsessive disorders); (2) breakdowns in subject/object relations (e.g., hallucinations and reality-testing disorders); (3) breakdowns in means–ends thinking (including, for example, “phobic” disorders); and (4) breakdowns in impulse management. In any case, whatever the classification of types of irrational action and thoughts, the very idea of rationality (and irrationality) only applies to intentional agents or “persons.” The idea does not apply to inherently non-rational entities, such as a micro-organism, or a mechanism, or any other thing categorized by some interpretive community as a mere “thing.” Such entities lack the intellectual and conceptual capacity to do things for reasons. They are unable to promote some idea of the good or imagine the future or have a conception of the long-term consequences of their actions. Such entities are not even potentially able to criticize themselves or ruminate over their transgressions or care about being

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justified in what they do. Thus, such entities do not have irrational (or rational) thoughts or engage in irrational (or rational) actions, except metaphorically. They are irrational (or rational) in their actions only in the sense that clouds are “generous” when they give rain to the earth, or that willows “weep,” or that a clock “knows” the time of day. That is to say, not at all. It is best not to use the language of rationality or irrationality for explaining the actions of such things, for they are not intentional agents, although if they are properly designed or evolved their behavior may appear intelligent or rational (or even moral), and it may be possible to predict their behavior by pretending that they are rational agents, more or less like us. I hope this little exercise in reflective thought about the nature of the two psychologies (indigenous and cultural) lives up to Professor Yang’s expectations for scholars in the Chinese and Jewish intellectual traditions. He was “trained” in a graduate program in the United States but felt “educated” by his Chinese soul. In addition to food and family and Confucian thought his personal soul is an inspiration to us all. May it travel well but never be distant from our thoughts and affections.

References Berlin, I. (1976). Vico and Herder. London: Hogarth Press. Cassaniti, J., & Menon, U. (2017). Universalism with uniformity: Explorations in mind and culture. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Enriquez, V. (1989). Indigenous psychology and national consciousness. Tokyo: Institute for the Study of Languages and Cultures of Asia and Africa. Rescher, N. (1988). Rationality: A philosophical inquiry into the nature and the rationale of reason. New York: Oxford University Press. Shweder, R. A. (1990). Cultural psychology: What is it? In J. Stigler, R. A. Shweder, & G. Herdt (Eds.), Cultural psychology: Essays on comparative human development. New York: Cambridge University Press. Shweder, R. A. (1991). Thinking through cultures: Expedition in cultural psychology. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Shweder, R. A. (1993). The cultural psychology of the emotions. In M. Lewis & J. Haviland (Eds.), The handbook of emotions. New York: Guilford Publications. Shweder, R. A. (1996). The “mind” of cultural psychology. In P. Baltes & U. Staudinger (Eds.), Interactive minds: Life-span perspectives on the social foundations of cognition. New York: Cambridge University Press. Shweder, R. A. (1999). Why cultural psychology? Ethos: Journal of the Society for Psychological Anthropology, 27, 62–73.

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Shweder, R. A. (2000). The psychology of practice and the practice of the three psychologies. Asian Journal of Social Psychology, 3, 207–222. Shweder, R. A., Goodnow, J., Hatano, G., LeVine, R., Markus, H., & Miller, P. (1998). The cultural psychology of development: One mind, many mentalities. In W. Damon (Ed.), Handbook of child psychology (Vol. 1, pp. 865–937). New York: Wiley. Shweder, R. A., & LeVine, R. A. (1984). Culture theory: Essays on mind, self and emotion. New York: Cambridge University Press. Shweder, R. A., Mahapatra, M., & Miller, J. G. (1990). Culture and moral development. In J. S. Stigler, R. A. Shweder, & G. Herdt (Eds.), Cultural psychology: Essays on comparative human development. New York: Cambridge University Press. Shweder, R. A., Much, N. C., Mahapatra, M., & Park, L. (1997). The “big three” of morality (autonomy, community, divinity), and the “big three” explanations of suffering. In P. Rozin & A. Brandt (Eds.), Morality and health. New York: Routledge. Shweder, R. A., & Sullivan, M. (1990). The semiotic subject of cultural psychology. In L. Pervin (Ed.), Handbook of personality: Theory and research. New York: Guilford Press. Shweder, R. A., & Sullivan, M. (1993). Cultural psychology: Who needs it? Annual Review of Psychology, 44, 497–523. Spiro, M. (1984). Transcript of oral remarks made at a “Culture Theory” conference during a discussion of “What is the problem of the ‘self’ anyway”? In R. A. Shweder & R. A. LeVine (Eds.), Culture theory: Essays on mind, self and emotion. New York: Cambridge University Press. Yang, K.-S. (1997). Indigenizing westernized Chinese psychology. In M. H. Bond (Ed.), Working at the interface of culture: Eighteen lives in social science. London: Routledge.

CHAPTER 7

Yang’s Global Psychology and Beyond Carl Martin Allwood

Professor Kuo-Shu Yang was a great pioneer in the indigenous psychologies and he had a full personal and academic life. He earned a Ph.D. in 1969 in the United States (supervised by Harry Triandis) and worked, with colleagues, to develop Taiwanese indigenous psychology. In his younger days, he was also a political activist (Gabrenya & Sun, 2015). Yang recognized early on the importance of a genuine global psychology (GP). His vision of GP was a psychology that fully represents the human being. More specifically, he envisioned a GP that integrates mainstream psychology (MP) and all non-Western indigenized psychologies (called IP by Yang [2000] and IZPs by Yang [2012]; below I use the label ‘IP’, except when referring to Yang [2012] specifically, when I will use ‘IZP’). The issue of GP has been discussed in the IPs under diverse headings such as ‘universal psychology’, ‘world psychology’, and ‘global psychology’, sometimes with the same author using more than one of the terms. An early contributor to this discourse was Virgio Enriquez (1977) from the Philippines. Other early contributors were, for example, Ardila (1993, Latin America), Berry and Kim (1993, Canada and South

C. M. Allwood (B) Department of Psychology, University of Gothenburg, Gothenburg, Sweden e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s) 2020 L. Sundararajan et al. (eds.), Global Psychology from Indigenous Perspectives, Palgrave Studies in Indigenous Psychology, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-35125-0_7

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Korea), Nsamenang (1993, Cameroun), and D. Sinha (1997, India). The issue has also later been a topic of attraction for IP authors (see, e.g., Hwang, 2005; Liu, 2015). Yang was original among the IP authors in his elaborated discussion of the process by which a GP can be constructed based on psychologies from different parts of the world. This chapter describes Yang’s vision of GP and comments on different aspects of his vision’s strengths and problems as I see them. Lastly, I offer my own suggestions for an equitable GP. Yang’s GP integrates different types of psychologies and I first consider his conceptualization of MP and two other main types of psychologies. The only truly indigenous psychology according to Yang is the scientific psychology that originated in Europe and North America represented in MP. He saw this psychology as completely derived from the culture in the societies in which it developed. Therefore he (2012), somewhat confusingly, called this Western-origin psychology ‘indigenous psychology’. However, in order to avoid confusion, like Yang (2000) I will call it ‘mainstream psychology’ (MP). In brief, Yang (2012) defined what is here called MP (and he called IP) as the sum of psychologies deriving from Europe, North America, and Australia. Yang (2012) described MP as historically exported to non-Western countries, often as part and parcel of colonialism, and as part of, as he noted, the Western-dominated ‘capitalist world-system’. This type of psychology he called ‘Westernized psychology’ (WP) and saw it as ‘sheer mimic[ry]’ of MP, produced through an ‘imposed etic’ approach. He argued that WPs were misplaced and unproductive copies of MP. For Yang, the ‘prime purpose’ of indigenizing psychology is that psychology should find its ‘sociocultural roots’. This means that “the knowledge generated will have sufficient sociocultural relevance to the mind and behavior of local people.” and that the “theories, concepts, methods, and tools” in the resulting IP are ‘well adapted’ to the local society (both quotes 2012, p. 10). Yang argued that IPs are important both in order to understand people in society, and for practical reasons, that is, in order to help solve social problems in non-Western societies. In (2000, p. 246), Yang defined IP as “an evolving system of psychological knowledge based on scientific research that is sufficiently compatible with the studied phenomena and their ecological, economic, social, cultural, and historical contexts”. Such IPs should be constructed “for each society with a given population or a distinctive culture” (p. 146). For Yang, IPs constituted ‘distinctive knowledge systems’. Moreover, Yang (2000)

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noted that IPs can be both monocultural (MCI) and cross-cultural (CCI), but Yang (2012) did not use this categorization. Each MCI and CCI can use either a ‘natural science model’ or a ‘human science model’ (NS and HS models). Finally, it should be noted that Yang (2000, 2012) emphatically argued that MP, WP, and IP are three separate disciplines because of their differences in a number of aspects of knowledge, and that IP has a special methodology focused on the most effective rationale and methods for doing IP research.

How to Develop Non-Western IPs Yang’s GP includes integrated IPs and I therefore describe and comment on his recommendations for how IPs should be developed next. An IP should strive to achieve as high indigenous compatibility (IC) as possible, and this is fundamental for how they should be developed. By IC, Yang meant that the research should be congruent with “the native participants’ psychological and behavioral contents, processes, mechanisms, and patterns as embedded in their ecological, economic, social, cultural, and historical contexts” (2012, p. 18). Yang (2000, p. 251) observed that the IC concept is applicable “also at the cross-cultural level” and he discussed three types of IC. These are context-independent (common in MP), context-dependent (common in IP), and reflective (i.e., that the research is congruent with the researcher’s psychological features as they are known through the researcher’s intuitive, reflective processes). Yang (2012) argued that complete IZPs cannot be produced because Western culture has ‘contaminated’ non-Western cultures as part of the modernization process and, moreover, because most IP researchers are trained in the West, or are so habituated to MP that their ability to do IP is low. Thus, IZPs can never truly and completely reflect the culture and society in which they are developed. He therefore described the methodology involved as ‘quasi-emic’. An important part of Yang’s approach to IP and GP is that IPs should have a tolerant and open attitude with respect to research methods. Referring to some of his previous works, he thus argued for the adoption of the principle of multiple paradigms described in (2000, p. 246) as follows: “Under the principle, different indigenous psychologists in the same society may be encouraged to apply different or even conflicting paradigms, such as those distinguished by Guba and Lincoln (1994), to their own research.”

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Yang (2012) described two main strategies to reach a high level of IC. Firstly, IP researchers should self-reflect on their own personal characteristics. Secondly, they should try to understand the participants’ characteristics through different pathways, for example by the “use of imagination and role-taking” (2012, p. 19), by use of their own tacit knowledge and emphatic ability, and by relying on relevant research. IPs are produced over time in different steps and Yang (2000, 2012) described some of the various ‘dos and don’ts’ that should be heeded in the process leading to IPs with sufficient IC. For example, in one of the ‘don’ts’ Yang recommends that IP research should begin with a locally relevant phenomenon, not with some component from Western research, such as a theory or a concept or a method. However, he also recommends that Western experiences in developing theories, concepts, and methods “should not be overlooked” (2012, p. 21), as such experiences may be useful to heed when developing IZPs. In relation to this recommendation, his next recommendation is somewhat paradoxical, in that he suggests that when developing IZPs, researchers should not think in English or other foreign languages. Among Yang’s ‘dos’ is that IZP researchers should “try to be a typical native when functioning as researchers” (2012, p. 22). Thus, their ‘indigenous ideas’ and ways of thinking should be ‘fully reflected’ in their research. Moreover, they should put off decisions about how the research should be carried out “as long as possible” until they hit on something ‘sufficiently indigenous’ (2012, p. 23).1 In yet another ‘do’, in line with other IP researchers, Yang urged IZP researchers to use “the intellectual tradition of their own culture” and not that from the West; “This shift in intellectual tradition will greatly enhance the level of IC in local research” (both quotes 2012, p. 24).

Yang’s GP In his paper (2012), Yang only mentioned the concept “global psychology” three times, twice in Figure 1 and once on p. 11: “Moreover, all the IZPs developed in various non-Western countries can be creatively integrated with all the IPs formed in Western countries to construct a genuine, balanced global human psychology (K in Figure 1) as envisaged

1 Yang (2000) did not use the qualifier ‘sufficient’ in this context.

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by Yang (2000).” To some extent, Yang’s (2000, 2012) articles overlap, but the (2000) text is more informative with respect to GP. There, he argued that cross-cultural psychology (which is assumed to use an NS model), cultural psychology (using an HS model) and IP should be unified and labeled ‘indigenous psychology’. This is in line with his view that cross-cultural psychology is derived from MP and that MP is the only fully ‘genuine’ IP (i.e., fully compatible with the culture it represents). It is also in line with his principle of multiple paradigms for IP. Furthermore, Yang (2000) argued that IPs can be compatible with the studied phenomenon “at certain levels of abstraction” (p. 246) even when they do not consider its ‘sociocultural’ context. Together, these assumptions allow for both cross-cultural and cultural psychology to be seen as special forms of IP. Yang’s (2000) descriptions of how GP can be developed come in bits and pieces and tend to be fairly abstract and not very detailed. In general, Yang argued that a good way to develop GP is bottom-up by means of what he called the pyramid model. The model works by first using the developed IP knowledge systems, including their research findings, “to develop the indigenous psychologies of progressively larger populations defined in terms of regional, national, ethnic, linguistic, religious, or geographic considerations” (2000, p. 246). As the final step in the process of constructing GP “the highest indigenous psychology, a universal, or more properly a global, psychology for all human beings on the earth will be formed by integrating lower-level indigenous psychologies” (p. 246). This seems to be what Yang (2012) meant by a genuine and balanced GP. Thus, the pyramid model “integrates progressively broader indigenous psychologies arranged with respect to societal, cultural, national, ethnic, and religious scope” (2000, pp. 257–258). Yang (2000) used a classification system based on “three bipolar theoretical and methodological characteristics” to identify four types of psychologies to be integrated into GP. These characteristics were labeled as: (1) Indigenous or Westernized approach; (2) Monocultural or crosscultural strategy; and (3) Natural science or human science model. By combining these characteristics, he identified eight forms of psychology, and after further pruning, four ‘adequate psychologies’ remained to be used as ingredients in GP. The first two of these were Western mainstream and cross-cultural psychologies, both of which, according to Yang, are based on the NS model (defined as a ‘positivist’ mainstream perspective). The last two psychologies are called ‘monocultural’ and ‘cross-cultural’

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indigenous cultural psychologies. Together, these two constitute what Yang called ‘current cultural psychologies’, both using the HS model2 and are the same as Yang’s (2000) ‘monocultural approach’ (MCI) and ‘cross-cultural indigenous approach’ (CCI). The MCI approach to GP is carried out by developing IPs (as described above) and then integrating them. The CCI approach was only briefly described by Yang (2000) and he gave no specific information about how the goals at different stages of the CCI should be researched. Therefore, and also due to space limitations, I will only describe its main characteristics. CCI attempts to avoid the problems of ethnocentrism and equivalence (that different aspects of the measures of a construct should function in the same way for participants in all the compared cultures) that plague mainstream cultural psychology. Yang claimed that these problems are avoided by the successful use of a CCI process in two stages. In the first stage, research projects are formulated using a qualitative approach including “a research theme that is indigenously relevant and significant for people in all participating societies” (2000, p. 254), and are executed by researchers from the two (or more) compared cultures. Initially, what is called ‘cross-culturally fair’ guidelines are formulated and are then followed at all stages and places when the research is carried out. In the research, the “responses of the variously studied psychological and behavioral subdomains are systematically and sufficiently covered without serious representation bias” (p. 254). Furthermore, the IC for each culture should be as high as possible with respect to conceptualization, design, data collection, and analysis/interpretation for example. The results from this stage are then analyzed with respect to the culturally unique (for each culture), common, and less common findings for ‘dimensional’ (variables and constructs) and ‘configurational’ (patterns and constellations) aspects across the studied cultures. Yang asserted that this first qualitative stage is more important than the studies in stage 2. In stage 2, more refined projects are conceived with respect to questions formulated on the basis of the studies in stage 1, at least with respect to its common and less common findings. In stage 2 studies, communalities in the results can be identified at higher, more inclusive levels, through a bottom-up approach, carefully attempting to avoid the elements of imposed etics that are present in mainstream CCP. Again, the 2 Although Yang (2000, p. 249) noted that in principle they could also use the NS model.

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important aspect of the studies at this stage is that they try to maximize IC for all important aspects of the research in all the participating cultures. An important advantage of CCI over mainstream CCP is that the researchers from all the involved cultures are equal in influence. Yang (2000) took a comprehensive approach to the integration work leading to GP. To produce GP, the IPs should be integrated with respect to their shared content and with respect to the approach used in the integration process. The integrated content can consist of different empirical characteristics or theories. The empirical characteristics may be psychological and behavioral features (easier to accomplish) and/or their functions (harder to accomplish) of diverse kinds. Integration in terms of theories is based on the research carried out by empirical integration and identifies theories that can “adequately understand, explain, and predict psychological and behavioral phenomena in a certain domain across two or more cultures” (p. 258). With respect to approaches for constructing GP, Yang (2000) described three general approaches to be used. Apart from the CCI approach, he included the Filipino IP researcher Enriquez’ crossindigenous method and what he calls assimilative synthesis. In Enriquez’ approach, generalizations are identified by the use of results from IP studies already carried out, but Yang also noted that Enriquez did not provide any details of how this should be done. In the assimilative synthesis approach, IPs are integrated with MP in a way that provides “a new knowledge system with a sufficient level of indigenous compatibility for local people” (p. 259). This approach is also called ‘integration by indigenization’.

Strengths and Weaknesses in Yang’s Conceptualization of GP In brief, Yang’s approach to GP is broad in the sense that it abstractly describes a number of different ways of integration. However, it is also sketchy in that it does not provide much specific detail about how the different ways of integration should be carried out, nor about how the different avenues should be combined. He only notes that the ‘empirical’, assimilative, and CCI approaches are more useful at the pyramid’s lower level and that the theoretical and cross-indigenous method is more useful at its higher levels.

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Among the strengths of Yang’s GP is clearly his plea, in line with the IP literature in general (e.g., Berry & Kim, 1993), that GP should be fully representative of the human being. This is both a laudable and, one would wish, self-evident idea. A further strength of Yang’s GP, as I see it, is his attempt to depoliticize and de-nationalize MP and IPs. He argued that IZP “may have nothing to do with researcher’s nationalistic sentiments” (2012, p. 21). In the same paper, he also noted that the IZPs from Taiwan, Hong Kong, and China are not ‘anti-Western’ or ‘nationalistically Sinocentric’ per se and that “it does not make sense to say that Western IP is an academically imperialistic knowledge system forcibly imposed on psychological research in non-Western countries” (p. 21). While it is clear that psychological research, like all research, is socially and economically dependent on past and current social power structures, Yang’s attempt to keep politics and (some components of) research separate still has some merit. To clarify, some components of research, such as the selection of the research problem, obviously have a political dimension. However, it could be argued that other aspects of the research process, such as the choice and application of the research methods used and the requirement that the writing should be concise and understandable (at least to experts), are less influenced by politics, and there are good reasons why this should be the case. Finally, I see Yang’s multiple paradigms principle (Yang, 2000), which implies openness with respect to methods and approaches, to be a strength of his conceptualization of GP. The premise that IPs are to be based on the local culture necessitates a generally open attitude with respect to methods in IP research. Some potential weaknesses of Yang’s suggestions for developing GP also deserve attention. As background, it should first be noted that Yang (2003) in a review of his work on modernization in China explicitly differentiated between meaning content at a (presumably collective, uniform) sociological, ‘societal’ level (culture) and at an individual (psychological) level. His empirical results showed the prevalence of variation in how individuals represent meaning content relating to modernization and Chinese tradition. Unfortunately, as illustrated below, Yang (2000, 2012) occasionally shows influence from the sociologically inspired societal culture concept (collectivistic, uniform culture) without justifying why this would be realistic or appropriate. I will first discuss his ideas for developing monocultural IPs. Apart from noting that Yang never defined what it means for an IP to be ‘sufficiently’

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compatible, these comments focus on Yang’s treatment of cultural meaning content. As described above, Yang argued that IP researchers should try to only draw on cultural elements from their own societies, including their own intellectual traditions. However, it is often not clear if a specific meaning element belongs to a certain culture or to another culture (or both). In this context, there is a tension between Yang’s recommendation that IP researchers should follow their own intellectual tradition and his background assumption that IPs should be scientific. Should science be counted as part of all IP cultures or as largely imported from the West? Scientific procedures cannot un-controversially be seen as being part of all the native cultures that IPs can be developed for (except maybe scientific procedures in elementary forms, see for example Campbell, 1988; Shadish, Cook, & Campbell, 2002). Similarly, Yang does not discuss the problem that if the agenda for IPs is followed (‘based on their own culture’), these cultural elements and intellectual traditions are likely to be represented as they have been understood by previous and current researchers, and other stakeholders, active in the process of representing the IP researcher’s home culture. Thus, references to native culture, etc., risk being misleading and contributing to a historically conservative and interest-driven understanding of the societies of IPs. This is in contrast to the idea that the IP research movement as such is constantly interacting with other current international developments in ideas and therefore, if IP researchers follow Yang’s recommendation and choose an open nonisolationistic approach, IP research will change. This latter approach is congruent with science’s ethos and also appears to be the approach of the editors of the present anthology. A further important aspect is that Yang (2000, 2012) appears to see the content at play in researchers’ thinking at a specific time as divided into conventional cultures. In this sense, you can switch between, but hardly mix these. He does not pay attention to the fact that the content of people’s memory representations and the contexts they think in are often already a hybrid mix of influences from various countries and societies on Earth. Such content mixings are sometimes, somewhat derogatorily, called ‘syncretism’, as exemplified in the Cuban-African religion Santeria where Christian and African religious ideas are mixed. Other examples of the same phenomenon are the various cross-influences occurring in music and modern art and the more elaborated vegetarian menus offered in McDonalds in India for example. However, I would argue that the overlap between cultures is deeper than these examples indicate.

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I will next focus on Yang’s description of the construction of GP. Yang is unclear about whether the progressive enlargement of IPs to cover larger and larger populations, etc., when developing GP, as described above, should occur for many IPs at the same time, or only for one specially selected IP. If many IPs should be ‘enlarged’ simultaneously, that is, generalized to larger groups of people in parallel, unsolved issues remain about how to translate their multi-vocal conceptual vocabulary into a common GP vocabulary and which vocabulary should be used at the highest level. And if only one IP should be used at the first stage in the bottom-up process, the obvious question is: which IP? Furthermore, the translated meaning content of IPs being integrated into GP is likely to be changed (at least to some extent) in the rendering in the language of the final GP (compare Gadamer, 1960). This is a form of, possibly necessary, incompleteness of GP. Another difficulty in constructing Yang’s GP is due to the diversity of IPs likely to result from the different types of methodological and theoretical assumptions (including ontological) used for constructing them. This is likely to make the task of constructing GP very difficult since it is not clear how such differences ought to be reconciled. If ‘conflicting’ in the quote above from Yang (2000, p. 246) describing his multiple paradigms principle is taken to mean ‘contradictory’, the task of constructing one unified GP might even be impossible. This may be why Yang in the quote from (2012, p. 11) provided above, suggests that GP should be derived from ‘creatively integrated’ MPs and IZPs. A further reason why a fully representative GP may not be possible is that it is not realistic to think that IPs can be constructed for each and every identified culture, for purely economic reasons. In practice, IPs have a tendency (there are exceptions) to be developed for a country’s majority groups. Accordingly, many, or most, smaller minority culture populations may never be represented. Such minorities may well be the groups that are the most different from the majority groups in a country and therefore Yang’s GP is likely to be narrower in range than the variation evidenced by humanity in total. For example, Gastardo-Conaco (2005) in the context of the Philippines IP, noted that most of the approximately 180 ethnic groups in the country were very poorly represented, with the exception of the Tagalog population, the largest ethnic group in the country. However, it is still clearly of interest to make GP as complete as possible (or at least to make it reasonably complete).

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Yang’s (2000) use of the NS/HS distinction for identifying the different types of psychologies to be integrated into GP is a further weak point of his GP. The NS/HS distinction was formulated in the West, making his GP culturally tainted. Moreover, Yang never comprehensively defined what he meant by HS and NS. This creates uncertainty about the foundations of his GP. For example, he did not discuss the possible consequences of defining HS (as is commonly done) as based on “idealistic philosophies”, usually characterized as emphasizing the dependence of all of reality on understanding and thinking. Similarly, although NS is usually associated with a naturalistic philosophy, it is not clear if HS is contradictory to naturalism. Moreover, the domains of interest seem to partially overlap between NS and HS (e.g., with respect to the human being, see e.g., Teo [2017]) and the methodologies of NS and HS are not necessarily always in opposition (e.g., both NS and HS can include both experiments and explorative observational methods). These uncertainties degrade the usefulness of the NS/HS division. As an example, at least two basic approaches to meaning content can be taken, the first being a platonic approach where specific meaning content is seen as something context-free and eternal. For example, Socrates’ and Plato’s maieutics aimed to make ideas that were latently present in people’s minds more directly accessible to them. The second approach sees meaning content as causally dependent on the specific features of the contextual environment in which it is generated (e.g., brains, social environments, etc.). Because it involves causality, this approach has an obvious, naturalistic feel and is subscribed to by many writers in culture-oriented psychology (e.g., Allwood, 2011; Atran, Medin, & Ross, 2005; de Souza, 2014; Kashima, 2005; Shweder, 1990). The first, platonic, approach is not commonly taken in current social and cognitive science and if the second approach is taken, the NS/HS distinction becomes less clear. The ramifications of Yang’s GP for humanistic psychology are not clear, given the vagueness in the conceptualization of NS and HS by Yang and others and also because Yang allows both NS and HS perspectives in IPs. However, Yang argues that in practice IPs tend to have a penchant for HS (due to HS’s greater interest in culture, compared to NS). Therefore, GP developed according to Yang’s recommendations is likely to enrich the conceptual and empirical literature of psychological human science. Moreover, his depoliticized approach to GP may well serve to temper the tendencies to politicize evident in some HS research.

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Finally, as discussed above, Yang (2000, 2012) used the culture concept in different ways and did not explicitly discuss what he meant by ‘culture’. Moreover, in spite of his own research on modernization (see Yang, 2003), he often neglected the diversity and variation within the cultural entities he discussed. As noted by many authors (e.g., Wikan, 1999), writing about culture in this way can lead to shallow stereotypes that, as shown by human history, can have severe negative social impacts. Yang’s tendency to lump together the cultural understanding of different subgroups of people within a country or a society sometimes creates problems for his reasoning. For example, he does not seem to have taken seriously the possibility that IP researchers are likely to belong to a modernized, Western-influenced, social class that differs from many (or most) other people in the researcher’s country. For example, he wrote “… the researcher as a local person tends to be similar in psychological and behavioral characteristics to other members of the society from which the research sample is drawn” (2012, p. 19). In all fairness, it should also be noted that Yang occasionally discussed specific cultures as something a person or country (and cultures) can have more or less of. For example, he noted that non-Western cultures can be more, or less, influenced by ‘Euro-American culture’. Moreover, he observed that people (e.g., researchers) can activate content associated with a specific culture ‘by will’. When he uses ‘culture’ in this way, his culture concept bears some similarity to the hybrid culture concept used in large parts of current social science (although Yang, 2012, p. 13, used the expression ‘contaminated’, which indicates that he assumed that there can be ‘pure’ cultures that are not the results of content streams from many directions).

Toward an Equitable GP Yang (2000, 2012) did not elaborate on the issue of what problems GP might take on. This is a limitation since the problems that researchers explore are one of the most important aspects of research. For example, the gestalt psychologist Wertheimer (1945, p. 123) argued that “Often, in great discovery the most important thing is that a certain question is found” (see also Allwood, 1997; Allwood & Bärmark, 1999; Kantorovich, 1993). Yang may have implicitly assumed that GP should continue to study the same types of questions and pose the same types of research problems as IPs or MP in general have: ‘business as usual’.

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A typical type of issue in IPs derives from local needs in the specific IP’s society. For example, IP writers have urged that the problems researched should include issues of relevance to non-Western countries such as analphabetism, over-population, corruption, or sibling caretaking of small children (see, e.g., Allwood, 1998; Ardila, 1993). Other types of common issues in IPs have concerned the elaboration of cultural content ascribed to the IP society in question, or personality features of people in the society. In this context, it can be noted that Yang’s GP tends to be based on studies which assume a homogenous, commonly shared culture in each society studied. To the extent that this is the case, it risks leading to a GP that is unrepresentative with respect to other possible categorizations of people’s understanding, for example differences with respect to men and women, social classes, and different ages and professions. Studies investigating features of the understanding of these categories of people should be part of a GP that more fully represents human understanding. However, it is also reasonable to request that a GP should be equitable; not only in the important sense that it represents all of humanity and its conceptualizations and local needs, but in a more general way. For example, in our current times, an equitable GP should also explore issues of concern to humanity at the macro level, not just locally (e.g., Sundararajan, 2019). GP should be equitable in the sense that it should focus on research of relevance and interest to all humans. Since many of the issues of such a GP are likely to be large in scope, such a GP might preferably often work together with other disciplines in an interdisciplinary context (see e.g., Sinha, 1993). Moreover, in line with Yang’s vision, apart from adapting research methods so that they fit the “needs” and characteristics of the participants and their context, a GP living up to its name will use a broad range of scientifically acceptable methods, including descriptive methods that provide the participants with more control. This, in order to facilitate for the discovery of new relevant phenomena. Moreover, in order to contribute fully to GP the IPs would profit by critically considering their understanding of what they mean by culture. As suggested above (and in Allwood, 2011), culture has often been understood in the IPs in a way that identifies the important meaning content in a society as content that is reproduced between generations in that society. This limited understanding of culture is likely to hinder the full contribution of IPs to GP, for example by providing GP with a biased understanding of the IP researchers’ societies. It may also contribute to whatever isolationistic tendencies

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IPs may have and might create unnecessary communication difficulties with other parts of psychology. Instead, IPs’ possibility to contribute to GP is likely to benefit by attending more even-handedly to all parts of the current understanding in their societies, including understanding that has more, or less, recently been imported from other parts of the world. This would make it easier to identify communalities, or at least similarities, in understanding between societies. When attempting to solve common problems questions of where the content used originated from might turn out to be of less interest. In brief, identifying similarities in understanding may facilitate the identification and communication of common human problems and their possible solutions. An equitable GP that researches issues of common human interest can provide an understanding that can help alleviate human suffering and increase human health and satisfaction. In line with this, it is likely to have a primarily applied orientation. When successful, the research findings will have consequences not just for one, or a few, local societies but for many, most, or all societies. Such research would not in itself solve the planet’s problems, but might be able to contribute insights and resources that can provide some support in solving them. For this, often a long-term perspective will need to be taken. Given that reality is changing, the important topics for a globally relevant psychology are also likely to change. Classical IP topics felt urgent in the 1960s, 70s, and 80s may now be controversial or even obsolete, for different reasons. For example, research on national character has been popular in the IPs but more recent research has questioned the credibility of national (or continent) characters as scientifically identifiable empirical phenomena (see e.g., McCrae & Terracciano, 2006; Shiraev & Levy, 2013; Terracciano et al., 2005). Thus, the GP envisioned here would also imply a continuous problematization and development of conceptualizations and research issues concerning fundamental aspects of human life such as the nature of human beings, society, knowledge, and culture. For such conceptual development, the results from Yang’s (2000, 2012) fully representational GP would be an important, but not sufficient start. Next, some topics and issues for GP relating to current or future concerns of all of humanity will be suggested. The scope and possibilities of such a GP are huge and here only a few suggestions are given. High on the list is research on psychologically relevant aspects of threats to our common destiny on this planet. For example, psychological research

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relating to ecological/environmental questions should be one of the topics at the forefront of an equitable GP. Some issues with specific global environmental relevance are: How can humanity’s thinking and behavior be influenced to be more environmentally sustainable? How can different ways of living be changed in more environment-friendly directions that are nonetheless tolerated or even liked by people? Other generally formulated relevant issues in this context are: How can governments, institutions, and individuals in different types of societies be aided to understand the dangers of different kinds of threats to the earth’s environment and be helped to find ways to find solutions? How can governments, institutions, and individuals be stimulated to work more effectively to stop, or at least constrain, evils such as gluttony (for example in the form of overconsumption and excessive profits), oppression, egotism, and ignorance, and how can engagement and compassion be increased? Issues involving threats to human life and health often demand, or could benefit from, the global coordination of human efforts. GP might research the psychological prerequisites for such coordination in different contexts. What types of, and forms for, coordination at different levels, are likely to be useful? For example, antibiotic resistance and multi-resistant bacteria are global problems that may be easier to solve with input by people from different organizations at each of many levels, from the global to the local. Such efforts may include appropriate information to, and incentives in suitable formats for, key categories of actors in different types of contexts. Further GP issues of common human interest relate specifically to human well-being. For example: How do different forms of living environments, such as variations of urban and rural forms, influence the wellbeing of humans with different backgrounds and from different human societies? Other relevant issues for an equitable GP pertain to research on improved conditions for better cooperation and increased tolerance between different individuals, groups, and societies and to research on how antagonism between human groups can be decreased and how tolerance of differences between people and traditions can be increased. For example: How can school and university education be designed so as to increase interest in, and knowledge of, variations and similarities in people’s living conditions, worldviews, and every-day experience between countries (for concrete suggestions, see Allwood, 2018, and other chapters in the same anthology).

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References Allwood, C. M. (1997). The function and handling of research problems in the social sciences. Science Studies, 10, 50–73. Allwood, C. M. (1998). The creation and nature(s) of indigenized psychologies from the perspective of the anthropology of knowledge. In S. Gorenstein (Ed.), Knowledge and society (Vol. 11, pp. 153–172). Greenwich, CT: Jai Press Inc. Allwood, C. M. (2011). On the foundation of the indigenous psychologies. Social Epistemology, 25, 3–14. Allwood, C. M. (2018). Approaches to culture-oriented research and teaching. In K. D. Keith (Ed.), Culture across the curriculum: A psychology teacher’s handbook (pp. 134–156). Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. Allwood, C. M., & Bärmark, J. (1999). The role of research problems in the process of research. Social Epistemology, 13, 59–83. Ardila, R. (1993). Latin American psychology and world psychology: Is integration possible? In U. Kim & J. W. Berry (Eds.), Indigenous psychologies: Research and experience in cultural context (pp. 170–176). Newbury Park, CA: Sage. Atran, S., Medin, D. L., & Ross, N. O. (2005). The cultural mind: Environmental decision making and cultural modeling within and across populations. Psychological Review, 112, 744–776. Berry, J. W., & Kim, U. (1993). The way ahead: From indigenous psychologies to a universal psychology. In U. Kim & J. W. Berry (Eds.), Indigenous psychologies: Research and experience in cultural context (pp. 277–280). Newbury Park, CA: Sage. Campbell, D. (1988). Evolutionary epistemology. In S. Overman (Ed.), Methodology and epistemology for social science: Selected papers Donald T. Campbell (pp. 393–434). Chicago: The University of Chicago Press. de Souza, D. E. (2014). Culture, context and society—The underexplored potential of critical realism as a philosophical framework for theory and practice. Asian Journal of Social Psychology, 17, 141–151. Enriquez, V. G. (1977). Filipino psychology in the third world. Philippine Journal of Psychology, 10, 3–18. Gabrenya, W. K., Jr., & Sun, C.-R. (2015). Kuo-Shu Yang: Scholar, leader, activist. In G. J. Rich & U. P. Gielen (Eds.), Pathfinders in international psychology (pp. 201–212). Charlotte, NC: Information Age Publishing Inc. Gadamer, H. G. (1960/1985). Truth and method. New York: Crossroad Publishing. Gastardo-Conaco, M. C. (2005). The development of a Filipino indigenous psychology. Philippine Journal of Psychology, 38, 1–17.

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Hwang, K.-K. (2005). From anticolonialism to postcolonialism: The emergence of Chinese indigenous psychology in Taiwan. International Journal of Psychology, 40, 228–238. Kantorovich, A. (1993). Scientific discovery logic and tinkering. Albany, NY: State University of New York Press. Kashima, Y. (2005). Is culture a problem for social psychology? Asian Journal of Social Psychology, 8, 19–38. Liu, J. H. (2015). Globalizing indigenous psychology: An East Asian form of hierarchical relationalism with worldwide implications. Journal for the Theory of Social Behavior, 45, 82–94. McCrae, R. R., & Terracciano, A. (2006). National character and personality. Current Directions in Psychological Science, 15, 156–161. Nsamenang, A. B. (1993). Psychology in Sub-Saharan Africa. Psychology and Developing Societies, 5, 171–183. Shadish, W. R., Cook, T. D., & Campbell, D. T. (2002). Experimental and quasi-experimental design for generalized causal inference. Boston: Houghton Mifflin. Shiraev, E., & Levy, D. (2013). National character. In K. D. Keith (Ed.), The encyclopedia of cross-cultural psychology (pp. 917–919). Chichester, UK: Wiley. Shweder, R. (1990). Cultural psychology—What is it? In J. Stigler, R. Shweder, & G. Herdt (Eds.), Cultural psychology: Essays on comparative human development (pp. 1–43). New York: Cambridge University Press. Sinha, D. (1993). Indigenization of psychology in India and its relevance. In U. Kim & J. W. Berry (Eds.), Indigenous psychologies: Research and experience in cultural context (pp. 30–43). Newbury Park, CA: Sage. Sinha, D. (1997). Indigenizing psychology. In J. W. Berry, Y. H. Poortinga, & J. Pandey (Eds.), Handbook of cross-cultural psychology: Theory and method (Vol. 1, pp. 129–169). Boston: Allyn & Bacon. Sundararajan, L. (2019). Whither indigenous psychology? Journal of Theoretical and Philosophical Psychology, 39(2), 81–89. Teo, T. (2017). From psychological science to the psychological humanities: Building a general theory of subjectivity. Review of General Psychology, 21, 281–291. Terracciano, A., Abdel-Khalek, A. M., Ádám, N., Adamovová, L., Ahn, C.-K., Ahn, H.-N., … McCrae, R. R. (2005). National character does not reflect mean personality trait levels in 49 cultures. Science, 310(5745), 96–100. Wertheimer, M. (1945). Productive thinking. New York: Harper and Brothers. Wikan, U. (1999). Culture: A new concept of race. Social Anthropology, 7, 57– 64. Yang, K.-S. (2000). Monocultural and cross-cultural indigenous approaches: The royal road to the development of a balanced global psychology. Asian Journal of Social Psychology, 3, 241–263.

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Yang, K.-S. (2003). Methodological and theoretical issues on psychological traditionality and modernity research in an Asian society: In response to KwangKuo Hwang and beyond. Asian Journal of Social Psychology, 6, 263–285. Yang, K.-S. (2012). Indigenous psychology, Westernized psychology, and indigenized psychology: A non-Western psychologist’s view. Chang Gung Journal of Humanities and Social Sciences, 5(1), 1–32.

CHAPTER 8

Forgiveness in Indigenous Psychological Research: A Trojan Horse, a Western Knockoff, or a Traditioned Sensibility? Alvin Dueck, Ruizhe Song, and Michael Marossy

Alongside pioneers of indigenous psychological studies such as Enriquez in the Philippines (1992), Martín-Baró in El Salvador (1994), Richard Shweder in the US (1991), and Dalal and Misra in India (2010) stands Kuo-Shu Yang in Taiwan (2012). His legacy is a host of Chinese psychologists, exemplified in K. K. Hwang (2011), who carry the torch for the development of indigenous psychology. This essay will (a) focus on Yang’s model for a global psychology as presented in his last published paper (Yang, 2012), (b) make the case that Westernized psychology be critiqued for its implicit neoliberal paradigm, and (c) show that neoliberalism represents a threat to Yang’s vision for developing tradition-sensitive understandings of forgiveness in non-Western cultures. Yang sees with much clarity that colonialism is a critical vehicle for exporting the indigenous psychological research of colonizers. However, he makes only passing reference to the role of implicit neoliberal thought.

A. Dueck (B) · R. Song · M. Marossy Fuller Graduate School of Psychology, Pasadena, CA, USA e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s) 2020 L. Sundararajan et al. (eds.), Global Psychology from Indigenous Perspectives, Palgrave Studies in Indigenous Psychology, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-35125-0_8

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Neoliberalism has impacted mainstream psychology in that it reflects capitalism, the autonomous entrepreneurial self, and the sloughing off of tradition. Some psychologies in non-Western societies appear to be Western knockoffs with a few local features added (Adams, Kurti¸s, Salter, & Anderson, 2012; Teo, 2005). Indigenized psychology, however, is constructed on local models, metaphors, and paradigms which may differ radically from the archetypal images and metaphors of neoliberalism. We propose that the presence of neoliberalism inside the Trojan Horse of mainstream psychology makes the local construction of hybridic indigenous psychologies complex and difficult. For example, most research on forgiveness has been conducted in Western countries according to Western frameworks (e.g., Enright and the Human Development Study Group 1991). Forgiveness is a culturally saturated concept that has traditionally fallen within religious and/or moral domains (Marsella, 2015). An indigenous approach implies the concept of forgiveness cannot be understood apart from people’s culturally constructed worldviews—which are influenced by a variety of factors such as religious and moral traditions. Our goal for this paper is to show that neoliberalism represents a threat to Yang’s vision for developing tradition-sensitive understandings of forgiveness in non-Western cultures.

Yang’s Oeuvre For Yang, a genuinely global psychology is an aggregate constructed upon lower levels of indigenous self-understanding beginning with local communities, then particular societies, and, finally, the global level. At their foundation, formal psychologies are systematized folk psychologies that order everyday life. Yang asserts that “indigenous psychologies [IPs] developed in various non-Western countries can be creatively integrated with all the IPs formed in Western countries to construct a genuine, balanced global human psychology…” (11). The components of Yang’s global model are (a) psychologies indigenous to Western societies, (b) Westernized psychologies contextualized in non-Western societies, and (c) genuinely non-Western psychologies constructed on research with adapted methodology, with local participants regarding locally important topics. Yang delineates three approaches to culture and psychology which we will describe and assess.

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a. Indigenous psychology in EuroAmerican societies. This monocultural psychology is directly rooted in the Western psychologist’s own native culture and creates a psychology that reflects that culture. It is constructed on its own EuroAmerican folk and philosophical psychology. The research participants are primarily Western, and this psychology reflects their political, historical, and cultural context. The psychological researcher may assume that the knowledge produced is universal and may not be aware of how provincial it really is. The psychological knowledge produced is highly contextualized within, compatible with, and applicable to American culture. Yang was ahead of his time in recognizing that Western psychology was indigenous to Western culture. b. Westernized Psychologies. Western psychological knowledge is often imposed etically on non-Western societies. As a result, the psychological knowledge constructed lacks contextualization, compatibility, and applicability. Local metaphors, stories, proverbs, and implicit folk psychology are ignored. Western theories, methods, metaphors, and folk psychology are often used uncritically in studying nonWestern research participants. Given training in the West and local pressure to measure up to Western research standards, the local psychological researcher often lacks the sense of autonomy required to create an indigenous psychology. Westernized psychology is “simply misplaced, dislocated and decontextualized” (Yang, 2012, p. 15). Yang avers that this imported version of Western psychological knowledge is fundamentally incompatible with indigenous cultures and is unable to assist local peoples with practical problem solving. However, at issue is not only the neglect of local resources—there is also a power differential between societies which permits one to dominate the other. Westernized psychology is not only psychological in nature but brings with it neoliberal values and assumptions. The latter receives little attention in Yang’s assessment of imported psychologies and how that may affect a global psychology. c. Indigenized psychology. Indigenized psychology in non-Western societies is directly constructed on local culture or ancient cultural roots. Indigenous Western psychological research is notoriously difficult to replicate in non-Western societies. Epistemologically indigenized psychology is quasi-emic in that local culture has already

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been influenced by Western values and psychology. The psychological researcher is very aware of the extent to which the psychological knowledge is indigenous or reflects existing imported Western psychology. Ultimately, in indigenized psychology, there is greater contextualization, compatibility with, and applicability to local culture. Parenthetically, while Yang laments the lack of indigenous psychology, he does not, to our knowledge, articulate a psychology of indigenous Taiwanese. Nonetheless, Yang speaks eloquently for those non-Western psychologists who seek indigeneity. Yang is sensitive to the fact that indigenized non-Western psychologies will be hybridic in that these psychologies are not developed de novo; instead, they are already in the process of reconstruction. Yang is correct when he insists that there are no pure, indigenous nonWestern psychologies.

Neoliberalism Yang sees with much clarity that colonialism serves as a vehicle for exporting the indigenous psychologies of the colonizers. That such is the case is demonstrated by the distinction he makes between Westernized psychologies and indigenized psychologies. Yet, Yang makes only an indirect reference to the role neoliberalism might play in sustaining the ongoing effects of Western colonialism today. Our argument is thus that neoliberalism blurs the clear distinctions Yang delineates between Westernized psychologies and indigenized psychologies. Uncritically accepting neoliberalism’s unspoken assumptions regarding society, morality, and the human person risks making psychology complicit in sustaining a form of ideological colonialism that continues to erode non-Western forms of indigeneity in today’s ever-globalizing world.

A Brief Introduction to Neoliberal Discourse Neoliberalism is, in its broadest sense, a “theory of political economic practices that proposes that human well-being can best be advanced by liberating individual entrepreneurial freedoms and skills within an institutional framework characterized by strong private property rights, free markets, and free trade” (Harvey, 2007, p. 2). The adoption of such practices in their purest forms by dominant Western nations is generally thought to have begun in the final decades of the twentieth century,

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creating the initial stages of what Foucault called “neoliberal governmentality” (Foucault, 2008). Foucault writes that a central component of neoliberal governmentality is its new framework for imagining the relationship between the individual’s purpose and the state’s economic success, with the resulting premise that “the economy is optimized through the entrepreneurial activity of autonomous individuals and that human wellbeing is furthered if individuals are free to direct their lives as entrepreneurs” (Sugarman, 2015, p. 104). Since Foucault’s time, the pervasive forces of globalization and global capitalism have disseminated neoliberal forms of governmentality into non-Western nations across the globe. And as new iterations of neoliberal governmentality encounter and transform the economic and political structures of non-Western nations, they impact the conceptual frameworks and thought patterns of indigenous traditions and cultures as well. Neoliberalism’s relevance for indigenous psychology thus relates to the portraits of the human person and psychological life prescribed by neoliberal forms of governmentality. Neoliberalism’s absolute emphasis on individual freedom as the primary vehicle for ensuring both the individual’s well-being and the state’s economic success inherently brings into question indigenous/traditional values and moralities that pose a threat to such freedom. This is the driving force behind neoliberalism’s cunning: whereas the colonialism of previous centuries achieved conquest through direct political force, neoliberalism provides its subjects with a sense of agency as they choose to shirk off the values and imaginative frameworks associated with their traditional forms of life in pursuit of the new definition of fulfillment prescribed by our global capitalist political economy. The resulting neoliberal self is thus reduced to the “entrepreneurial self” (Foucault, 2008)—a fundamentally autonomous economic entity who “conceives of [its self] as a set of assets—skills and attributes—to be managed, maintained, [and] developed” (Sugarman, 2015, p. 104). Leveraging the suffering brought about by socioeconomic marginalization as its primary inroad, neoliberalism implicitly teaches this entrepreneurial self to prioritize “personal attributes aligned with enterprise culture, such as initiative, self-reliance, self-mastery, and risk taking” over traditional life patterns and forms of morality (Sugarman, 2015, p. 104). The authority of science provides further legitimacy to the telos of the enterprising self. By universalizing a definition of human fulfillment that idolizes desirable affect states as the ultimate ends of

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relational functioning and the purposeful life, the indigenously Western tradition of positivistic science simultaneously epitomizes neoliberalism and disseminates its influence in its purest form (Richardson, Bishop, & Garcia-Joslin, 2018). In this way, the dominant intellectual tradition of the West continues to undermine the imaginative frameworks of indigenous non-Western cultures—not by challenging the authority of their traditions directly, but by reducing the denouement of traditional forms of life across the globe to a truncated understanding of happiness as “a depthless physiological response without moral referent … a biological potential of the individual that makes no recourse to psychic interiority, biography, or social relationships of any kind” (Binkley, 2014, p. 3).

Neoliberalism and Yang’s Model We thus propose that neoliberalism poses a hidden threat to Yang’s vision for a “genuine, balanced, global human psychology” (Yang, 2012, p. 11, italics added). While Yang’s own critical sensitivities are illumined by his argument that “indigenously oriented non-Western psychologists should never habitually and uncritically apply Western theories, concepts, methods, or tools before thoroughly immersing themselves in the natural concrete details of the local psychological or behavioral phenomenon,” our point is that the veiled nature and increasingly pervasive influence of neoliberal discourse is making this crucial step in Yang’s program more complex and difficult than ever before (Yang, 2012, p. 24). The very purpose of our essay, then, is to highlight and exemplify the extent to which neoliberalism threatens psychologists’ frameworks for imagining indigenous responses to research questions that retain their “autonomy” from the influence of Western Psychology (Yang, 2012, p. 16). For allowing neoliberalism to remain within the Trojan Horse of psychology as a discipline risks making psychology complicit in disseminating a subversive form of Western ideological influence capable of “colonization in all spheres of life” (Teo, 2018, p. 3). For this reason, we must resist Yang’s claim that “it does not make sense to say that Western IP is an academically imperialistic knowledge system” (Yang, 2012, p. 21). For alongside Carl Ratner (2019), we hold that neoliberalism’s function as a subversive ideology that undermines indigenous traditions in favor of promoting the portrait of the human

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person prescribed by global capitalism shows us that we can only recognize the severity of our global neoliberal condition when we also recognize neoliberalism’s fundamentally political nature. Neoliberalism is not the unintended side-effect of apolitical intercultural encounters. Instead, it is an ideological form of colonization that attempts to indoctrinate historically marginalized non-Western nations by subtly undermining their indigenous sensibilities and promising them material gain through their participation in the thought world of global capitalism. Failing to identify neoliberalism’s fundamentally political nature, then, risks making psychology a medium for disseminating Western neoliberal ideology. For if psychology does not expose neoliberalism as an ideology that promotes and obfuscates political/economic oppression, then psychology will not be able to attend to the indigenous and traditional ways of life that represent alternatives to neoliberal oppression.

Westernized Psychology, Neoliberalism, and Forgiveness Research Forgiveness research is an area in psychology where we find evidence of neoliberalism’s subversive influence within Yang’s notion of Westernized psychology. Forgiveness has served as an important research topic for positive psychologists and has been examined in terms of its contributions to subjective well-being at the individual level and civic virtues at the group level (Seligman, 2002). Researchers generally recognize its origins in religious and moral traditions, but their focus has been moving away from these frameworks in pursuit of a universal framework that might be generalized (and thus perhaps be more profitable) across populations (Ho & Worthington, 2018; Hook, 2007). Two of McCullough and Witvliet’s (2002) goals in the Handbook of Positive Psychology were to identify definitions of forgiveness and instruments “assessing its value for individual and social well-being and designating interventions to promote forgiveness ” (p. 447, italics added). We submit that such goals not only dislocate and decontextualize a highly contextual social behavior that responds to ruptures and transgressions in relationships—they also appraise the value of forgiveness in the neoliberal economic fashion. The assumption that forgiveness can be “assessed” and “promoted” apart from any traditional, religious, and/or moral framework demonstrates the authors’ neoliberal underpinnings in emphasizing absolute freedom of the individual in the spirit of entrepreneurialism.

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We submit that the pursuit of a singular definition of forgiveness and the creation of instruments to measure forgiveness across cultural contexts are forms of Westernized psychology laden with neoliberal assumptions that colonize not only indigenous cultures but also disrespect religious diversity.

Defining Forgiveness The first goal of forgiveness research is to articulate a working definition. In the spirit of Western psychological positivism, forgiveness researchers have pursued a singular definition of forgiveness. It is believed that “without a clear definition, forgiveness will be little understood and open to much confusion” (Enright, Freedman, & Rique, 1998, p. 46). Citing primarily North’s (1987) paper on forgiveness in Christian ethics, Enright and the Human Development Study Group (1991) define forgiveness as “the overcoming of negative affect and judgment toward the offender, not by denying ourselves the right to such affect and judgment, but by endeavoring to view the offender with compassion, benevolence, and love while recognizing that he or she has abandoned the right to them” (p. 126). We recognize the value of definitions in advancing our understanding of psychology, and we support, in accordance with Yang’s frame of indigenized psychology, the use of definitions within the contexts in which they were developed. Given Enright et al.’s conceptualization of forgiveness from a Western Christian worldview, their definition may be more helpful with Christians in Western contexts. However, in accordance with Yang’s frame of Westernized psychology, we worry when the definition of forgiveness is used acontextually in nonWestern, non-Christian contexts and masked as having originated locally. Enright and Fitzgibbons (2000) defended Enright and the Human Development Study Group’s (1991) definition of forgiveness on the basis that “forgiveness occurs within the context of moral right and wrong, involving reduced resentment, and increased compassion and moral love” across Hebrew, Christian, Islamic, Hindu, and Buddhist traditions (p. 258). This defense appears to be a gross oversimplification of each religious tradition that displaces the particular meanings of behaviors, transgressions, and approaches to repair in each context. For example, when Enright and Fitzgibbons compared the “loving-kindness” a Buddhist demonstrated to his oppressor, an enraged king, to forgiveness when the Buddhist “[displayed] no anger but instead [wished] the king well” (p. 259), they

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seemed to make an etic interpretation of the Buddhist practice from a Christian lens. There was no indication that the Buddhist forgave at all according to Enright et al.’s idea of forgiveness that follows “a deep, personal, long-lasting injury or hurt” with “a sense of justice” (pp. 127– 128). We think that such comparisons and readings of non-Western traditions are forms of the colonizing Westernized psychology that Yang critiqued. Possibly paralleling the proliferation of neoliberalism, forgiveness research has also been displaced from its own religious roots within Western contexts. Prior to the 1980s, forgiveness fell within the domain of religion. It first drew attention as a self-help book that a Reformed Christian theologian wrote about its benefits to mental health and wellbeing (Worthington, 2005). Today, researchers make passing reference to forgiveness’ origins in religion—but it is unclear as to which religious tradition they are referring. Enright et al.’s (1991) definition of forgiveness derived primarily from Christian ethics (North, 1987) and a Western philosophical tradition that developed within a larger Christian context (e.g., Cunningham, 1985; Kohlberg & Power, 1981). Their sources emphasized forgiveness as a moral good and virtue, which Enright and Fitzgibbons (2000) upheld in their examination of forgiveness as a moral virtue. Because they prioritize individual freedom over any other form of moral duty in a neoliberal fashion, however, Enright and Fitzgibbons expressed concern over the threat to individual choice posed by the notion that forgiveness is a “duty” that must be expressed for one to be considered a moral person. For them, it is necessary that one holds the right to resentment and the choice to forgive. Although Enright and Fitzgibbons draw their understanding of forgiveness from Western Christian traditions, their neoliberal sensitivities cause them to prioritize the individual as the universal starting point of relational functioning. Examining Enright et al.’s (1991) definition of forgiveness according to the tenets of neoliberalism, we find that it assumes the individual as an agent of inalienable rights and freedoms to “negative affect and judgment” and forgiveness. Decontextualized of a traditional, religious, and/or moral framework that might stipulate social duties to forgive, it indicates that social context has no bearing on one’s forgiveness; rather, one may choose to forgive for the purpose of adding value to oneself. Sans traditional, religious, and/or moral frameworks, forgiveness becomes a mechanism for the elevation of desirable affect states. That such is the case

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is evidenced by McCullough and Witvliet’s (2002) view of the core feature of forgiveness: “when people forgive, their responses (i.e., what they feel and think about, what they want to do, or how they actually behave) toward people who have offended or injured them become less negative and more positive—or prosocial—over time” (p. 447, italics added). We believe that this simplified view of forgiveness not only displaces its contexts, but also truncates its function to simply an improvement in physiological responses, which may be depthless (Binkley, 2014).

Measuring Forgiveness The second goal of forgiveness research according to McCullough and Witvliet (2002) is to create instruments to measure forgiveness based on the identified definitions. The Enright Forgiveness Inventory (EFI; Enright, Rique, & Coyle, 2000) measures forgiveness according to Enright et al.’s (1991) definition. It is one of the most widely used instruments and has been translated into at least twelve languages (e.g., Hanke & Fischer, 2013). In accordance with our critique of the authors’ definition of forgiveness as a vehicle for the neoliberal subversion of indigenous ways, we submit that the EFI is both a form of Westernized psychology and a Trojan Horse for hiding neoliberal ideology. First, as an instrument of Westernized psychology with moral and philosophical roots in Christianity, the EFI may fail to capture the metaphors, stories, proverbs, and implicit folk psychology of nonWestern, non-Christian indigenous contexts. In one study, Hanson (2005) examined the validity of the Mandarin version of the EFI (MEFI) that has yielded high internal consistency scores in studies with Chinesespeaking populations (e.g., Lin, Enright, & Klatt, 2013). He asked participants to identify one Mandarin Chinese word that represents Enright et al. (2000) definition of forgiveness1 and, in accordance with an indigenously Chinese understanding of relationships, one Mandarin Chinese word that represents the definition of “tolerance.” He found that most participants did not identify the Mandarin Chinese word for forgiveness used in the MEFI. Participants identified a total of 57 words for “forgiveness” and “tolerance,” and several of the most common words (i.e., 1 The definition in Enright et al. (2000) is worded slightly different from the one found in Enright and the Human Development Study Group (1991) but their meaning is synonymous.

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kuan shu, bao rong ) were used to represent both “forgiveness” and “tolerance.” According to Hanson, there is an overlap in the construct, or semantic web, of forgiveness and tolerance in Mandarin Chinese. This finding contradicts Enright, Freedman, and Rique’s (1998) view that forgiveness is not “simply accepting or tolerating the injustice…[or] ‘moving on’ or ‘putting the past behind us’” (p. 47). In another example, Hanson found that participants most frequently associated their Mandarin Chinese word for “forgiveness” with the Chinese proverb, “never remember the wrongdoing of others.” Yet, according to Enright et al., forgiving is explicitly described as “not the same as forgetting.” Thus, Hanson’s study demonstrated the errors produced by Westernized psychological instruments when they are used with a non-Western Chinese population (See also, Paz, Neto, & Mullet, 2008). Secondly, the EFI may not provide meaningful results for indigenous psychology in EuroAmerican societies as well. The EFI consists of 60 items that measure forgiveness on the three dimensions of affect, behavior, and cognition. Each item is rated on a 6-point Likert scale of “strongly disagree” to “strongly agree.” On affect items, respondents rate the extent to which they feel positive and negative feelings toward a person they are seeking to forgive. For example, “I feel warm toward him/her” and “I feel bitter toward him/her.” On behavior items, respondents rate the extent to which they act in certain positive and negative ways with the person they are looking to forgive, for example, “regarding the person, I do or would help” and “regarding the person, I do or would avoid.” On cognition items, respondents rate the extent to which they think positive and negative thoughts about the person they are looking to forgive, for example, “I think he or she is nice” and “I think he or she is a bad person.” Entirely based on individual affect, behavior, and thought, the EFI not only neglects to capture the interpersonal, relational dimension of forgiveness that is salient in indigenous collectivist contexts (e.g., Sandage, Hill, & Vang, 2003), it also neglects to capture the sense of moral duty found in the Western Christian ethics that was used to conceptualize forgiveness (e.g., North, 1987). We thus find the reduction of items into positive and negative affective, behavioral, and cognitive states uninterpretable in measuring forgiveness in both indigenous non-Western and religious Western cultures.

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Conclusion We began this essay with a review of the three models of indigeneity posed by Yang (2012) in order to facilitate the development of a global psychology. The latter would be an amalgam of indigenous EuroAmerican psychologies, Westernized psychologies, and locally developed indigenized psychologies. We then raised the question of whether the neoliberal understanding of the person and culture implicit in Westernized psychology might undermine local efforts in developing a more homegrown indigenized psychology. We think that neoliberalism’s tacit but pervasive influence within psychology as a discipline blurs the clear distinctions Yang delineates between Westernized psychologies and indigenized psychologies—and that such an influence poses a real threat to Yang’s vision for a balanced global psychology. Thus, we argue that uncritical acceptance of neoliberal assumptions in psychological research allows neoliberalism to remain within the Trojan Horse of psychology as a masked tradition and risks making psychology complicit in disseminating a subversive form of Western ideological influence capable of “colonization in all spheres of life” (Teo, 2018, p. 3). In our essay, we discussed evidence of neoliberal assumptions in the Westernized psychological study of forgiveness. We suggest that when researchers attempt to identify a single universal definition of forgiveness and create instruments of measurement that are used cross-culturally without adaptation they are promoting a global psychology that dismisses indigenous particularity and imposes Western, neoliberal frameworks. A psychology of forgiveness that is not indigenized does not provide the context required to understand people’s culturally constructed worldviews and behaviors for relationships. In the spirit of Yang’s global psychology of indigenized psychologies, we submit that forgiveness as related to subjective well-being and civic virtue cannot be understood apart from the greater traditional, religious, and moral frameworks of a culture. Moreover, the glue that connects various parts of a global psychology may then be that of neoliberalism rather than a reflection of the actual experiences of human diversity.

References Adams, G., Kurti¸s, T., Salter, P. S., & Anderson, S. L. (2012). A cultural psychology of relationship: Decolonizing science and practice. In O. E. Gillath,

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G. E. Adams, & A. E. Kunkel. (Eds.), Relationship science: Integrating evolutionary, neuroscience, and sociocultural approaches. Washington, DC: American Psychological Association. Binkley, S. (2014). Happiness as enterprise: An essay on neoliberal life. Albany, NY: Suny Press. Cunningham, B. B. (1985). The will to forgive: A pastoral theological view of forgiving. The Journal of Pastoral Care, 39, 141–149. Dalal, A. K., & Misra, G. (2010). The core and context of Indian psychology. Psychology and Developing Societies, 22(1), 121–155. Enright, R. D., & Fitzgibbons, R. P. (2000). Helping clients forgive: An empirical guide for resolving anger and restoring hope. Washington, DC: American Psychological Association. Enright, R. D., & North, J. (1998). Introducing forgiveness. In R. D. Enright & J. North (Eds.), Exploring forgiveness (pp. 3–8). Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press. Enright, R. D., & the Human Development Study Group. (1991). The moral development of forgiveness. In W. M. Kurtines & J. L. Gewirtz (Eds.), Handbook of moral behavior and development (pp. 124–151). New York, NY: Psychology Press. Enright, R. D., Freedman, S., & Rique, J. (1998). The psychology of interpersonal forgiveness. In R. D. Enright & J. North (Eds.), Exploring forgiveness (pp. 46–62). Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press. Enright, R. D., Rique, J., & Coyle, C. T. (2000). The Enright Forgiveness Inventory (EFI) user’s manual. Madison, WI: The International Forgiveness Institute. Enriquez, V. G. (1992). From colonial to liberation psychology: The Philippine experience (pp. 53–57). Quezon City: University of the Philippines Press. Foucault, M. (2008). The birth of biopolitics: Lectures at the Collège de France 1978–1979. Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave Macmillan. Hanke, K., & Fischer, R. (2013). Socioeconomical and sociopolitical correlates of interpersonal forgiveness: A three-level meta-analysis of the Enright Forgiveness Inventory across 13 societies. International Journal of Psychology, 48, 514–526. https://doi.org/10.1080/00207594.2012.651086. Hanson, T. E. (2005). Translating “forgiveness”: The validity of the Mandarin version of the Enright Forgiveness Inventory. Unpublished master’s thesis, University of Saskatchewan, Saskatoon, Canada. Harvey, D. (2007). A brief history of neoliberalism. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Ho, M. Y., & Worthington, E. L. (2018). Is the concept of forgiveness universal? A cross-cultural perspective comparing Western and Eastern cultures. Current Psychology, 1–8.

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Hook, J. N. (2007). Forgiveness, individualism, and collectivism. Dissertation, Virginia Commonwealth University. Hwang, K.-K. (2011). Foundations of Chinese psychology: Confucian social relations (Vol. 1). New York, NY: Springer Science & Business Media. Kohlberg, L., & Power, C. (1981). Moral development, religious thinking, and the question of a seventh stage. In L. Kohlberg (Ed.), The philosophy of moral development (pp. 311–372). San Francisco, CA: Harper & Row. Lin, W. N., Enright, R. D., & Klatt, J. S. (2013). A forgiveness intervention for Taiwanese young adults with insecure attachment. Contemporary Family Therapy, 35(1), 105–120. Marsella, A. J. (2015). Reflections on the cultural contexts of conflict resolution via truth and reconciliation processes. In M. Galluccio (Ed.), Handbook of international negotiation: Interpersonal, intercultural, and diplomatic perspectives (pp. 287–295). Cham, Switzerland: Springer International Publishing. Martín-Baró, I. (1994). Writings for a liberation psychology. Cambridge, MA and London: Harvard University Press. McCullough, M. E., & Witvliet, C. V. (2002). The psychology of forgiveness. In C. R. Synder & S. J. Lopez (Eds.), Handbook of positive psychology (pp. 446– 458). Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press. North, J. (1987). Wrongdoing and forgiveness. Philosophy, 62, 449–508. https://doi.org/10.1017/S003181910003905X. Paz, R., Neto, F., & Mullet, E. (2008). Forgiveness: A China-Western Europe comparison. The Journal of Psychology, 142(2), 147–158. Ratner, C. (2019). Neoliberal psychology. In Neoliberal Psychology (pp. 145– 174). Cham: Springer. Richardson, F. C., Bishop, R. C., & Garcia-Joslin, J. (2018). Overcoming neoliberalism. Journal of Theoretical and Philosophical Psychology, 38(1), 15–28. Sandage, S. J., Hill, P. C., & Vang, H. C. (2003). Toward a multicultural positive psychology: Indigenous forgiveness and Hmong culture. The Counseling Psychologist, 31, 564–592. https://doi.org/10.1177/0011000003256350. Seligman, M. E. P. (2002). Positive psychology, positive prevention, and positive therapy. In C. R. Synder & S. J. Lopez (Eds.), Handbook of positive psychology (pp. 1–9). Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press. Shweder, R. A. (1991). Thinking through cultures: Expeditions in cultural psychology. Cambridge, MA and London: Harvard University Press. Sugarman, J. (2015). Neoliberalism and psychological ethics. Journal of Theoretical and Philosophical Psychology, 35(2), 103. Teo, T. (2005). The postcolonial critique. In The critique of psychology: From Kant to postcolonial theory (pp. 155–180). New York, NY: Springer Science & Business Media. Teo, T. (2018). Homo neoliberalus: From personality to forms of subjectivity. Theory & Psychology, 28(5), 581–599.

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Worthington, E. L. (2005). Initial questions about the art and science of forgiving. In E. L. Worthington (Ed.), Handbook of forgiveness (pp. 1–13). New York, NY: Routledge. Yang, K.-S. (1997). Indigenizing westernised Chinese psychology. In M. H. Bond (Ed.), Working at the interface of culture: Eighteen lives in social science (pp. 62–76). London: Routledge. Yang, K.-S. (2012). Indigenous psychology, Westernized psychology, and indigenized psychology: A non-Western psychologist’s view. Chang Gung Journal of Humanities and Social Sciences, 5(1), 1–32.

CHAPTER 9

Psychology for the Global 99% Margaret J. Hendricks and Fathali M. Moghaddam

Over a long and productive career, Kuo-Shu Yang provided stimulating ideas that have proved useful in discussions about the direction of psychology around the world (e.g., Yang, 1997, 2000, 2012). Yang worked at a high level of abstraction and his most important contribution is probably the framing of global changes in psychology, and the conceptualization of three kinds of what he terms ‘scientific psychology’, indigenous psychology (IP), Westernized psychology (WP), and indigenized psychology (IZP). This macro-level conceptualizing continues to stimulate debate, particularly in Asian psychology. Our focus in this discussion is specifically on what Yang (2000) calls IZP, “an evolving system of psychological knowledge based on scientific research that is sufficiently compatible with the studied phenomena and their ecological, economic, social, cultural, and historic contexts” (p. 245). The IP of the United States has become mainstream psychology at a global level (Moghaddam, 1987; Moghaddam & Taylor, 1985). In essence, parallel to the superpower status of the United States in economic

M. J. Hendricks · F. M. Moghaddam (B) Georgetown University, Washington, DC, USA e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s) 2020 L. Sundararajan et al. (eds.), Global Psychology from Indigenous Perspectives, Palgrave Studies in Indigenous Psychology, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-35125-0_9

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and military domains, mainstream U.S. psychology has also gained superpower status in the context of global psychology. Our point of departure is scholarship that is critical of contemporary mainstream psychology on ideological grounds, as well as on the grounds of following outdated positivist models of science (see Bruner, 1986; Billig, 1995, 1996; Fox & Prilleltensky, 1997; Gergen, 1976; Harré & Moghaddam, 2012, 2016; Sampson, 1981). This critical scholarship is not given enough attention by Yang and most others writing in the ‘indigenous psychology’ debate. In line with a number of theories of intergroup relations (Moghaddam, 2008) and critical psychology (Fox & Prilleltensky, 1997), we highlight the role of ideology and group-based inequalities in the production of mainstream psychology. We see mainstream psychology, what in Yang’s terms is indigenous U.S. psychology, as dominating the global stage (Moghaddam, 1987) but failing to reflect the interests of the global poor—both in Western and non-Western societies. We see a need for far more critical attention to the issue of group-based inequalities, which is not given enough attention in discussions of IP. In order to rectify this neglect, we first need to radically change perspectives on ethics in psychology.

The Poverty of Ethics in Psychology We argue that mainstream psychology has neglected the central interests and concerns of the majority of humanity. In this respect, traditional psychology is ‘unethical.’ This is in line with Brown’s (1997) argument that “Formal codes continue to focus narrowly on risks to the individual research participant, in the specific context of the experiment or study, but neglect questions about risks to the group to which the participant belongs. Even more rare are questions about whether or not certain types of research, no matter how ethically conducted, harm the culture because they directly or inadvertently perpetuate reactionary or oppressive norms” (p. 56). In agreement with Brown, we are going beyond the narrow definition of ethics adopted in mainstream psychology. A broader concern with ethics necessarily encompasses the research questions being addressed and the impact of research on the interests of groups, not just the question of how individuals are treated in the research setting. We have argued that the research questions being addressed by psychologists largely reflect the interests and concerns of the 1% rather than the 99%.

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The chapter is in four main parts. First, we briefly discuss the issue of group-based inequalities. Second, we describe the development of psychology in the ‘Three Worlds’: the First World of psychology consisting of the United States, the Second World comprised of the other industrialized nations, and the Third World made up of the developing countries. Note that the ‘three worlds of psychology’ (Moghaddam, 1987) stems from the issue of power and resource distribution. We elaborate on resource and power differences both between and within each of the three worlds. In part three, we specifically examine research evidence suggesting that poverty impairs cognitive functioning. In the concluding section, we return to Yang’s scholarship and briefly suggest paths forward.

Group-Based Inequalities and Psychology In recent decades a number of leading economic analysts have identified and highlighted two highly important trends in wealth distribution between and within nations: first, increasing wealth disparities between nations; and second, increasing wealth disparities within nations. For example, Holton’s (2014) analyses lead to the conclusion that “…gross domestic product (GDP) per head of the Netherlands – the richest country in 1820 – was three times that of China the world’s poorest. By 1913, the United States had become the world’s richest country, and the ratio between the United States and China, which remained the poorest, had expanded to ten to one. Today the ratio of richest to poorest now stands at one hundred to one, though China is no longer the poorest” (p. 81). Piketty (2014), another leading economic analyst, has pointed out disparities in the rate of return of capital (accumulated by the wealthy elite) compared to income and output: “…the private rate of return on capital, r, can be significantly higher for long periods of time than the rate of growth of income and output, g. The inequality of r > g implies that wealth accumulated in the past grows more rapidly than output and wages. This inequality expresses a fundamental logical contradiction. The entrepreneur inevitably tends to become a rentier, more and more dominant over those who own nothing but their labor. Once constituted, capital reproduces itself faster than output increases” (p. 571). Interestingly, although these findings reported in seminal works by Robert Holton (2014) and Thomas Piketty (2014) have been widely reported in the Western media (Piketty’s books have become best-sellers), at the national political level there has been no serious effort to control

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these trends. Indeed, taxation policy by President Donald Trump in the United States has lowered taxes for the super-rich, at the same time that food-stamps for the poor have been cut. Just as differences between the richest and poorest nations have increased, the differences within these richest and poorest nations have increased. Commenting on wealth distribution trends in 2011, Warren Buffett, the second richest person in the United States at the time, said, “…there’s been class warfare going on for the last twenty years, and my class has won. We’re the ones that have gotten our tax rates reduced” (quoted in Dorling, 2014, p. 1). In the United States, the 2017 ‘Trump tax cuts’ and the repeal of the Affordable Care Act’s individual mandate penalties (meaning that individuals are no longer penalized if they fail to register and monetarily contribute to health insurance) gave even more advantages to corporations and the richest people in the country (Glied, 2018). Higher wealth inequality is often defended by those who argue for the important role of social mobility: through hard work, talent, and other necessary characteristics, the poor can make their way up the social hierarchy and join the rich. Thus, in the American context the ideology of the ‘American Dream’ and the slogan ‘anyone can make it in America’ is propagated. As long as the social mobility elevator works to carry hardworking and talented poor individuals to the top, then the system is fine. But the fact is that the social mobility elevator is not working, it is broken. Research clearly shows that in countries such as the United States and the United Kingdom, the financial and educational achievement of not only parents but also grand-parents has an important impact on outcomes for the next generation (Gilligan, Karraker, & Jasper, 2018; Gould, 2012; Mare, 2014). Thus, at the same time that the gap between the richest and poorest nations is increasing, and the gap between the richest and the poorest people within nations is increasing, social mobility is stagnating in the United States and other major countries. Hundreds of millions of people are trapped in chronic poverty (Chronic Poverty Report, 2008–2009), meaning that they are poor in multiple ways (not just in terms of income) for very extended periods of time, often intergenerationally as they pass on chronic poverty to their children as inheritance. Chronic poverty involves a lack of multiple forms of capital, including financial, environmental, human skills and knowledge, social, and political capital. The chronically poor inherit little or no capital and accumulate little or no capital. In addition to the chronically

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poor, a far larger number are ‘merely’ poor; according to the World Bank, 2.7 billion people live on less than $2 a day (Clemens & Kremer, 2016), meaning that they have very low capital for extended periods of time, but find ways of (at least) temporarily climbing out of poverty (but often falling back into poverty at a later time). But does this increase of wealth concentration and inequality, with resulting poverty for a large disadvantaged group, have any psychological importance? We discuss this question as part of the celebration of the life and work of Kuo-Shu Yang. We argue that poverty does have important psychological consequences, and we advocate for a psychology that better meets the needs of the global 99%—simply referring to the vast majority who are not part of the global rich (actually, it would be more accurate to refer to something like the global 99.99999%, but we have continued to use the 99 vs. 1% narrative popularized in the media). There is already a broad discussion about the relationship between psychology and poverty (Carr, 2013; Carr & Sloan, 2003; Smith, 2010), with some focus on women (Bullock, 2013), ethnicity (Raz, 2016), and children (Lipina & Colombo, 2009; Maholmes & King, 2012). Some attention has also been given to psychology and poverty in non-Western countries (e.g., Mohanty & Misra, 2000). In the present discussion, we narrow our focus to the cognitive consequences of poverty, with special attention to children. Our goal is not to undertake an exhaustive review, but to highlight certain findings that we believe to be particularly salient in a global context. We use examples from research on cognitive load and poverty to provide details of the different needs and concerns of the economically rich and poor. This research provides strong evidence in support of the view that the experience of economic poverty cognitively impairs the performance of poor people, distracting them and preventing them from competing as equals even when seemingly equal opportunities are presented to them. In essence, findings reveal that lack of money shapes the thinking of the poor, even when the task at hand seems neutral and far-removed from monetary matters.

Psychology in the Three Worlds The growth of psychological science outside the First (the United States) and Second (other industrialized nations) Worlds of psychology has been impressive since the 1980s when the Three Worlds of psychology were identified (Moghaddam, 1987). In the major countries of Africa, Asia,

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and South America, there are now national and regional psychological associations, conferences, and journals. Along with this growth, major standardized psychological tests of personality and intelligence originating in the First and Second Worlds, as well as numerous research instruments, have been translated and standardized for use in the Third World societies of Africa, Asia, and South America. In this respect, it could be argued that psychology has become more global (see discussions on the complexities of global psychology in Stevens & Gielen, 2006). Close inspection of the growth of psychology around the world reveals that there is a great deal of uniformity in the kind of psychology spreading internationally (Moghaddam, 1987). This uniformity parallels uniformity in certain goods that are becoming global, such as McDonalds and Pizza Hut. Research originating from the Third World of psychology has been so greatly influenced by the First and Second Worlds that it is often thought of as WP—being neither original nor indigenous to these non-Western countries (Yang, 2012). In part this Westernization of psychology has come from the continued dominance of U.S. psychology in the field today. Most importantly, the research questions that drive psychological research around the world are emerging mainly from research centers in Western societies, and particularly the United States. One possibility is that psychological knowledge produced in the United States and other Western societies is scientifically superior and, for this reason, it is being adopted by non-Western societies. Moghaddam and Lee (2006) contrast this ‘scientific objectivity’ model with a powerrelations model to explain why the United States, a global superpower in terms of military, economics, and politics, is also dominant in the field of psychology. The power-relations model proposes that the field of psychology is more influenced by research indigenous to powerful nations with global influence simply because they are powerful and have influence. One way this Westernization of psychology is strengthened is through the elite—living in the top 1% of society—in the Third World. Trained in Western universities, they return to their home countries bringing Western values, ideas, and psychological methodology (Moghaddam & Lee, 2006; Yang, 2012). Most importantly, these elite transfer from the West the key research questions being pursued in Western research centers. Through imported research priorities and questions, the elite in non-Western societies shape psychology in their societies to become distant from the traditional sector of non-Western societies (Moghaddam & Taylor, 1985). These processes have resulted in ‘dual perceptions’ in

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many developing nations, with a modern sector that perceives the world in ways heavily influenced by the West (and the psychological science of the West) and a traditional sector that continues to view the world more from an indigenous perspective. If the psychology being practiced comes from these Westernized elite and is absent of the culture of the indigenous world, then research seen as global is actually coming from a Westernized 1% that in many ways are more similar to people living in the First and Second Worlds than their fellow neighbors living in the Third World (Moghaddam & Lee, 2006). Adapting and translating tests created in the Western world with Western values and culture are not capturing the traditional culture of the 99% in the Third World but rather the Westernized 1%. Through a process of double-reification, ways of thinking and acting are exported from Western to (mainly the modern sectors of) non-Western societies, and ‘discovered’ as universals through ‘cross-cultural’ research—which mostly involves student samples in different societies. A review of traditional psychology journals focused on social behavior and culture showed that the percentage of published studies using student samples has increased (Moghaddam & Lee, 2006). This can only be a valid approach if we assume that social and cultural behavior is universal and it does not matter which human populations are sampled for research. But this is an invalid assumption; it is not possible to test the universality of psychological theories if research samples consist mostly of students. It is not just in non-Western societies that this occurs, in developed countries psychology is often established in the top 1% and merely exported to explain social phenomena for the rest of the population— assuming it’s one size fits all (Moghaddam & Taylor, 1985). As Yang (2012) wrote, given the dominance of the United States in psychology and its global cultural influence, it will be impossible to create a psychology isolated from the Western world. Instead, the idea is to focus on strengthening IZP. However, in order for this to happen—psychology must first expand beyond the 1% in each World to include the 99%. The next section describes one way in which the needs of the 99% are being included.

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Poverty and Cognitive Functioning In this discussion we briefly consider evidence that poverty has important consequences for the cognitive functioning of the poor. The twenty-firstcentury research in this domain builds on the early studies of Jerome Bruner (Bruner & Goodman, 1947) and others (also see Keys, Brozek, Henschel, Mickelsen, & Taylor, 1950) illuminating the impact of poverty on cognitive functioning. There are several ways in which contemporary research on the psychological consequences of poverty is different from the earlier research. First, in the twenty-first century there is greater wealth concentration and wealth disparity (Dorling, 2014; Holton, 2014; Piketty, 2014). In short, the billions of people who still live on less than $2 a day are being left further behind. Second, economists and others outside psychological science have discovered that poverty tends to be perpetuated and worsened because it has severe psychological consequences, which leads to a cycle of poverty (Schilbach, Schofield, & Mullainathan, 2016). Thus, psychological changes are now seen as part of the solution to poverty. Most importantly in terms of research innovations, a third feature of contemporary studies on psychology and poverty is the central place given to cognitive load, the ‘burden’ that performing a particular task imposes on the cognitive system of a learner (Paas & Van Merriënboer, 1994). Reviewing this research, Shafir (2017) concluded that, “Preoccupation with pressing budgetary concerns occupies the mind, leaving fewer cognitive resources available elsewhere, thus impeding cognitive function in all aspects of life, financial and otherwise” (p. 133). For example, a series of studies by Shah, Zhao, Mullainathan, and Shafir (2018) demonstrate the special role of money in the lives of the poor. In these studies, participants are presented with different scenarios and have to make decisions that directly or indirectly involve money. The following is an example of the scenarios used by Shah et al. (2018, p. 8): “Suppose you are running late for an important meeting across town. While you had originally planned to walk there, there is not enough time now, and no quick public transportation to get you there. So you take a cab. As you sit in the cab in traffic, what do you think of?” In response to this and other similar scenarios, lower-income participants were more likely to show a preoccupation with the financial costs involved. But lower-income participants also showed a higher tendency

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to think about money when considering a scenario about illness (higherincome participants did not show this tendency), which on a surface level was unrelated to finances. Lower-income participants also found it more difficult to suppress thoughts about costs, once they came to mind. Shah et al. (2018) demonstrated that the kinds of thought associations experienced by higher- and lower-income participants were also different: seemingly disconnected issues and items became connected through the power of money in the minds of lower-income participants. The preoccupation of the poor with money and financial challenges has been shown to have detrimental consequences for decision-making and life choices broadly. For example, in another study Shah, Mullainathan, and Shafir (2012) demonstrated that the poor allocate attention in a way that neglects certain key features of a situation, leading to problematic decision-making, and outcomes such as over-borrowing. In a series of experiments Mani, Mullainathan, Shafir, and Zhao (2013) induced thoughts about monetary issues and then tested performance on cognitive tasks among participants with different income levels. To induce thoughts about financial issues, participants were presented with scenarios such as, “Your car is having some trouble and requires $X to be fixed. You can pay in full, take a loan, or take a chance and forego the service at the moment…how would you go about making this decision?”. The cost for repairing the car was either low or high. In the middle of thinking through how they would tackle such a problem, participants completed two tasks measuring cognitive performance. Results show that lower- and higherincome participants performed similarly when the car repair cost was low, but the lower-income participants performed worse when the car repair cost was high. In the next experiment, Mani et al. (2013) found that farmers did worse on cognitive tasks when tested before harvest, when they were relatively poor, but better after harvest, when they had more money. Thus, research on poverty and cognition has established that poverty increases cognitive load and impairs performance on cognitive tasks (Mani et al., 2013), a trend that can span across generations as part of ‘inherited poverty’ (Gilligan et al., 2018). Additionally, research has demonstrated the wider and more long-term impact of poverty. For example, researchers have examined how childhood poverty can lead to impairment in working memory in adults (e.g., Evans & Schamberg, 2009). Working memory is essential for short-term storage and manipulation, for language comprehension and production, and for processing

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of information to be transferred to long-term memory. The findings of Evans and Schamberg (2009) suggest that chronic stress, measured by biological markers, in childhood mediates the relationship between the length of poverty experienced in childhood and working memory in adulthood. This is in line with a body of research suggesting that poverty in childhood impairs cognitive functioning and influences the underlying neurobiology of cognition (Ursache & Noble, 2016).

Concluding Comments Yang’s conceptualization of three types of psychology, IP, WP, and IZP, is proving useful for stimulating debate about psychology around the world. We argue that this debate would benefit by giving more attention to issues of ideology, power, group-based inequalities, and the logicopositivist assumptions underlying mainstream psychology, as well as to the scholarship of researchers critical of mainstream psychology with attention to these issues (e.g., Billig, 1995, 1996; Bruner, 1986; Fox & Prilleltensky, 1997; Gergen, 1976; Harré & Moghaddam, 2012, 2016; Sampson, 1981). We discussed the domain of cognition and poverty as reflected this more critical perspective. Finally, we note that our particular approach to poverty and cognition has been limited. First, we have focused on a one-directional process, examining how poverty influences cognition. Our approach leads to policy implications that emphasize the importance of changing the external environment and resource distribution. However, we acknowledge that this is only part of the solution. It could be argued that the relationship between poverty and cognition is bi- or multi-dimensional, with cognition also influencing poverty. For example, Dalton, Ghosal, and Mani (2014) developed a model of poverty and aspirations that implies both external (e.g., resource distribution and practical opportunities/programs available to the poor) and internal constraints (e.g., aspirations and motivations among the poor) must be targeted and changed. Dalton et al. (2014) point to instructive examples of program failures when only external constraints are changed, such as when opportunities are presented to the poor, but not taken up, to improve their situation through farming innovations and asset assistance programs. Thus, it is imperative that both external and internal constraints are targeted by poverty reduction programs.

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A second way in which our perspective on cognition and poverty might be limited is that the standard instruments and methods used in traditional research might lead to results with less generalizability. This is the claim of Orozco-Hormaza, Perinat, and Sánchez (2009), who conducted research on cognitive development in Columbia and concluded that poor children, “…do not [all] exhibit high deficits; on the contrary, at all ages, a high percentage of children are able to solve items designed for a higher Battelle age range than their chronological age indicated” (p. 304). Further, within the sample of poor participants, these authors distinguished between three levels of poverty but failed to find the expected relationship between the level of poverty and cognitive development. Thus, there is a need for caution as we move forward to generalize about the relationship between poverty and cognition.

References Billig, M. (1995). Banal nationalism. London: Sage. Billig, M. (1996). Arguing and thinking: A rhetorical approach to social psychology. New York: Cambridge University Press. First published 1987. Brown, L. (1997). Ethics in psychology: Cui bono? In D. Fox & I. Prilleltensky (Eds.), Critical psychology: An introduction (pp. 51–67). Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage. Bruner, J. S. (1986). Actual minds, possible worlds. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Bruner, J. S., & Goodman, C. C. (1947). Value and need as organizing factors in perception. The Journal of Abnormal and Social Psychology, 42, 33–44. Bullock, H. E. (2013). Women and poverty: Psychology, public policy and social justice. New York: Wiley-Blackwell. Carr, S. C. (2013). Anti-poverty psychology. New York: Springer. Carr, S. C., & Sloan, T. S. (Eds.). (2003). Poverty and psychology: From global perspective to local practice. New York: Springer. Chronic Poverty Research Center. (2008–2009). Chronic poverty report 2008–2009: Escaping poverty traps. Retrieved 1:00 pm EST December 6, 2018, from http://www.chronicpoverty.org/uploads/publication_files/ CPR2_ReportFull.pdf. Clemens, M. A., & Kremer, M. (2016). The new role for the World Bank. Journal of Economic Perspectives, 30, 53–76. Dalton, P. S., Ghosal, S., & Mani, A. (2014). Poverty and aspirations failure. The Economic Journal, 126, 165–188. Dorling, D. (2014). Inequality and the 1%. London: Verso.

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Evans, G. W., & Schamberg, M. A. (2009). Childhood poverty, chronic stress, and adult working memory. Proceedings of the National Academy of Science (NPAS), 106, 6545–6549. Gergen, K. J. (1976). Social psychology as history. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 26, 309–320. Gilligan, M., Karraker, A., & Jasper, A. (2018). Linked lives and cumulative inequality: A multigenerational family life course framework. Family Relations, 10, 111–125. Glied, S. (2018). Implications of the 2017 Tax Cuts and Jobs Act for public health. American Journal of Public Health, 108, 734–736. Gould, E. (2012). U.S. lags behind peer countries in mobility. Retrieved 1:10 pm EST November 27, 2018, from https://www.epi.org/publication/usa-lagspeer-countries-mobility/. Harré, R., & Moghaddam, F. M. (Eds.). (2012). Psychology for the third millennium: Integrating cultural and neuroscience perspectives. London and Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage. Hardcover and softcover. Harré, R., & Moghaddam, F. M. (Eds.). (2016). Questioning causality: Scientific explorations of cause and consequence across social contexts. Santa Barbara, CA: Praeger. Holton, R. J. (2014). Global inequalities. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Keys, A., Brozek, J., Henschel, A., Mickelsen, O., & Taylor, H. L. (1950). The biology of human starvation. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Lipina, S. J., & Colombo, J. A. (2009). Poverty and brain development during childhood: An approach from cognitive psychology and neuroscience. Washington, DC: American Psychological Association Press. Maholmes, V., & King, R. B. (Eds.). (2012). The Oxford handbook of poverty and child development. New York: Oxford University Press. Mani, A., Mullainathan, S., Shafir, E., & Zhao, J. (2013). Poverty impedes cognitive function. Science, 341, 976–980. Mare, R. D. (2014). Multigenerational aspects of social stratification: Issues for further research. Research on Social Stratification and Mobility, 35, 121–128. Moghaddam, F. M. (1987). Psychology in the three worlds: As reflected by the crisis in social psychology and the move toward the indigenous third-world psychology. American Psychologist, 42(10), 912–920. Moghaddam, F. M. (2008). Multiculturalism and intergroup relations: Psychological implications for democracy in global context. Washington, DC: American Psychological Association Press. Moghaddam, F. M., & Lee, N. (2006). Double reification: The process of universalizing psychology in the three worlds. In A. C. Brock (Ed.), Internationalizing the history of psychology (pp. 163–182). New York: New York University Press.

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Moghaddam, F. M., & Taylor, D. M. (1985). Psychology in the developing world: An evaluation through the concepts of “dual perception” and “parallel growth”. American Psychologist, 40(10), 1144–1146. Mohanty, A. K., & Misra, G. (Eds.). (2000). Psychology of poverty and disadvantages. New Delhi, India: Concept Publishing. Orozco-Hormaza, M., Perinat, A., & Sánchez, H. (2009). Cognitive development and interaction contexts. In A. C. de Sousa Bastos & E. P. Rabinovich (Eds.), Living in poverty: Developmental poetics of cultural realities (pp. 287– 308). Charlotte, NC: Information Age Publishing. Paas, G. W. C., & Van Merriënboer, J. J. G. (1994). Instructional control of cognitive load in the training of complex cognitive tasks. Educational Psychology Review, 6, 351–371. Piketty, T. (2014). Capital in the twenty-first century (A. Goldhammer, Trans.). Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University press. Raz, M. (2016). What’s wrong with the poor? Psychiatry, race, and the war on poverty. Chapel Hill, NC: The University of North Carolina Press. Sampson, E. E. (1981). Cognitive psychology as ideology. American Psychologist, 36, 730–743. Schilbach, F., Schofield, H., & Mullainathan, S. (2016). The psychological lives of the poor. American Economic Review, 106, 435–440. Shah, A. K., Mullainathan, S., & Shafir, E. (2012). Some consequences of having too little. Science, 338(6107), 682–685. Shafir, E. (2017). Decisions in poverty contexts. Current Opinions in Psychology, 18, 131–136. Shah, A. K., Zhao, J., Mullainathan, S., & Shafir, E. (2018). Money in the mental lives of the poor. Social Cognition, 36, 4–19. Smith, L. (2010). Psychology, poverty, and the end of social exclusion: Putting our practice to work. New York: Teachers College Press. Stevens, M. J., & Gielen, U. P. (Eds.). (2006). Toward a global psychology: Theory, research, intervention and pedagogy. New York: Psychology Press. Ursache, A., & Noble, K. G. (2016). Socioeconomic status, white matter, and executive function in children. Psychophysiology, 53, 71–82. Yang, K.-S. (1997). Indigenizing Westernized Chinese psychology. In M. H. Bond (Ed.), Working at the interface of cultures: Eighteen lives in social science (pp. 62–76). London: Routledge. Yang, K.-S. (2000). Monocultural and cross-cultural indigenous approaches: The royal road to the development of a balanced human global psychology. Asian Journal of Social Psychology, 3, 241–264. Yang, K.-S. (2012). Indigenous psychology, Westernized psychology, and indigenized psychology: A non-Western psychologist’s view. Chang Gung Journal of Humanities and Social Sciences, 5(1), 1–32.

CHAPTER 10

The Impossible Conditions of the Possibility of an Alter-Global Psychology Thomas Teo and Bilal Af¸sin

Yang (1997, 2000, 2012) advanced the idea that psychology can be global, not in the way Western psychologists have projected, but based on the integration of all indigenous psychologies, whereby Western scientific psychology itself is understood as an indigenous endeavor that does not have supremacy over other indigenous psychologies. His vision for (what we name) an “alter-global psychology” requires both Western and nonWestern approaches. Yang (2000) remains consistent in even calling this global psychology indigenous: “the highest indigenous psychology, a universal, or more properly a global, psychology for all human beings on the earth will be formed by integrating lower-level indigenous psychologies” (p. 246). Yang’s “global” vision is unique because he neither assumes the universality of a culture-specific phenomenon, nor does he accumulate unsystematically existing findings from different cultures; rather he imagines different groups of “native” psychologists focusing deeply on a

T. Teo (B) · B. Af¸sin York University, Toronto, ON, Canada e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s) 2020 L. Sundararajan et al. (eds.), Global Psychology from Indigenous Perspectives, Palgrave Studies in Indigenous Psychology, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-35125-0_10

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similar psychological phenomenon in long-term international collaborations. Yang’s vision for a global psychology reminds us of Immanuel Kant’s (1724–1804) projects in that it remains idealistic in a way that orients psychologists who are sympathetic to indigenous psychologies toward an end in the internationalization of psychology. It helps us to debate the conditions of the possibilities of a global psychology that is not based on colonial or particular visions. However, from a critical perspective that we want to assume in this debate, we begin with divergent questions: “Why did the global psychology the way Yang envisioned not happen? Why is it not happening? Why is it unlikely to happen in the near future? What are the conditions that one needs for achieving a global psychology and are they possible?” This critical intervention is sustained by analyses within Western psychology about the integration of Western theories and the many suggestions for solving this problem (see e.g., Goertzen, 2008; Green, 2015). However, integration within Western academic psychology did not happen, and we are at the moment further away from any form of unification. Privileging one research program such as neuroscience, cognitive psychology, or behaviorism in psychology does not solve the problem of Western integration. If integration is not possible within Western psychology, then how would it be possible to achieve that on a global level? In order to understand why neither integration in Western psychology nor the integration of all psychologies into a global one has occurred, analyses need to move away from an internal rational reconstruction to an analysis of science (psychology) and academia on the background of history, sociology, culture, politics, economics, psychology (of psychology), and other factors that have influenced and shaped psychology (see Teo, 2018; Walsh-Bowers, 2010). From a critical perspective, the first reflection needs to address the degree to which Western psychology is indigenous of the very culture it is assumed to represent. Critical psychologists have argued that Western indigenous psychology, particularly scientific psychology, is not as indigenous as Yang might think. We do not primarily refer to the idea that the difference within Western culture is larger than the difference between various cultures, but to the project of critical psychology that started with the assumption that psychology as researched and taught in academia and practiced in professional contexts has limited relevance for the conduct of life of ordinary people. Psychology

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has enacted and embodied for a long time a class bias, gender bias, minority bias, and biases against LGBTQ persons and persons with disabilities, to mention a few streams of reflection. The project of Western psychology is not immediate relevance, but one of making it relevant to people through a process that involves more or less subtle power. The second reflection relates to the issue of power not only within but also between cultures, nations, and countries. The reality of globalization requires an analysis of wealth, power and the neoliberal marketing and selling of Western goods and services, including research and applied practices that demonstrate historically that the Western model of psychology has had a head start and advantage in regard to the distribution or “competition” of ideas. It has been quantified in academia in citation rates and impact factors of individuals, departments, universities, and countries. In this competitive and adversarial model that itself represents an indigenous character established in Anglo-American contexts and distributed throughout the world, there is no insider place for alternative, minority psychologies. Thus, if mainstream Chinese psychologists want to compete with Western psychologists, which they do, then they need to concentrate on areas with high impact (e.g., neuroscience in psychology). Psychologists focused on historical traditions that had once a significant role in that culture do not count. There is no incentive for integration, in this export model of science, or for including indigenous psychologies outside the West.

The Relevance of Psychology Yang (2012) makes the argument that indigenous psychology (concepts, theory, methods, results) reflects local phenomena, and that psychology demonstrates indigenous compatibility1 with the culture from which it emerged. Indeed, for Yang, the knowledge from indigenous psychology in Euro-American countries has high compatibility and high applicability with them (see p. 15). An important problem is, from the perspective of critical thought, that psychology in the West can be divided into academic research psychology, pop psychology, psychotherapy, and applied psychology (part of the psydisciplines) and it is doubtful that academic psychology is more compatible with the culture than pop psychology. Mainstream academic psychology, in its practice divides issues into variables and is the least compatible and applicable program to problems of

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the West. Admittedly, there is a complex relationship between pop psychology, academic psychology, and its applications that would make the discussion more intricate. The project of critical psychology was based on a critique of the relevance of academic psychology. German critical psychologists have argued that American or Americanized psychology has limited value for Europe and the Americas. Holzkamp’s (1970) inaugural critical article pointed to the limited practical relevance of research psychology. In his detailed analysis, he argued that the development of experimental methodology and statistics led to an increased particularization of reality in the laboratory, and that exactly those factors that had been controlled or excluded in the experiment, would play important roles in real-life contexts. Given the difference between experimental and social life, psychology would not achieve technical relevance. In addition, where psychology became technically relevant (testing, assessment, etc.) it meant working for people in power in a given society. He envisioned a psychology that had emancipatory relevance (knowledge about societal constraints) that would aid persons in challenging power in society. Although the article is about 50 years old, psychologists still need to ask what kind of relevance and hence compatibility Western psychology has in Western countries. Clearly, emancipatory relevance is missing in research psychology, emerging only at the margins, not only because status-quo transcending thinking is oblique to psychology, but also because resistance or social justice are themes that are perceived as political and hence not part of psychology’s mission. Technical relevance requires significant translation work from research psychology into practice, arguably a translation that requires additional hermeneutic competencies not contained in research itself. In addition, psychology in not challenging existing conditions supports existing ones that are infused with power and interests. Psychology is a discipline of the status quo, which means that the technical and emancipatory relevance is limited if one takes the full meaning of these concepts into account. Mainstream psychology has been playing the “game” but is not prepared to change the rules of the game. If the goal of society is to restrict immigration from certain countries, psychology has been ready to provide technical expertise to select undesirables, as has happened in the context of immigration restriction for Europeans from the South and East to the United States (Gould, 1996). If the military has wanted to know who should become an officer or a pilot, psychology has provided

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expertise. If an employer has wanted to find a conscientious employee, psychology has been ready. Yet, a psychology from below, with theories and practices from the perspective and experiences of the dispossessed (see also Martín-Baró, 1994), that still represent large numbers in the United States, is missing. The compatibility of mainstream psychology for those groups is significantly limited. Thus, we do not have instruments that allow the dispossessed or person with less power to assess whether, an employer, professor, manager, or bureaucrat is a “jerk,” “bullshiter” (Frankfurt, 2005), or an “a*hole” (Nunberg, 2012) (see also Teo, 2018). Historically and arguably even today psychologists have played a significant role in “adjusting” citizens, immigrants, or the Other to an accelerating society, especially in the US American context. At the beginning of the 20th century, when the discipline of psychology was seeking status and recognition, it was able to separate itself from philosophy, drawing the boundary against an old-fashioned discipline. Faced with many practical problems of the day, psychologists had to prove themselves and embraced the dominant adjustment ethos of American politics and society (see Pickren & Rutherford, 2010). Many indigenization calls, including Yang’s, ask for producing socially applicable knowledge in psychology. But does this knowledge mean technical relevance, an adjustment ethos, or emancipatory relevance? We submit that although the situation has improved in the field of psychology, emancipatory relevance is lacking in the mainstream. There are hopeful trends such as the Power Threat Meaning Framework (Johnstone & Boyle, 2018) developed for the clinical section of the British Psychological Society that provides an analysis of mental health issues that includes power. Yet, despite improvements and some influence by critically-oriented psychologists the mainstream is slow to develop theories and practices from the standpoint of ordinary people. Indeed, the now often used acronym WEIRD (Henrich, Heine, & Norenzayan, 2010) includes educated and rich (and not only Western), meaning that the fact that psychology has also less relevance for people who experience economic power and class is hardly addressed in psychology (Bullock & Limbert, 2009). Income inequality, which produces many negative health and mental health outcomes and leads to highly differentiated life trajectories (Pickett & Wilkinson, 2015), is ignored. Societal structures remain conceptually alien to mainstream psychology that builds and promotes an individualism that misleads in understanding how societal realties can produce

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mental health problems within a culture. The reality of neoliberalism not only as an ideology but also as an economic system that impacts subjectivities remains a foreign concept for academic psychology. The idea that culture requires a different methodology is rejected and repressed when discussing the pioneer of psychology Wilhelm Wundt (1832–1920) who emphasized that his Völkerpsychologie requires a different framework. The problem of “relevance for whom?” can be extended from the economically dispossessed to minorities, LGBTQ groups and individuals, and persons with disabilities, all of whom have advanced a critique of mainstream psychology (see Teo, 2018). But power is not only about groups and agents in society. Once we take Foucault’s (1980) analyses into account we realize that power is not only enacted by the actions of the powerful, but that psychology itself has become a form of internalized power. A seemingly low relevance of psychology for a population has been accompanied by a process of psychologizing and internalization. Scientific psychology is being made relevant throughout the 20th century and throughout the world by a process that we call psycolonization. Making something irrelevant relevant is an ongoing process in the psydisciplines and continues into neuroscientific psychology (Rose & Abi-Rached, 2013).

Psycolonization: Making Psychology Relevant Around the Globe Western psychology is complex and has applications that are more or less relevant to groups of people in the West. There is still a mainstream psychology, a dominant psychology, that is taught and practiced, using variables in research and statistical hypothesis testing. One could argue that following the APA publication manual (American Psychological Association, 2010) on how to write a research article cements mainstream practices. Psychologists socialize students into these activities as well as into concepts and theories that are partially foreign in everyday life. In doing so and in distributing mainstream psychology into the public, using mass media and education, psychology is made relevant within a culture and distributed around the world. Whether originally relevant or not the discipline is promoted like a commodity that is produced, advertised, sold, and bought in the market place. One could make the argument that there is a need, but we also know that needs can be produced and instigated.

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Critics of psychology have used the term psychologization, which means the usage and distribution of psychological terminology in areas where they did not exist before (De Vos, 2012; Rose, 1996). We would go further and say that making something irrelevant into something relevant is a process of colonization whether within or across cultures. In that sense the 20th century was a century of psycolonization. The power to psycolonize and to aid in the interiorization of psychological issues is the success of psychology. Miller (1969) in his famous presidential address understood that using a more benign terminology: it was about “giving psychology away.” Hacking (1986, 1992) used the term of making people up, using the example of multiple personality disorder. Yet, doing so means to psycolonize people who did not need it. One could even make the argument that once a need for psychology is made, it becomes a form of subjective addiction with demand. People have been psycolonized successfully. Let us make a comparison: The Winter Olympic Games were originally a Western project that includes now participants from around the world. Bobsleigh is a traditional event that competed at the first games in 1924 in Chamonix. The sport may be indigenous or reflective of what some Westerners were doing (Alpine skiing would be a more common discipline), a result of some cultural practices, but not representative in terms of what Western people actually do themselves (and popular only within very few nations). Cultural winter practices originating in indigenous communities such as snowshoe running did not have the same head start to make it onto the list of games. The Arctic Winter Games that focus on indigenous culture and where snowshoe running is a discipline do not have the same status (based on historical and commercial reasons) as the Olympic Games that spread around the world. To call for the integration of all indigenous sports and activities into true universal games remains idealistic. Countries and individuals, who need to be recognized and successful within the status quo, suture themselves into activities that are recognized on a global level and need to compete in already “recognized” sports. Psychology has emerged as a Western discipline operating and collaborating with money, power, existing frameworks and bodies of knowledge. In order to be successful on an international level, psychologists around the world need to follow the standards set by the international community that indeed reflects Western ideals of research. Psycolonization means to accept those practices and standards as necessary. For that reason, indigenous and critical psychologists, even qualitative psychologists, remain at

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the margins of the discipline. This does not mean that change is impossible; the addition of new ideas in psychology is an ongoing process. Yet, the very foundation of scientific psychology, set in concrete, is difficult to shatter. In most instances, if you want to make it in academic psychology, you need to participate in this historically grown psycolonization. It takes more than a call for change to transform the power of the status quo psychology. If one follows this stream of argument, it would be better to suggest that mainstream psychology is made, developed, and sold to be compatible (even if it was originally not compatible, or compatible only for a small minority). This applies to Western and non-Western persons, students, and academics. In fact, it takes a lot of training and attention to become psycolonized to Western psychology, from being a participant in an experiment, who is given only a small number of possible reactions (walking out of the study would not be considered a legitimate reasonable reaction), to being a researcher who conducts research with variables and analyzes data with statistical tools, writes papers according to explicit and implicit standards, and presents and submits papers to journals, which contain an understanding of the logic of acceptance or rejection and linguistic practices by editors. It is a cultural practice that most individuals in this culture are not able to accomplish. To suggest that bobsleigh is indigenous is, in a dialectical way, right and wrong at the same time. Similarly, psychology has been made indigenous, in a process, to increasing numbers of Western and Eastern peoples. For the process of psycolonization, in order to make something irrelevant relevant, and for the purpose of translation and meaning-making, mainstream academic psychology, which is highly technical and artificial in its frameworks, needs pop psychology. One could argue that scientific psychology has only contempt for pop psychology because of this dependency that undermines the “being scientific” self-understanding of academic psychology. It is ironic that “giving psychology away” depends on the maligned publicizers of scientific psychology. Indeed, the public is less interested in scientific psychology than in a psychology that provides clear, concrete, and simple answers, rather than abstract theories. Pop psychology books represent the first level of public translation, followed by textbooks for students and an interested community. The latter assume an intermediary role in that they are written by researchers or academics close to the research process, who strive to translate the many technical studies into meaningful entities that can be understood by the interested reader.

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The translation practice often involves a process of hermeneutic surplus where more is told about facts than is contained in the data themselves (see Teo, 2008). This applies to “normal” research as well as to work that has achieved the status of celebrity studies in psychology. For example, Perry (2013) revisited Milgram’s “obedience experiment” by interviewing participants and investigating primary sources such as tape recordings, transcriptions, drafts of reports, and vivid first-person accounts. Perry argues that Milgram had preconceived ideas of the participants and was trying to verify Hannah Arendt’s concept of the “banality of evil,” which suggested that ordinary people who are under authority can commit evil deeds. She argues that Milgram set a theatrical stage with a well-written and detailed script that would minimize the possibility of disobedience. Perry’s examination of the Stanley Milgram Papers at Yale University Library shows that in over half of all variations Milgram found the opposite result: More than 60% of the subjects disobeyed the experimenter’s orders. However, Milgram did not publish all information and structured his interpretations in order to fit into preconceptions. The ongoing usage of psychoanalysis in the public, despite its academic critique, has to do with the fact that psychoanalysis has had a head start in participating in the psycolonization of the public, its representation in the media, including movies and art, and that psychoanalysis has always provided concrete and translatable concepts that can easily be applied and directed to our own subjectivity (for the same reason Lacan’s cryptic language did not have the same effect on the public). Even if one does not to “buy into” the terminology of psychoanalysis one has participated in the process of psycolonization (the assumption that we have to look inside ourselves with psychological tools to understand ourselves). “Giving scientific psychology away” is a continuous process, where one can add something new or replace something old with something new. Neuroscience partially succeeded with the concept of neuroplasticity, which provides the idea that personal change is possible, based on a scientific foundation, once “I” am flexible and working on “my” neuroplasticity. Critics have pointed out that the rhetoric of plasticity fits the neoliberal transformation of the flexible, responsible, self-caring self (Pitts-Taylor, 2010). Thus, to suggest that neuroplasticity is indigenous would miss the facticity of psycolonization that now takes place around the globe. In our view, Yang has a static concept of indigenous psychology in mind, one

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that does not account for the dynamic, looping processes of Western psychology.

Power, Justice, and Academic Virtues Scientific psychology has been relevant to some people more than others and is made “relevant” in a process of psycolonization, within a culture, and to all people of all cultures. This success required a head start, money, power, and status. The distinction between etic and emic in crosscultural psychology can be interpreted as pointing to power differentials between societies. Compared to the culture-specific, internal/relative emic approach, an etic approach appears to provide a more comprehensive and “absolute” view. However, to be able to assume the universality of one’s culture-specific phenomenon, one has to have the power to cross one’s borders, to integrate one’s with others’ knowledge, and to test its ecological validity. We could paraphrase that an etic approach is an emic approach with an army, navy, and air force. The unequal dispersion of power has also produced resistance that has challenged this process and the unearned influence of Western psychology. Indigenous psychology itself can be seen as such a form of resistance or a project of justice while others have worked on the decolonization of psychology (Adams & Estrada-Villalta, 2017) or the critique of mainstream psychology (Parker, 2015). Because of the power of the status quo, which means the power of mainstream academic psychology, Yang’s vision for an alter-global psychology remains unrealized given the current global economic and academic outlook. This marginal movement for a global psychology as well as the movement to perform psychology differently, where people are not objects but subjects, not subjects but co-researchers, a psychology with and for and not about persons, remains important. We should not deceive ourselves, given the current conditions and the difficulty of overturning these encrusted conditions quickly, that this would be possible in the short term. The call for a global psychology needs to be augmented by analysis of power as it exists on the global level. It needs to address global justice, or what is maybe easier to grasp, global injustices, in order to comprehend the psychological status quo. Scientific psychology has hardly contributed to an understanding of power and its connection to subjectivity. Most of the work that addresses power differential that exists in the world, in structures, between psychologies, or even the power of psychology,

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individualization, responsibilization, or governmentality, has emerged from the psychological humanities and other social sciences. We are not denying that psychologists have been instrumental in supporting justice and combatting injustice, but this has happened not because but despite the character of psychology. Indigenous and critical psychologies are part of the marginal group. But choosing among psychologies, may they be traditional or not, is not a real choice. Given the imbalances of power, money, and status associated with scientific psychology, indigenous or critical psychology, or the psychological humanities, we can easily assume a trend in existing societies with its economic values, that follows something that represents external success. The possibility of a global psychology, given processes of psycolonization of neoliberal globalization, remains highly elusive. The normativity of an alter-global psychology could be defended. There should be more justice in the world, and the lack of justice needs to be analyzed. Power in psychology needs to be theorized and understood as a condition for the apparent impossibility of a global psychology. The history of psychology as an instrument of injustice needs to be recorded. Even a struggle against windmills needs to be maintained, from a moral point of view, as does the democratic project in an increasingly undemocratic world. Yet, we should not deceive ourselves that a shift in global power balance would lead to a psychological state where psychological language, concepts, and practices are not informed by power, if power is not challenged. Thus, it would be naive to assume that a different worldhistorical trajectory would have led to a better global psychology. Amazon Studios’ television series “The man in the High Castle” operates with the premise that Nazi Germany and the Empire of Japan had won the Second World War. Indeed, we can perform a thought experiment and ask what psychology would look like in Nazi America. Arguably some technological knowledge might take on similar forms as we know it, but psychological practice might be based on a Jungian depth psychology and psychological research might focus on race differences and theories that were developed in Nazi Germany (e.g., Ganzheitspsychologie). It would be a half-global psychology for those countries colonized by the Germans (with Japanese psychology being in the other part of the world). Given the existing economic world order that produces winners and losers, the above analyses, which were focused on power and the (im)possibility of requirements such as more equality between and within countries, more international justice, the end of colonization, more

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democracy and solidarity among countries, could be augmented by analyses of internal values and virtues that guide the discipline. Based on the history of science in the world, the differentiation and increased complexity of knowledge that makes it difficult for any individual to be knowledgeable in several fields of knowledge (or even in several subfields of psychology), the value or virtue of epistemic modesty would logically follow. Our own knowledge horizons are always limited and, therefore, we need to be humble and modest when making claims about global psychology. We believe that Yang was guided by such values. Yet, epistemic humility is not at the core of the discipline, and is not endorsed by the leaders in the field, in textbooks, and public announcements. Instead we find the opposite, such as exaggerated knowledge claims, fact statements based on problematic studies, anecdotal evidence based on single experiments that are not corroborated but presented as science, claims to Truth when interpretations were not determined by data, and sensationalized and fraudulent findings that attract attention for the time being. Why? The current climate of science is one of neoliberal academia (see Giroux, 2015), where selling, marketing, and producing research that draws most attention is cherished. Indeed, epistemic grandiosity, the opposite of what the project of a global psychology needs, is promoted in a highly competitive, output-oriented academic context. Global psychology no longer needs military intervention, but rather a world market on which psychology can be sold, while modesty gets lost. Of course, we know that not necessarily the best products, or in our terminology, the most relevant products, are sold. Issues such as language of publication or presentation, where English has become the lingua franca of psychology, add additional complexities to the idea that we need justice among various nations (see also Wierzbicka, 2014). Smaller countries, which do not participate in the world market of psychology due to linguistic or financial reasons, will be forgotten. Differentiations that have made it possible for the upper classes to enjoy psychological thinking may not translate to the working classes in a country. On the other hand, a psychology of the upper classes in the West may very well have relevance to upper classes in the periphery (see Bhatia, 2018). Indeed, globalization may have produced a reality where some forms of Western psychology are more relevant to people in power in a developing country than to the marginalized in a Western country.

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Conclusion Given the current global external and internal circumstances an alterglobal psychology in the vision of Yang appears impossible. The international academic system that is based on hierarchical competition for recognition and power makes it difficult to focus on marginally marketable ideas, while this system itself is embedded in the international project of neoliberal globalization. Regular individual academics suture themselves into both systems and in order to be successful will choose ideas that will reward them. There is a market for indigenous psychology, but it is extremely small and there may only be space for a very few leaders that cannot engender a whole research industry. Academics would need to endorse epistemic modesty when striving to learn about indigenous psychologies outside of their horizons. There are, to remain in the logic of neoliberal ideology, no incentives to do so. Even psychologists outside of the center have few incentives to develop a global psychology based on the message of indigenous psychologies. What remains is the call to do justice to the reality of the indigenous character of the many psychologies that exist around the world. It is a moral intervention to demand that psychologists do justice to the varieties of psychology. Even the call for justice is interrupted by different ideas of doing justice, such as that including or excluding indigenous subjectivity makes a better psychology. An alter-global psychology outside the mainstream is thinkable but at the moment not doable given the impossible conditions that need to be fulfilled to make that happen. There is no need for the mainstream to relinquish power. Even if we had a balance between power, money, and recognition, it would not be clear that the alter-global psychology as envisioned by Yang would be the best possible way of moving forward. Yet, many psychologists avoid talking explicitly about their normative lenses. What do we mean by solving our problems, which is often mentioned as a research goal in indigenous psychology? What are these problems? Are they merely cultural? Where do politics and economy come into play? Despite the fact that the indigenization movement in psychology was an anti-colonial and originally a political act, it seems to be losing its “resisting” character, while showing only a culturally-descriptive face. However, indigenization cannot solely be a “cultural turn” when it interrogates the authority of psychologists and reorients us toward everyday life and lay people’s wisdom. Are we looking for truth and solutions

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with and for our participants or about them? Should there be a congruity between a native psychologist and a phenomenon, or congruity between a psychologist and another human being? Are we really working on a phenomenon or with a person? Can we experimentally deceive subjects as long as we properly debrief them—something we probably do not try to do in our lifeworld? Such questions provide insights into what makes a balanced alter-global psychology unique. Thus, despite these conditions and problems, we suggest that we should pursue the project of an alter-global psychology. Academia and society have provided niches and subcultures where one can pursue the advancement of such a global psychology. It would remain at the margins given the apparatuses that it would have to combat, with few disciplinary rewards. Doing justice to psychology means not abandoning the insight into the necessity of an alter-global psychology that is comprehensive, modest, and sensitive, and that is for and with people, despite seemingly impossible internal and external conditions for achieving this goal. Injustice has to be named even when one cannot find a solution.

Note 1. Yang’s ideas on indigenous compatibility (IC) are complex and seem to have changed over the years. Yang (2000) distinguished three major indigenous compatibilities: Context-independent, context-dependent and reflective. The first referred to isolating phenomena from their contexts, which is happening in decontextualized empirical studies of American mainstream psychology (see p. 250). He refers to the problem that we discuss in this chapter. Later, (Yang, 2003), he discussed only two major kinds as contextindependent and context-dependent IC (see p. 279) and omitted the reflective one without explanation. More recently, Yang (2012) did not use the distinctions at all and seemed to assume a high compatibility with Western psychology.

References Adams, G., & Estrada-Villalta, S. (2017). Theory from the South: A decolonial approach to the psychology of global inequality. Current Opinion in Psychology, 18, 37–42. American Psychological Association. (2010). Publication manual of the American Psychological Association (6th ed.). Washington, DC: American Psychological Association.

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Bhatia, S. (2018). Decolonizing psychology: Globalization, social justice, and Indian youth identities. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press. Bullock, H. E., & Limbert, W. M. (2009). Class. In D. Fox, I. Prilleltensky, & S. Austin (Eds.), Critical psychology: An introduction (2nd ed., pp. 215–231). London: Sage. De Vos, J. (2012). Psychologisation in times of globalisation. New York: Routledge. Foucault, M. (1980). Power/knowledge: Selected interviews and other writings, 1972–1977 (C. Gordon, L. Marshall, J. Mepham, & K. Soper, Trans.). New York: Pantheon. Frankfurt, H. G. (2005). On bullshit. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. (Original work published 1986). Giroux, H. A. (2015). Dangerous thinking in the age of the new authoritarianism. New York: Routledge. Goertzen, J. R. (2008). On the possibility of unification: The reality and nature of the crisis in psychology. Theory & Psychology, 18(6), 829–852. Gould, S. J. (1996). The mismeasure of man (revised and expanded). New York: Norton. Green, C. D. (2015). Why psychology isn’t unified, and probably never will be. Review of General Psychology, 19(3), 207–214. Hacking, I. (1986). Making up people. In T. C. Heller, M. Sosna, & D. E. Wellbery (Eds.), Reconstructing individualism: Autonomy, individuality, and the self in Western thought (pp. 222–236). Stanford: Stanford University Press. Hacking, I. (1992). Multiple personality and its hosts. History of the Human Sciences, 5, 3–31. Henrich, J., Heine, S. J., & Norenzayan, A. (2010). The weirdest people in the world? Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 33(2–3), 61–83. https://doi.org/10. 1017/S0140525X0999152X. Holzkamp, K. (1970). Zum Problem der Relevanz psychologischer Forschung für die Praxis [On the problem of the relevance of psychological research for practice]. Psychologische Rundschau, 21(1), 1–22. Johnstone, L., & Boyle, M. (with Cromby, J., Dillon, J., Harper, D., Kinderman, P., Longden, E., Pilgrim, D., & Read, J.) (2018). The power threat meaning framework: Overview. Leicester: British Psychological Society. Martín-Baró, I. (1994). Writings for a liberation psychology. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Miller, G. A. (1969). Psychology as a means of promoting human welfare. American Psychologist, 24(12), 1063–1075. https://doi.org/10.1037/h0028988. Nunberg, G. (2012). Ascent of the A-word: Assholism, the first sixty years (1st ed.). New York: Public Affairs. Parker, I. (Ed.). (2015). Handbook of critical psychology. London: Routledge.

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Perry, G. (2013). Behind the shock machine: The untold story of the notorious Milgram psychology experiments. New York, NY, US: New Press. Pickett, K. E., & Wilkinson, R. G. (2015). Income inequality and health: A causal review. Social Science and Medicine, 128, 316–326. Pickren, W., & Rutherford, A. (2010). A history of modern psychology in context. New York: Wiley. Pitts-Taylor, V. (2010). The plastic brain: Neoliberalism and the neuronal self. Health: An Interdisciplinary Journal for the Social Study of Health, Illness and Medicine, 14(6), 635–652. Rose, N. (1996). Inventing ourselves: Psychology, power, and personhood. New York, NY: Cambridge University Press. Rose, N. S., & Abi-Rached, J. M. (2013). Neuro: The new brain sciences and the management of the mind. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Teo, T. (2008). From speculation to epistemological violence in psychology: A critical-hermeneutic reconstruction. Theory & Psychology, 18(1), 47–67. Teo, T. (2018). Outline of theoretical psychology: Critical investigations. London, UK: Palgrave Macmillan. Walsh-Bowers, R. (2010). Some social-historical issues underlying psychology’s fragmentation. New Ideas in Psychology, 28(2), 244–252. Wierzbicka, A. (2014). Imprisoned in English: The hazards of English as a default language. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press. Yang, K.-S. (1997). Indigenising Westernised Chinese psychology. In M. H. Bond (Ed.), Working at the interface of cultures (pp. 62–76). London: Routledge. Yang, K.-S. (2000). Monocultural and cross-cultural indigenous approaches: The royal road to the development of a balanced global human psychology. Asian Journal of Social Psychology, 3, 241–264. Yang, K.-S. (2003). Methodological and theoretical issues on psychological traditionality and modernity research in an Asian society: In response to KwangKuo Hwang and beyond. Asian Journal of Social Psychology, 6(3), 263–285. Yang, K.-S. (2012). Indigenous psychology, westernized psychology, and indigenized psychology: A non-Western psychologist. Chang Gung Journal of Humanities and Social Sciences, 5(1), 1–32.

PART III

Critique of International Readings of Prof. Yang

CHAPTER 11

A Commentary on Commentaries on the Prospects for a More Equitable Global Psychology James H. Liu

I had great difficulty in writing commentary on commentary from 4 distinguished teams of scholars on Professor Kuo-sho Yang’s (2012) vision for a global psychology (GP). The reason is that these commentaries devote a lot of attention to epistemology, and the process of knowledge construction. Professor Yang himself wrote a lot about theory and methods, but in a pragmatic way within the practice of quantitative empiricism (using mainly surveys and interviews, and also analysis of archival sources, all in Chinese). His style of doing research was mainly inductive; this has been critiqued by his close colleague Hwang (2003). There is therefore quite a large gulf between the author and the commentaries (notably lacking in a perspective from cross-cultural psychology, which would have been closer to Professor Yang’s work) that makes talk about building a GP uncomfortably unrealistic. A key point to realize is that by

J. H. Liu (B) School of Psychology, Massey University, Auckland, New Zealand e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s) 2020 L. Sundararajan et al. (eds.), Global Psychology from Indigenous Perspectives, Palgrave Studies in Indigenous Psychology, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-35125-0_11

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2012 (in marked contrast to his much more expansive orientation presented in Yang, 2000) Professor Yang is talking about indigenous psychology in a more limited way, as “scientific IP.” He equates “Western psychology” with “Western scientific IP” (p. 8) which is a reductionist position that makes the task of building a GP for constructionist commentators extremely difficult. It is obvious that everyone contributing to this volume holds Professor Yang in high esteem, but our views of his work will be as blind men feeling an elephant: these views will be shaped by our own perspectives, in time and in space.1

Reflecting on Allwood’s Commentary Carl Martin Allwood has been a careful observer and documenter of trends in indigenous psychology since his seminal piece with John Berry (Allwood & Berry, 2006). Characteristically, he provides a most careful reading of the target article (Yang, 2012), importantly juxtaposing it with his more seminal English-language work on the subject (Yang, 2000). I think Allwood’s representation of Yang’s (2000, 2012) vision of GP is fair; it provides an accurate reading of Yang’s views in a concise and respectful way. I might add some insider spice to some of Allwood’s observations. Yang was committed to describing three distinct forms of scientific psychology, but curiously, he changed their nomenclature from 2000 to 2012, going from Mainstream Psychology to describe Western psychology as developed and practiced in North America and Europe to Indigenous Psychology in 2012. This makes our writing about this topic in our commentaries more difficult, as the basic terms have changed, perhaps to the point of reversal. Allwood glosses over this change, but I think it is meaningful. In 2000, Asian social psychology was still in its formative stage, providing a new and powerful regional/global platform for indigenous psychology. Yang’s (2000) paper is Olympian, visioning the process of building a genuinely GP from the bottom up, through inductive processes of first monocultural indigenization, and then cross-cultural

1 There was also a very late commentary by Professor Richard Shweder, that engages even less with Professor Yang’s vision of GP, so I will touch on it in passing but not attempt a full commentary on his commentary.

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indigenization. Professor Yang devoted much effort to laying the foundations for indigenized psychology throughout the 1990s in mainland China, when China was still in the early stages of economic modernization. Then China felt it had much to learn from Taiwanese psychologists. Not so much today. In the 2000s there came increasing pressure in Asia to increase research “quality” by publishing in English language journals with high impact factors. I was an evaluator of a huge grant led by Professor Hwang and peopled by Professor Yang’s top students (and followers), and I saw pressures manifest on how the grant was carried out, and who was rewarded and punished in the process. This structural feature of academia has become a major impediment to the prestige and sustainability of indigenous psychology in Asia, where English is not the native language. The emphasis on impact factor and English language publications has turned the tide against Indigenized Psychology (which I will refer to as IP) in Taiwan, where a big literature in Chinese on IP has accumulated. This includes 51 volumes of the journal Indigenous Psychological Research in Chinese Societies (本土心理学 研究) (for access to this body of work, see http://www.airitilibrary.com/ Publication/alPublicationJournal?PublicationID=10298282&IssueID= 201907040002), together with foundational textbooks in Chinese on psychology from an indigenous Chinese perspective. But these publications are not salient outside of Taiwan. So if IF and citations are taken as the measure of success, then IP will be marginalized, and publications in the lingua franca of English will become the sole currency of actually existing GP.2 By 2012, it had become apparent that Asian social psychology would continue to be much influenced by Western psychology, and be relatively marginal in a global industry dominated by English language journals published mainly in the USA. China in particular appears determined to race forward in academia by emulating the West (see the Shanghai Jiao tong University’s ranking system adopted by China: it’s one of the most natural science-oriented systems I’ve ever seen http:// www.shanghairanking.com/). As a consequence, it has developed a

2 At least until (and if) the PRC becomes the hegemonic world power in the 2nd half of the twenty first century—but I’m pretty sure they won’t be calling whatever they do in Chinese psychology IP by then.

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Westernized Psychology (WP) more invested in neuroscience than indigenization.3 Furthermore, despite the platform furnished by the Asian Association of Social Psychology (AASP, see https://asiansocialpsych. org/), that Yang contributed mightily to, there has not been any research published I am aware of where two non-Western cultures have used a cross-cultural indigenous or cross-indigenous method across their monocultural indigenous psychologies to build an assimilative synthesis. This lack is clearly visible in two recent and authoritative volumes in IP, edited by Kim, Yang, and Hwang (2006) and Yeh (2019). The opportunity was and is there for the Taiwanese and the Filipinos, as developers of two of the more comprehensive indigenized psychologies in the world (see Allwood & Berry, 2006), to build a more globalized psychology with indigenous roots. But this potential has never been truly attempted, let alone realized. Rather, as Jahoda (2016) noted, each IP dialogues more with the Western mainstream than its near neighbors. Thus, Jahoda (2016) may be correct in observing that the possibility of a GP based on IPs is more attractive in abstraction than in reality. This may be because, as Allwood remarks, it has been very difficult for different IPs to find common cause. I read Professor Yang’s terminology of 2012 as a wry acknowledgment that at this juncture in world history and in the final stages of his career, prospects for a genuinely GP, based on the equitable processes he’d outlined in 2000, were nowhere to be seen, not even on the horizon. This dream had entered, as Teo and Asfin (this volume) write, into the domain of the impossible. Yang’s wry revenge was to call Western psychology the only truly Indigenous psychology.

Reflecting on Teo and Asfin’s Commentary Like other eminent intellectuals of his era, Professor Yang was accomplished as both a public figure and a scholar, but also like others of his stature and generation, he never attempted to integrate the two roles. In his academic writing on IP, Yang maintained an Olympian equanimity clothed in the language of a magnanimous and inclusive science. Unlike Enriquez (1992), who founded Filipino IP, he never wrote about power 3 Given such a platform for academic program development, academics cannot have much space for developing interest in the notions of rationality expounded by Shweder (this volume) as central to cultural psychology.

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relations in the production of knowledge, but was a canny operator in the concrete sphere of producing alternatives. Given the actual power relations of academia in Taiwan and around the world, it is no surprise that his efforts resulted in the creation of a fruitful margin (本土心理学) rather than any reform at the center. As Teo and Asfin (this volume) note, the history of psychology is fertile with seminal margins, and is dominated by an overall failure to substantially integrate (for further discussion of this history, see Liu & Liu, 1997). Hwang (2003), drawing from the philosophy of constructive realism, leveled a similar criticism of Yang’s research program as Teo and Asfin here: the everyday life of the typical Westerner is some distance removed from the scientific micro-world of Western social scientists. Yang’s (2003) reply to Hwang was couched entirely in the language of quantitative empiricism. He refused to engage at all with Hwang’s (2003) broader issues about philosophy of science. Professor Yang was someone who focused on methods rather than methodology, on the practice of doing scientific research rather than thinking about how one ought to do research in an alternative world. It seems surprising that one so concerned with indigenous compatibility would not be focused more on practical applications, but as a leader of IP I think Professor Yang was also more interested in dialogues with other social scientists than in engaging with activists or practitioners. As Teo and Asfin observe, psychology is a “discipline of the status quo”; and “where psychology became technically relevant (testing, assessment, etc.) it meant working for people in power in a given society.” There is in fact another branch of Taiwanese psychology (with publications mainly in Chinese, see http://www.appliedpsyj.org/ journal/?p=3932) that does engage with liberation psychology issues, but draws from another literature entirely separate from IP, led by Professor Hsia. These two branches of Taiwanese psychology, led by two eminent Chinese scholars, have not deeply engaged with one another. Yang chose the pathway of making IP relevant scientifically, through the use of scientific methods rather than through emancipatory participation (or semi-emancipatory argumentation). I think he would have disagreed with Teo and Asfin’s assertion that psychological relevance equals psycolonization. His do’s and don’ts to increase indigenous compatibility are eminently practical guides for de-psycolonization. There are 51 volumes of research in indigenous psychology available in classic Chinese characters as evidence against this assertion. This literature is not aimed

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at any neoliberal or postcolonial international market. This is work of, by and mainly for Taiwanese Chinese.4 While Yang’s (2000) IP was a broad church in the abstract, capable of including any methods or methodology, in practice he did not advocate on behalf of critical perspectives in psychology. I think he would have reacted to Teo and Asfin’s social constructionist critique of “making relevance as a colonizing enterprise” just as he reacted to Hwang’s (2003) philosophical criticism of his research on modernity and tradition: with an empirical response, and politely benign neglect. Thus, while I agree with Teo and Asfin’s judgment that “There is a market for indigenous psychology, but it is extremely small and there may only be space for a very few leaders that cannot engender a whole research industry,” I cannot see Professor Yang adopting a program of GP constructed on emancipatory grounds. I think he was too committed to the practice of psychological science to engage in what Teo and Asfin confess is tilting at windmills. While not talking about power, he wielded power at some of the highest levels in the Taiwanese tertiary sector. It is slightly unfortunate that the vast majority of this work is published in Chinese, and so is not readily available to the commentators in this volume and elsewhere. But this is exactly what is required of IP for a population that is not predominantly English speaking.

Reflecting on Moghaddam and Hendricks’s Commentary This commentary is on an important contemporary issue that only glances by Professor Yang’s body of work. Indirectly, the issue it visits is one that has troubled IP for some observers: why privilege culture as the condition for drawing boundaries around different forms of psychology, and where should these boundaries go. Moghaddam and Hendricks privilege privilege as the focal point for boundaries; they argue that giving more attention to socioeconomic status/inequality both for individuals and for societies results in a psychology for the 99%. In their vision of a GP, research on poverty and psychological functioning would be front and center. 4 Sadly, many mainland Chinese would not be able to read this research easily, as the mainland now uses simplified characters; but I believe there may be simple character versions of the papers available somewhere.

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It seems indisputable that socioeconomic status and inequality are central features that orient individual lives and the functioning of societies. It is also clear that this was not a central concern for Professor Yang. He was much more interested in studying a constellated feature of this, that of tradition and modernity in the developing world (Yang, 2003). Poverty was a moving target in Taiwan during Professor Yang’s time there. In the 1960s, Taiwan had a per capita GDP equal to Jamaica, but by the 2000s per capita GDP was equivalent to the lower rungs of the OECD. It is easy to see why Professor Yang would have chosen culture, which has had more enduring effects on the place he lived, rather than poverty and/or inequality. Contrary to the macro-level global conditions described by Moghaddam and Hendricks, inequality would have decreased and living standards increased from 1949 through to 2000 in Taiwan. In China, poverty levels have plummeted from 1990 to the present, even while income inequality also increased. I doubt this type of dynamic, politically charged trajectory would have captured Professor Yang’s interests, which were in psychological science rather than politics or economics. While laudable in its aims, it’s hard to see Moghaddam and Hendricks’s (this volume) vision forming anything more than a topic of study in psychology or other social sciences. Forming such a margin could be seminal, as there are other excellent researchers now zeroing in on the issues of poverty and income inequality (e.g., Carr et al., 2018). The challenge of course, would be the problem of integration: psychology is good at exploring new vistas, and not so good at integrating them back into a functional discipline.

Reflecting on Dueck, Song and Marossy’s Commentary Dueck, Song, and Marossy (this volume) situate their commentary within the dominant economic discourses and practices of our day, neoliberalism. They propose that neoliberalism’s construction of the person as a free agent, unfettered by tradition to act as an economically rational entrepreneur in a capitalist legal framework threatens indigenous lifeways: they stifle people’s ability to imagine alternatives to the present world order, and they subvert traditional norms and beliefs. They raise the issue that research on forgiveness originated in Christian societies, where its definition was infused with religious sensibilities. They worry about the

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errors that such an imposed etic might produce in studying forgiveness in non-Christian societies. I’m not sure why we need the term neoliberal here: it seems that most of their commentary is classic cross-cultural psychology about the perils of an imposed etic (see Berry, 1989), and the dangers of unthinkingly applying an independent self worldview. There is very little analysis of the economic imperatives of capitalization subverting traditional norms and values in their chapter. I should also mention that there is a substantial body of work on forgiveness in Chinese language psychology research in Taiwan; there is an experimental paper by Lin and Sun (2017) published in Yang’s legacy journal Indigenous Psychological Research in Chinese Societies, as well as hundreds of publications in other journals indexed on Airiti library’s database. The references in Lin and Sun’s (2017) paper are half in English, half in Chinese suggesting that there are no absolute boundaries between IP and WP knowledge in this domain. A search on forgiveness (宽恕) and psychology as a keyword in the airiti library (https://www. airitilibrary.com/) located a dozen hits. Many of these used the Enright Forgiveness Inventory, and many did not. Here, we can see the fundamental limitations that language provides for IP, where dedicated scholars from other cultures are unaware of indigenous research in their area of specialty when it is not in English (however the abstracts on Airiti are in English). Each culture connects to the English mainstream, and not to one another.

Summary Summarizing, there was a shared concern for application across the four commentaries, but there was not a shared agenda about what specific steps to take in order to make IP more globally applied. Allwood suggests a common cause in the environmental calamities facing humanity, so sustainability would be his proposed core for GP. Teo and Asfin share with Moghaddam and Hendricks a concern for equality and prevention or empowering marginality. Dueck et al. do not offer a vision for GP. This issue of the lack of a shared agenda is the most important issue facing GP and I will return to it to conclude this essay. The first three sets of authors all raise questions about how to decide where to draw the lines around the construction of an IP. If IPs are drawn around culture, how broad or how narrow should that description

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of culture be? If around socioeconomic status, again, who or what should be included and excluded? I suspect there are no definitive answers to these questions, only pragmatic responses to actual situations involving historical circumstances, power, and funding. For example, indigenous Chinese psychology is currently centered in Taiwan because there was a civil war that separated Taiwan from China in 1949, and Professor Yang emigrated to Taiwan in 1947. Mainland China has not elected in the main to develop IP along the lines outlined by Taiwanese scholars in the 1990s, but rather chase WP. So at the moment, we do not have an overarching IP for Chinese speaking peoples. There are some who would argue for political reasons that there ought to be two IPs for Chinese speakers, one for Taiwan and one for China. I think these questions are academic. I agree with Teo and Asfin that in today’s global economy, there is no motivation at all to inductively build up a GP according to the inductive process Yang (2000) described. Epistemologically, I doubt such an enterprise would be feasible. Theories are built up as parts of systems, and in agreement with Hwang (2011, Chapter 3), I question whether it is possible to inductively assimilate theoretical systems originating independently from different parts of the world into a comprehensive whole. The only GP is the one currently existing, one indigenous to North America and Europe, spreading as an imposed (or eagerly embraced) etic to the rest of the world. This GP is constructed on a philosophy of science ill-suited to the practice and advance of psychology as a discipline benefitting humanity. My own take on the need for better application of IP is to argue that a more comprehensive approach to ethics is required to turn either IP or WP into a more useful and applied global enterprise (Liu, 2017; Liu & Macdonald, 2016). But getting agreement on something like this is going to be pretty difficult. I feel that the future is going to be characterized by social networks of the like-minded and willing rather than more concerted social movements like IP. I have deeply appreciated IP for the intellectual space it has afforded me as a traveler, carrier of multiple identities, and denizen of different lands. I think that IP will always have a place to the extent that language and culture creates specific psychological needs that can best be satisfied by indigenous compatibility. In this sense, I feel that Professor Yang’s legacy is secure. Indigenous Psychological Research in Chinese Societies (本土心理学研究) has established a place for itself because it fills a

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practical and intellectual niche in Taiwanese society. I regularly encourage my mainland Chinese colleagues to make use of this body of knowledge, instead of habitually relying on WP. But recognizing the power dimensions of academia and the world today, I harbor no illusions that this is the “royal road to a global psychology” as Professor Yang proclaimed in 2000. China is a singularity, and the enormity of its IP is to an unfathomable extent conditioned by its Communist system of governance (Zhang et al., 2019). It is not even fashionable to call IP “IP” in China, but cultural psychology, with a different meaning than its usage in the USA. What China does in the coming decades will determine the shape GP takes, because my guess is that at a certain point in its historical trajectory, China will eschew its dependence on WP and develop its own IP in fact. The driver of this change will be an increased need for mental health for Chinese people, that cannot be provided by WP (which is based on a medical model not well-suited to provide for mental health needs even in Europe and North America). This situation also holds for other up and coming states in Asia, like Indonesia. Therefore, in the best case for the development of IP in the future, I can foresee a fragmentation of psychology into more applied wings, with stronger indigenous compatibility and the ability to deliver improved mental health for local populations in certain places. Whether they call these movements IP or not will be a moot point, for they will need to follow processes where local sources of knowledge (e.g., Chinese medicine, which is still very popular) are mobilized in a more scientific manner to meet health and community needs. Psychology has proven to be a resilient beast. One might describe it as a many-headed hydra, a chimera, or perhaps an amoeba. It has had an amazing ability to spawn fruitful margins, like IP, that in time may run out of steam and became somewhat unique wings of psychology prominent in particular locations. I have admired Professor Yang as a juntze (君子), a true gentleman in our field. I am humbled by the fact that even the greatest among us can but create a margin or an eddy in the flow of academic time. It will be the luck the draw and the force of powers beyond our ken that will determine the future of GP. I can but anticipate the critical junctures of power, meaning, and identity that might enable us as social scientists to take agency to shape the future of our field when the right moment comes (Liu, Fisher Onar, & Woodward, 2014). I enjoin readers of this volume to vision research

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and practice of psychology in their own way, emanating from humanheartedness (Liu, 2017), while joining with others to make a future enterprise more capable of connecting with others, improving mental health, and generating possibilities of fulfilling human potential for generations to come. In Chinese philosophy, a dynamism between the yin of culture specificity and the yang of human universality (Shweder, this volume) can be held by moral, ethical, and human-hearted personhood that learns how to connect the two in action.

References Allwood, C. M. (this volume). Yang’s global psychology and beyond. Allwood, C. M., & Berry, J. W. (2006). Origins and development of indigenous psychologies: An international analysis. International Journal of Psychology, 41, 243–268. Berry, J. W. (1989). Imposed etics-emics-derived etics: The operationalization of a compelling idea. International Journal of Psychology, 24, 429–450. Carr, S. C., Maleka, M., Meyer, I., Barry, M. L., Haar, J., Parker, J., … YoungHausner, A. (2018). How can wages sustain a living? By getting ahead of the curve. Sustainability Science (published online). https://doi.org/10.1007/ s11625-018-0560-7. Dueck, A., Song, R., & Marossy, M. (this volume). Forgiveness in indigenous psychological research: A Trojan Horse, a Western knockoff, or a traditioned sensibility? Enriquez, V. G. (1992). From colonial to liberation psychology: The Philippine experience. Manila: De La Salle University Press. Hwang, K.-K. (2003). Critique of the methodology of empirical research on individual modernity in Taiwan. Asian Journal of Social Psychology, 6, 241– 262. Hwang, K.-K. (2011). Foundations of Chinese psychology: Confucian social relations. New York: Springer. Jahoda, G. (2016). On the rise and decline of ‘indigenous psychology’. Culture and Psychology, 22(2), 169–181. Kim, U., Yang, K.-S., & Hwang, K.-K. (Eds.). (2006). Indigenous and cultural psychology: Understanding people in context. New York: Springer. Lin, C.-P., & Sun, C.-R. (2017). The effect of significant other’s advice on forgiveness in Chinese culture. Indigenous Psychological Research in Chinese Societies, 48, 3–55. Liu, J. H. (2017). Neo-Confucian epistemology and Chinese philosophy: For actioning psychology as a human science. Asian Journal of Social Psychology, 20, 137–149. https://doi.org/10.1111/ajsp.12168.

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Liu, J. H., Fisher Onar, N., & Woodward, M. (2014). Symbologies, technologies, and identities: Critical junctures theory and the multi-layered nationstate. International Journal of Intercultural Relations, 43, 2–12. https://doi. org/10.1016/j.ijintrel.2014.08.012. Liu, J. H., & Liu, S. H. (1997). Modernism, postmodernism, and NeoConfucian thinking: A critical history of paradigm shifts and values in academic psychology. New Ideas in Psychology, 15(2), 159–177. Liu, J. H., & Macdonald, M. (2016). Towards a psychology of global consciousness. Journal for the Theory of Social Behavior, 46(3), 310–334. https://doi. org/10.1111/jtsb.12101. Moghaddam, F. T., & Hendricks, M. J. (this volume). Psychology for the global 99%. Shweder, R. (this volume). The role of reason in cultural interpretation: Some Talmudic distinctions for indigenous and cultural psychology. Teo, T., & Asfin, B. (this volume). The impossible conditions of the possibility of an alter-global psychology. Yang, K.-S. (2000). Monocultural and cross-cultural indigenous approaches: The royal road to the development of a balanced global psychology. Asian Journal of Social Psychology, 3, 241–263. Yang, K.-S. (2003). Methodological and theoretical issues on psychological traditionality and modernity research in an Asian society: In response to KwangKuo Hwang and beyond. Asian Journal of Social Psychology, 6, 263–285. Yang, K.-S. (2012). Indigenous psychology, Westernized psychology, and indigenized psychology: A non-Western psychologist’s view. Chang Gung Journal of Humanities and Social Sciences, 5(1), 1–32. Yeh, K.-H. (Ed.). (2019). Asian indigenous psychologies in the global context. New York: Palgrave. Zhang, R.-J., Liu, J. H., Milojev, P., Jung, J., Wang, S. F., Xie, T., … Morio, H. (2019). The structure of trust as a reflection of culture and institutional power structure: Evidence from 4 East Asian societies. Asian Journal of Social Psychology, 22(1), 59–73. https://doi.org/10.1111/ajsp.12350.

CHAPTER 12

From Indigenous Psychologies to Cross-Indigenous Psychology—Prospects for a “Genuine, Global Human Psychology” Rogelia Pe-Pua

I am an indigenous psychologist from the Philippines. Indigenous psychology (IP) has been a passion of mine ever since my humble beginning as a student assistant to Virgilio G. Enriquez (1942– 1994), the “father” of indigenous psychology in the Philippines. This occurred during my undergraduate years at the University of the Philippines, at a time in the 1970s when Enriquez has just started the Sikolohiyang Pilipino (Filipino indigenous psychology) (SP) movement. I was privileged to have been mentored by him and to have worked collaboratively with him to forge the movement forward. I was also mentored by Professor Yang Kuo-Shu (1932–2018), the “father” of indigenous psychology in Taiwan. This happened during my extended research visit at Chung Yuan University in Taiwan in 2009, hosted by no less than Yang himself. We had long conversations about

R. Pe-Pua (B) The University of New South Wales, Kensington, NSW, Australia e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s) 2020 L. Sundararajan et al. (eds.), Global Psychology from Indigenous Perspectives, Palgrave Studies in Indigenous Psychology, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-35125-0_12

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indigenous psychology and how to internationalize IP and make this global. His 2012 paper reflects some of the ideas that we talked about. In this chapter, I will be drawing on a close reading of Yang’s and Enriquez’s scholarship from an indigenous psychologist’s point of view to examine what are the prospects for a “genuine, global human psychology.” This will be helped by the international critiques that has been done in the preceding section (of this book). I will also draw from insights that I have gained from research into IP in a number of countries in 2009 (Philippines, Taiwan, Japan) and in 2012 (Indonesia, New Zealand, Canada). Lastly, I will elaborate on some of the ideas I have put forward in my contribution of an entry (“Indigenous Psychology”) in the International Encyclopedia of the Social & Behavioral Sciences (Pe-Pua, 2015). To do this, I will focus on three major topics which will then form the three major sections of this chapter: unpacking and strengthening indigenous psychologies; the wisdom of cross-indigenization; and prospects for a “genuine, global human psychology.” As a caveat, before I continue, I would like to clarify what I mean when I use the term “we” in this chapter. In the Filipino language, there are two terms used for we. “Tayo” is an inclusive “we,” which means, “you and I,” meaning the speaker and the person spoken to. “Kami” is exclusive, “us, not including you,” meaning the speaker/s describing themselves or their views to others. This distinction has actually morphed into sometimes conflicting perspectives when discussing Philippine indigenous psychology. Zeus Salazar, a famous Filipino historian who, alongside Enriquez, heralded and promoted Sikolohiyang Pilipino, was the one who made the distinction between the inclusive and the exclusive “we” in relation to indigenous psychology. The exclusive pangkami (culture-bearers explaining their psychology to others) perspective implies that the indigenous culture-bearers are always defensive, trying their best to explain what IP is to non-indigenous psychologists. Whereas the inclusive pantayo perspective (culture-bearers exploring their psychology among themselves) is considered more productive and significant in developing IP (Salazar, 1991). I have declared sometime ago (Pe-Pua & Perfecto-Ramos, 2012) that both perspectives are important. Be that as it may, I am using the inclusive pantayo meaning when I use “we” because I believe we need to explore these issues among ourselves who are doers and supporters of IP.

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Unpacking and Strengthening Indigenous Psychologies What Is Indigenous Psychology? When I started being involved in the development of Philippine indigenous psychology way back in the early 1970s, the concept of IP was being met with skepticism and a lot of doubt. More than four decades on, IP is being considered as a separate discipline. Books, book chapters, journal articles, and special issues of journals have been devoted to examining, clarifying, and debating about it. “Indigenous psychology” has been an entry in encyclopedias (see Hwang, 2013; Pe-Pua, 2015 for example). In my encyclopedia entry (Pe-Pua, 2015), I listed a number of definitions offered by scholars in the Philippines (Enriquez, 1975), Taiwan (Yang, 2000), South Korea (Kim, 1990), India (Sinha, 1997), and others (Ratner, 2008). I also listed a number of elements that can be drawn for these definitions, namely, • “Primacy of the indigenous or local or culturally derived perspective, understanding, categories, interpretation, explanation, frames of reference. • Relevance to the indigenous/native culture/people, reflecting their sociocultural reality. • The indigenous culture as the source of concepts and theories, rather than a set of imposed theories and knowledge. • ‘Indigenous compatibility,’ which refers to the extent by which “the researcher’s concepts, theory, methods, tools, and results adequately represent, reflect, or reveal the natural elements, structure, mechanism, or process of the studied phenomenon embedded in its context” (Yang, 2000, p. 250). • A movement or potentially a discipline” (Pe-Pua, 2015, p. 788). Yang’s definition of indigenous psychology is given in his 2000 article: “an evolving system of psychological knowledge based on scientific research that is sufficiently compatible with the studied phenomena and their ecological, economic, social, cultural, and historical contexts” (p. 245). I adapted Enriquez’s (1975) definition of Sikolohiyang Pilipino (Philippine indigenous psychology) to come up with this definition for

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indigenous psychology: “Psychology that is anchored on the thought and experience of the indigenous people, as understood from an indigenous perspective (Pe-Pua, 2015, p. 788). For me, it is the indigenous perspective, from within the indigenous culture, that is significant. The IP perspective opens up the possibility of reframing our understanding of “psychology” itself. For example, Yang (1999, p. 184) himself started clarifying that psychology is “an empirical science that investigates, from an individualistic-orientation and collectivist-orientation perspective, the contents, structure, mechanism, and processes of human mind and behavior conditioned by physical, biological, social, cultural, and historical characteristics at the intrapersonal, interpersonal, intragroup, and intergroup levels.” Much earlier, Enriquez (1976) proposed we must take into account the following if we are to understand Filipinos’ psychology: their emotions and experienced knowledge (kalooban and kamalayan), awareness of one’s surroundings (ulirat ), information and understanding (isip), habits and behavior (another meaning of diwa), and the soul (kaluluwa). New Zealand Indigenous psychologists proffered tikanga (customary practice) and related concepts as significant foci of their work in psychology (Nikora, et al., in Allwood & Berry, 2006). What/Who Is the “Indigenous”? This question did not seem to be considered important, judging from the lack of attempt to clarify the term “indigenous.” My simple attempt to clarify this lead me to propose this distinction: Indigenous psychology refers to psychology that is anchored on the thought and experience of the indigenous people, as understood from an indigenous perspective. Psychology of the indigenous people refers to any analysis of psychological behavior of the indigenous people, whether from an indigenous perspective or not, i.e., whether using indigenous or nonindigenous theories and methods. Psychology in the indigenous country or culture would then refer to the development of psychology in the particular culture or country, embodying both indigenous and non-indigenous perspectives and research (Pe-Pua, 2015, p. 789).

I also cited the clarification made by Linda Nikora and her colleagues from New Zealand, that the term “indigenous” can refer to indigenous communities or to residents of a society (Nikora, et al., in Allwood and

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Berry, 2006). In understanding or developing IPs, we must be inclusive and reflect both groups of the indigenous population. An issue related to this is that Indigenous peoples, or First Nation population use this term with a capital letter “I”; to them it is not proper to write “indigenous psychology” but rather “Indigenous psychology.” In unpacking the term “indigenous,” I believe that an IP should reflect the “many mentalities” (Schweder, 2020, this volume) within the population it represents. Diversity, rather than homogeneity, should be a precondition not to be ignored in our quest for a unified IP—if such unification is at all possible. Is Western Psychology the Only IP in the World? Yang (2012) contended that “Western psychology is the only IP in the world (p. 24).” He justified this claim by saying that “It is a pure form of scientific IP, which may be defined as a discipline that applies the scientific method to the study of the psychological and behavioral phenomena of people in a specific ethnic group or cultural tradition for developing a systematic psychological knowledge system. This system has been constructed in such a way that its theories, concepts, methods, and tools are highly compatible not only with the studied psychological and behavioral phenomena themselves but also with their ecological, economic, social, cultural, and historical contexts (p. 7)”. With due respect to Professor Yang, I disagree with his contention. I will accept that Western psychology is an IP, but it is not the only IP in the world. For Yang’s basis for this assessment is a definition of the “indigenous” as “pure” in culture instead of understood from an indigenous perspective. Also, if we accept that psychology is the totality of people’s thought, behavior and experience, then we can say that IP is as old as the first peoples of a country. There is no pure IP. When Yang (2012) differentiated the three psychologies when he was describing Western psychology being the only IP, those descriptions fit what I have known to be Philippine IP, Chinese IP, and New Zealand IP—so why not call them IPs as well? Why appropriate the term IP to Western psychology exclusively? Following the clarification of IP, we must also question how reflective this Western psychology is of the Western societies, whether this is indeed an IP. For instance, Pickren (2013) argued that American psychology was the result of an indigenization of German, French, and English imported

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elements, and then “mixed with home-grown metaphysics, religion, and healing practices (e.g., mesmerism), each of which has its own history of indigenization” (p. 698). Teo and Afsin (2020, this volume) claim, “From a critical perspective, scientific psychology is not necessarily reflective of Western societies, but rather particular, and constitutes the psychological in a process of psycolonization (p. 1).” Also, “Western indigenous psychology, particularly scientific psychology, is not as indigenous as Yang might think (p. 4)” in as much as “psychology as researched and taught in academia and practiced in professional contexts has limited relevance for the conduct of life of ordinary people (p. 4).” Furthermore, we need to be aware that we should not always use Western psychology as standard or frame of reference, for in doing so, we are perpetuating the uni-dominance of Western psychology. It is correct to say that the “Western model of psychology has had a head start and advantage when it came to the distribution or ‘competition’ of ideas. (Teo & Afsin, 2020, this volume, p. 5)” But just because it was the first psychology that shaped the discipline, and just because it is widely considered the “mainstream psychology,” it will be more accurate to regard it as one of the IPs in the world that is of equal footing with other IPs in the world. In Yang’s discourse, referring to “non-Western psychologists” or researchers could actually promote the idea that IP is on one end of the continuum, and Western psychology is on the other end. This could turn out to be a fallacy. For as long as we hold this discourse, we could continually be pitting IP against Western psychology—just like David and Goliath. Indigenization Yang (2012) referred to Westernized psychology (WP) and Indigenized psychology (IZP). This implies the process of Westernization and indigenization. Yang referred to indigenization as an “academic movement” under which the WPs have been transformed to IZPs. Indigenization has always been identified as the process of developing IP (Sinha, 1997). A few scholars have defined indigenization: as a movement (Hwang, 2013), as one of several stages in IP development (Adair, 2006), as a process that involves internal and external bases (Pickren, 2013). Enriquez and Sinha offer the most elaborate understanding of indigenization. Both of them argue for two directions of indigenization. One

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direction of indigenization is from outside the culture: indigenization from without (Enriquez, 1987, 1992) or indigenization of the exogenous (Sinha, 1997). Here, the outside culture (e.g., American psychology) is the source, and elements are imported and transformed into something indigenous to the population. Translation, replication, and modification are common tools in this type of indigenization. The other direction of indigenization is what Sinha (1997) called internal indigenization, or what (Enriquez, 1987, 1992) called indigenization from within or cultural revalidation. Here, the indigenous culture is the source, and the process involves semantic elaboration, indigenous codification or recodification, and systematic explication of implied theoretical frameworks, to produce knowledge that reflects the indigenous experience and realities (Enriquez, 1987, 1992). I submit that indigenization of the exogenous and cultural validation are the two general ways to develop IP. The term “indigenization” is not really appropriate for the second direction of indigenization above for, how do you indigenize something that is already indigenous? (Pe-Pua & Protacio-Marcelino, 2000). You indigenize what is exogenous. You revalidate the culturally indigenous concepts, theories, and methods. Therefore, when Yang stated that “increasing numbers of psychologists in many non-Western societies have been trying to convert their WP into a local IZP (Yang, 2012, p. 24),” he was talking about indigenization of the exogenous only. He did not acknowledge that most IPs include the many discoveries resulting from the process of cultural validation; in fact, the revalidated theories should occupy a more prominent place in the country’s psychology. This leads me to believe, from an active indigenous psychologist’s point of view, that appropriating “indigenous psychology” to Western psychology, and calling what the current indigenous psychologist’s psychology do as simply “indigenized psychology” denies the originality and the cultural compatibility of our IPs (that are not the Western psychology that Yang regarded as the only IP). Indigenous concepts such as kapwa, amae, and so on are certainly not “indigenized”—they are already “indigenous” from the outset. Yang stated, “no matter how successful the indigenously minded investigators are in indigenizing their WP, their IZP will never become as genuine and pure an IP as the one that spontaneously developed in EuroAmerican societies. Non-Western psychologists must realize that they have already lost their historical opportunity to develop a pure IP (Yang,

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2012, p. 11).” I certainly do not take comfort from that statement! The Philippine experience in developing an IP is proof that the opportunity is not lost. Perhaps the most contentious part of Yang’s statement is his concept of a “pure IP.” Regarding the path to developing IP, I found that “there is no single path for developing IP. Each country has their particularities in terms of national history, policies, priorities, and positioning in the academic environment. These tend to influence the path taken by the majority and the minority of psychologists, as well as attitudes toward IP in general (Pe-Pua, 2015, p. 790).” How Do We Develop and then Strengthen IPs? Yang (2012) elaborated on a few dos and don’ts for achieving a sufficient degree of indigenous compatibility of indigenized research. These are important to make sure we develop IPs properly. Hwang (2020, this volume) gave very sensible advice on how to build up IP, following Schweder’s idea of “one mind, many mentalities.” He said, “In order to achieve the goal of a universal psychology, indigenous researchers should construct formal theories illustrating the functionings of the human mind that are applicable to various cultures and use them to study the particular mentalities of the people in a given culture by examining their psychology and behaviors in daily life (p. 24).” In terms of strengthening IPs, he also cited that “Hwang’s (2019) epistemological strategy for constructing culture-inclusive theories to understand any cultural system may provide an outlet for those indigenous psychologists who are seeking for cultural identity in their academic research works” (Hwang, 2020, this volume, pp. 29–30). The international critiques in Part II of this volume raised a few challenges to IP development which need to be addressed. One is the amount of “rejection” that we encounter from within our own country, and outside or internationally. I am reminded of a conference session many, many years ago when the idea of an IP was just being presented in international conferences. In a room full of eager psychologists from mostly Third World countries, a well-known Western cross-cultural psychologist said, “If we are to have so many IPs, it will be so difficult!” There was silence. I stood up bravely and said, “IP is not for the convenience of international psychologists.

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We already know that Western psychology does not work for us, so we’re doing this, not out of convenience, but because we need this.” Indigenous psychologists (like me) are sometimes accused of being “emotional,” or “defensive,” but the reality is, we sometimes need to show our passion, commitment, and assertiveness in the face of downright rejection of IP. This task of “defending” IP becomes even more intense when the criteria being thrown at us are “Western” criteria or standards. Or when we ourselves try very hard to get the “blessing” of mainstream psychology that IP is okay to pursue. I remember in 2016 when a particular article was published about IP. I read the abstract and stopped reading the article immediately because I did not want to get upset, especially when I was in the middle of editing the Handbook of Filipino Psychology (Pe-Pua, 2018a, 2019) that consisted of 100 articles, representing the key writings on IP in the Philippines. I realized then that I have become cynical of judgments of “decline” and “death” of IP passed by people who are not really immersed in it and do not truly understand what it is, and then use standards that are bound to put IP in a bad light. But seriously, my motivation for preparing this Handbook was to challenge put-downs on IP. To prove that IP is alive is to publish its achievements in book form. I know that publishing in journals is regarded as premium in academic achievement, but when IP articles are not consolidated, we are not able to show the “density” of its presence. Be that as it may, it is important for us, indigenous psychologists, to stay focused—pick up those criticisms that are constructive, that will help us improve our work. Be careful not to be distracted or disheartened by unwarranted criticisms and outright rejection, especially from nonindigenous psychologists who are interested to protect their own “brand” of psychology. Let us not waste our time just always “defending” our IP. Let us just continue doing this important work, in a professional, culturally appropriate way. Another challenge is the lack of incentive in terms of personal career development by doing IP. Publication is a major part of advancing our careers. Many young psychologists would continue what I call the “regurgitation” model or framework or way of publishing. They would just replicate studies and so on so they can have the statistics and report these, and so they can get published. If we perpetuate this, then indigenous psychology will not have a future. The problem has always been that most journals are not sympathetic to qualitative indigenous research. Even my

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own article on Enriquez’s legacy in Philippine IP (Pe-Pua & ProtacioMarcelino, 2000) was first rejected by a major Psychology journal, being deemed more appropriate for a “regional” journal. I remember discussing this with Prof. Yang in 2009. We agreed that we need to have journals that are specific to IP. At that time, the Asian Association of Cultural and Indigenous Psychology (AACIP) had just been established. Its plan for an Asian Journal on Cultural and Indigenous Psychology has never materialized because of a lack of funding. But Prof. Yang believed that such a journal, on a regional basis, was appropriate. I deviated from that opinion, and offered that it has to be an international journal. Be that as it may, some countries have developed IP journals locally. For example, Taiwan established a journal entitled Indigenous Psychological Research in Chinese Societies in 1993,1 which has continued to publish scholarly articles (not updated). The Philippines has established a journal focused on Philippine IP (DIWA E-JOURNAL). IP promotion is heightened from whole-book or whole-journal issue publication on this topic. We have some inroads in this regard, namely: Indigenous Psychologies: Research and Experience in Cultural Context (Kim & Berry, 1993), Indigenous and Cultural Psychology: Understanding People in Context (Kim, Yang, & Hwang, 2006); two issues of the Asian Journal of Social Psychology (volume 3, issue 3, 2000; volume 8, issue 1, 2005); a special issue of the International Journal of Psychology (volume 41, issue 4, 2006). The most recent ones are Yeh’s (2019) edited book, Asian Indigenous Psychologies in the Global Context; and volume 39, issue 2 of the Journal of Theoretical and Philosophical Psychology (2019). All these provide visibility, more effective than individual articles in journals, or single chapters in a book. When the publication title clearly has “indigenous psychology” or similar terminology, we are telling the world that there is such a thing as IP. Local books are also important. One benefit is that the book form provides an opportunity to consolidate and showcase the success of IP in a country. Some examples from the Philippines and Taiwan are From Colonial to Liberation Psychology (Enriquez, 1992), and Foundations of Chinese Psychology: Confucian Social Relations (Hwang, 2012). When

1 I have the table of contents of the 17 issues from 1993 to 2002 of this journal, translated to English, courtesy of Prof. Yang’s assistants at Chung Yuan University in 2009.

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we were discussing this in 2009, Prof. Yang showed me some publications in Chinese; and asked his assistants to translate the table of contents for my purpose. One of these publications was a two-volume edited book titled Chinese Indigenous Psychology (Yang, Hwang, & Chung-Yang, 2005, 2009). There were 26 chapters divided into nine sections. This was the inspiration for my two-volume edited book, the Handbook of Filipino Psychology (Pe-Pua, 2018a, 2019) that was published more than ten years later. Language is an issue faced by IP in some countries. I found in my research on IPs in different countries that publishing in the local/national language is not a problem. In fact, most of the publications are already in the local language. After all, a motivation underpinning the development of IP came from the use of the local language to articulate and generate knowledge. There have been a number of publications of IP writings in English, but perhaps not reflective of what is actually out there in the IPs. There are some reasons. The lack of English language proficiency in academic publishing is probably one challenge, but more so for Taiwanese and Japanese psychologists, and certainly not for Filipino psychologists. But I discovered that a major reason is the attitude toward writing in English. Many indigenous psychologists did not feel it is necessary to disseminate IP outside the national boundaries; they believed the usefulness of IP is mainly for the national interest. Another reason to consider is the state of workload in countries such as the Philippines where academics normally have heavy teaching loads, and are also very much immersed in projects outside the university (i.e., in the community, country) that require their expertise in IP—thus, publishing becomes a lower priority. There have been some pressures in recent years though, for academics to publish in international refereed journals and outlets before they can get promoted or given tenure—thus, more scholars have started to publish their work in English. Considering the issues of language, I propose that for IP to be stronger, both local and international languages should be considered, but with priority given to the usefulness of such publication to the indigenous country, if possible. With regard to the attitude toward the boundaries of IP, I believe that the pantayo perspective (culture-bearers exploring their psychology among themselves) should prevail, without losing sight of the pangkami perspective (culture-bearers explaining their psychology to others) because eventually, we want our IP to be useful and understandable more widely.

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We need to consolidate individual IPs in order to strengthen it. We need to sustain the momentum in terms of publishing. Our leaders and supporters in the “mainstream” discipline who hold power over publishing can be persuaded to influence the editorial boards to publish articles and books on IP—special issues of journals, or whole books. We also need to be proud of our IP work, and stop feeling humble and appearing to be apologetic about it. It is understandable to feel that our work may not be generalizable. But we just need to keep going. Church and Katigbak (2002) provide a good summary of what we need for IPs to prosper: the formulation of indigenous theory; objective consideration informed by empirical data; continuing development and validation of indigenous measures; systematic investigation of the comparative and convergent validity of various indigenous and imported research methods; institutional/structural improvements leading to growth and stability of the indigenous research culture; maintenance of an appropriate balance between the pursuit of an independent psychology and the avoidance of insularity; and eventually, increased efforts to relate cross-indigenous approach toward a universal psychology. (p. 141)

The Wisdom of Cross-Indigenization The theme of this volume is that IPs will contribute to a global psychology. Yang proposed that this can be done by integrating the different IPs. Allwood (2020, this volume) pointed out that Yang did not really define what he meant by global psychology (GP) in his 2012 article, but that his 2000 article provides more information, albeit not detailed, especially on how this GP will be developed. Allwood further pointed us to Yang’s (2000) four types of psychologies that would be ingredients for a global psychology, one of which is “cross-cultural indigenous psychologies.” Yang also discussed two approaches, namely the “monocultural approach” (MCI) and the “cross-cultural indigenous approach” (CCI). I will focus on Yang’s use of “cross-cultural indigenous” and relate it to Enriquez’s use of the term “cross-indigenous.”

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Cross-Indigenization Versus “Cross-Culturalization” Enriquez (1992) made a distinction between “cross-indigenous knowledge” and “‘cross-cultural’ knowledge derived from an application of the psychology of industrialized countries to data gathered from the Third World (p. 86).” He claimed that there is a “uni-national dominance in psychology” by Western (aka American) psychology (see Fig. 12.1); and that the commonplace practice adopted in cross-cultural psychology is one where this dominant psychology provides the framework for research in this area. Enriquez proposed cross-indigenization as an effective strategy for consolidating various IP efforts. This strategy is illustrated in Fig. 12.2. “In this model, the different cultures of the world are tapped as sources of cultural knowledge. The resulting pool may then be called ‘cross-cultural knowledge’. More aptly, it is cross-indigenous knowledge…” (Enriquez, 1992, p. 86).

Fig. 12.1 A schematic diagram of uni-national dominance in psychology (Indigenization from without) (from Enriquez, 1992) (Re-produced with permission from the University of the Philippines [publisher])

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Fig. 12.2 Towards a global psychology through a cross-indigenous perspective (Enriquez, 1992) (Re-produced with permission from the University of the Philippines [publisher]). Note The direction of arrows indicates “indigenization from within”

The cross-indigenous approach is consistent with Yang’s (2000) notion of a bottom-up approach whereby at the bottom lies the different IPs, and from this, a global psychology will emerge. The main difference that I can see is that Yang’s approach produces a pyramid, whereas Enriquez’s cross-indigenous approach is more likely to produce a trapezoid—the top (global psychology) is likely to be broader than the top of a pyramid. The concept of cross-indigenization is derived from the framework of recognizing the value of IPs with an end in view of comparing the various IPs. This is in contrast with the common practice in cross-cultural psychology of imposing a dominant-culture sourced structure and involving various cultures in collecting data to support or verify a theory. The cross-indigenization model shows how different cultures are tapped as sources of cultural knowledge, with these knowledge then contributing to cross-indigenous knowledge. The natural first step of the cross-indigenization approach is the development of indigenous psychological concepts or theories through cultural validation and indigenization. The next step is to compare the indigenous theories or concepts emerging from different cultures and discover commonalities or contrasts. This is mediated with a reference to existing (Western) theories. The next step is to develop tentative “theories.” This will be followed by theory-testing across cultures; both quantitative and qualitative methodologies could play a role in this step. And the last step is to give it a place in the discipline (of psychology).

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A number of countries in the world have a long history of undertaking research on IP. There have been advances in the development of indigenous research methods; and the applied aspect of IP have been adequately demonstrated. There have been indigenous theories that are published in the English language, but most of the theoretical developments have remained, understandably so, in the local language of the indigenous. The current situation of theorizing in IP begs the question of how much crossindigenization has occurred, and how much of these indigenous theories have become internationalized or have been recognized in mainstream or even in cross-cultural psychology? Schweder (2020, this volume) raised a very important question: “Do the indigenous psychologies of different peoples have psychological relevance and applications beyond their points of origin; or, in other words, might an indigenous psychology with a ‘Chinese soul’ illuminate the ‘soul’ (and ‘mentalities’) of members of non-Chinese populations, and vice versa?” The path to answer this question is cross-indigenization. I shall give three examples of cross-indigenization to attempt to answer Schweder’s question with a resounding “YES!” Cross-Indigenization of Self and Interpersonal Relations Enriquez’s theory of kapwa, Yang’s theory of social orientation, and Hwang’s theory of face and favor present an opportunity for developing a cross-indigenous (it will be premature to speculate “universal” at this point) theory of the social self. Enriquez’s Indigenous Theory of Self and Kapwa Kapwa is a core indigenous concept in Filipino psychology. It may sometimes be translated as “other” but it is actually shared identity, an inner self shared with others, unity of self and others; in more lay terms, fellow human being (Enriquez, 1978, 1994). This concept shows the flexibility that Filipinos (and perhaps many other cultures) regard inclusion/exclusion or membership/non-membership in a group. For example, they do make a distinction between ibang tao (“outsider”) and hindi ibang tao (“one of us”) but both categories of people are to be treated as kapwa (Enriquez, 1978, 1994). Certain behaviors are accorded to the two different groups in relation to the self, but adjustments can be made. For example, salingpusa (informal member) (Enriquez, 1994) is an ambiguous category that is commonly seen in Filipino social interaction.

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To illustrate this, a toddler can be allowed to be a salingpusa in a game that teenagers play because their parents do not want the teenagers to exclude the toddler, because they do not want to hurt the feelings of the toddler. In so doing, the teenagers make adjustments to the rules of the game in order to accommodate the toddler. In other words, we are allowed to break some rules, or even bend backward to accommodate the salingpusa, perhaps to avoid hurting their feelings. Thus, salingpusa can enjoy privileges enjoyed by the formal members. Filipinos are always concerned about the feelings of others; this is very consistent with kapwa psychology. Nonetheless, they can be quite precise in indicating inclusion/exclusion. For example, there are three words that denote “we”: • kita = dual we (you and I) • tayo = inclusive we (“us,” including you) • kami = exclusive we (“us,” not including you). The point to remember, however, is that whether kita, tayo, or kami, the Filipino is dealing with kapwa, and they think and act accordingly (Enriquez, 1994). Enriquez (1978, 1994) has developed kapwa into a semi-theory, by categorizing the kapwa social interaction into two: the ibang-tao (outsider) and the hindi-ibang-tao (“one-of-us”). In Filipino social interaction, one is immediately “placed” into one of these two categories; and how one is placed determines the level of interaction one is shown. Enriquez (1994) then contrasted between kapwa in a collectivistic culture, and kapwa in an individualistic culture. Kapwa as social interaction is shown in Table 12.1. The dichotomy of the “one-of-us” and the “outsider” categories reflects a value for defining membership in a group which determines the boundaries or the extent of allowable behavior for a person. A good example is food-sharing. A guest to a family home, when regarded as outsider (called bisita or visitor) is treated differently from family members or friends. Special dishes are cooked, not usually the native cuisine (e.g., fish simmered in vinegar and garlic, called paksiw, or grilled fish, called inihaw) but those adopted from colonizers (e.g., stewed beef dish called puchero, or fresh vegetable salad). These dishes are usually served on fine

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Table 12.1 Kapwa as social interaction (from Enriquez, 1994, pp. 51 and 52) Pakikipagkapwa (Collectivistic)

Pag-iisa (Individualistic)

Ibang-tao (outsider) Pakikitungo (transaction/civility) Pakikisalamuha (interaction with) Pakikilahok (joining/participating) Pakikibagay (in-conformity with) Pakikisama (adjusting) Hindi Ibang-tao (one-of-us) Pakikipagpalagayang-loob (rapport, mutual trust) Pakikisangkot (getting involved) Pakikiisa (being one with)

Ibang-tao (outsider) Pagsasarili (individuation) Pag-iwas (avoidance) Paghiwalay (separation) Pagmamalaki (autonomy) Pakikinabang (self-gain) Hindi Ibang-tao (one-of-us) Pagkukubli (masking) Pagwawalang-bahala (lack of concern) Pagsalungat (disagreement)

Reproduced with permission from the Akademya ng Kultura at Sikolohiyang Pilipino (publisher)

china that are normally displayed in a glass cabinet or put away for special occasions. On the other hand, if you are hindi ibang tao (e.g., family members, relatives, friends), you can share sawsawan (dipping sauces) and whatever food happens to be on the table. There is no fuss, and you use whatever utensils and plates normally used in the home (Santiago, 1976). Yang’s Indigenous Theory of Social Orientation Yang’s (1995) theory centers on the key Chinese concept of social orientation as a comprehensive system as well as a synthetic pattern of Chinese dispositional characteristics. Yang (1999, p. 194) defined social orientation as “a person’s tendency to establish and maintain a harmonious relationship with, and merge into, the surroundings so that collective and relational goals can be effectively achieved.” In contrast, individual orientation refers to “a person’s tendency to differentiate from and to dominate, control, or change the environment so as to fulfil personal desires, motives and ambitions.” According to Yang, there are four closely related orientations that “represent the four major ways through which a typical Chinese tries to fit into and form a harmonious union with important social realities in the environment (Yang, 1999, p. 195).” The four social orientations are: • Familistic orientation—the tendency to “subordinate personal interests, goals, glory, and welfare to those of the family, to the extent

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that the family is primary, and its members secondary (Yang, 1999, p. 194)” • Other orientation—the tendency to “be readily influenced by other people: constant worry about opinions of others, strong conformity to others, deep concern about social norms, and high regard for reputation (Yang, 1999, p. 194)” • Relationship orientation—the tendency to put “unusually strong emphasis on the functional importance of social relationships (guanxi) in everyday social life–relationology (Yang, 1999, p. 194)” • Authoritarian orientation—the tendency to be sensitized to authority, to worship authority, and to depend on authority (Yang, 1999). He went on to elaborate on the relationship orientation, describing three categories of relationship, with corresponding distinct modes of interaction in accordance with different principles: • jiaren (family members)—governed by zeren or responsibility • shuren (“cooked” persons: relatives outside the family, people in the same village, neighbors, friends, colleagues, and classmates)—governed by renqing or interpersonal favor and affect • shengren (“raw” persons like strangers)—governed by lihai or an eye on possible gains and losses (Yang, 1999). Hwang’s Indigenous Theory of Face and Favor Another siginificant indigenous theory from Taiwan is Hwang KwangKuo’s theory of face and favor, which is basically a theory of interpersonal relationship. While Hwang’s original writings (1987, for example) provide the details of this sophisticated theory, Yang (1999) provides a very good summary of the elements of this theory, which is related to four key indigenous concepts: guanxi (relationship), renqing (favor), mianzi (face), and bao (reciprocation). In the theory, Hwang presents three categorizations of social ties in which “social interaction proceeds according to different rules of social exchange (Yang, 1999, p. 195)”:

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• Affective ties—permanent long-lasting relationships; with family, close friends and other congenial groups; characterized by warmth, safety and attachment; rule of need prevails. • Mixed ties—relatively shorter duration and milder affection; with relatives, neighbors, teachers, classmates, colleagues, etc.; rules of renqing (favor) and mianzi (face) prevail. • Instrumental ties—functional, means to other goals; unstable and temporary relationships; universal, impersonal, lacking in affection; equity rule prevails (Yang, 1999). Comparing the three theories, we can come up with a number of observations. First, all three theories indicate the close link between the self and others, in a way that seems intertwined. In other words, the self seems to be defined by its relationship to others. Enriquez called this kapwa, or shared identity. Yang demonstrated this with the propensity of social orientation, and more specifically of a relationship orientation that dominates everyday social life. Hwang also suggests the importance of social ties, albeit not specifically mentioning the self. Second, categorizing the “other” (that seems to be part of the self also) suggests “distance” in terms of emotional attachment. Enriquez came up with two broad categories: the ibang-tao (outsider) and the hindi-ibang tao (“one-of-us”). But he did not specify who exactly are the people under these categories; whereas Yang did, through his categories of relationship. Yang’s jiaren (family members) and shuren (“cooked” persons such as relatives, co-villagers, neighbors, friends, colleagues, and classmates) categories seem to correspond to Enriquez’s hindi-ibang tao (“one-of-us”). His shengren (“raw” persons such as strangers) category seems to correspond to Enriquez’s ibang-tao (outsider). Hwang, similarly, used categories such as affective ties, mixed ties, and instrumental ties. Third, the three theorists’ categorization of “other” suggests that there are corresponding behaviors or rules of interaction expected for each category. Enriquez discovered eight levels of social interaction, from the most superficial “pakikitungo (transaction/civility)” to the most profound “pakikiisa (being one with),” which are related to his two categories of “other.” He also contextualized these levels of social interaction within the collectivistic and individualistic interpretations. Further reading into this sophisticated categorization will reveal the nuances in behavior across various social situations.

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Both Yang and Hwang came up with quite sophisticated “rules” of social exchange. The closest relationship requires a sense of greater responsibility and looking after the needs of its members. The moderate relationship expects interpersonal favor and affect. Last, but not the least, the more distant (and unstable) relationship tends to be ruled by instrumentality and functionality, and looking out for potential gains and losses. Mediating this comparison of the three indigenous theories would be reference to concepts such as ingroup–outgroup, interpersonal relations, social exchange theory, and so on. Continuing with the cross-indigenization process, it is possible to develop a tentative theory that has an integrated approach to categorizing the “other” and specifying membership in each category. In addition, we could outline the different behaviors and “rules” that characterize the relations of self and other within the various categories. Finally, we need to collect data across different cultures, not just in the Philippines and Taiwan, to test the theory. Cross-Indigenous Exploration of Reciprocity My second example to demonstrate the potential of cross-indigenization is related to reciprocity. Hwang’s rule of renqing (favor) in mixed ties, and Yang’s renqing (interpersonal favor and affect) governing social relationships with relatives and friends, bear resemblance to the Filipino concept of utang-naloob, one of the earliest “discoveries” of American psychologists about Filipino behavior. In fact, these psychologists went as far as concluding that this is one of the Filipino values. Focusing on the word utang which means “debt,” the American scholar Kaut (1961) translated utang-naloob as “debt of gratitude.” A Filipino psychologist Andres (1994) took it further by describing it in terms of the obligation one feels to repay a favor or help received. This is done by sending gifts or returning the favor, either directly to the person who gave the favor or help, or to their (extended) family members. Andres espoused, “It is not clear when a debt has been fully paid, so that the relationship becomes an ongoing one (p. 191).” Another American scholar, Hollnsteiner (1961), exacerbated the interpretation of “debt” by claiming that the recipient of the help or favor is forced “to show his (sic) gratitude properly by returning the favor with interest.”

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The major difference between the above elucidation of utang-na-loob from Hwang’s and Yang’s interpretation of renqing is that utang-na-loob was very much understood from a Western lens, even by the Filipino Andres, that regards the social transaction involving favor as direct, reciprocal, and expected. There is a “payment” of the “debt.” There could also be an element of the holder of the resources wanting the recipients to feel beholden to the giver, something Enriquez (1977) speculated would be useful in maintaining the image of the colonizer as benefactor. Therefore, the above interpretation is an “exogenous” interpretation of an indigenous concept; and it is this interpretation that has become pervasive in Philippine society, and in fact being touted as the source of a lot of problems in the culture and society of the Filipinos. But if we focus on loob instead of utang, we will discover the true meaning of utang-na-loob. The word loob literally means “inside,” but its meaning is tied to the word/s or prefix-suffix-infixes it is attached to. For example, sama ng loob means “resentment” (sama means “bad”), while kagandahang-loob means “shared humanity” (kagandahan includes the core noun ganda which means “beautiful”). When utang and loob are joined, the indigenous interpretation of utang-na-loob is “gratitude/solidarity.” It is not meant to be a burden or obligation as the word “debt” connotes, because there is always an opportunity to help or do a favor, either to people who have helped you before, or to others in the future, as a way of showing gratitude for being a recipient of help or favor in the past (similar to “paying it forward”). The cycle continues, but the exchange is not necessarily direct, nor immediate. Part of the expectation in Filipino social interpersonal relationship is to help, not to pay back for help/favor received. (I remember my late mother who taught her children not to forget the good deeds so-and-so have done for our family, and to always include those persons’ respective families too when we remember their good deeds. Likewise, people who have benefitted from my mother’s generosity, materially and spiritually, have always been good to us, citing how big their “utang-na-loob” was to my mother.) (Pe-Pua, 2018b). A major difference of utang-na-loob from renqing is that utang-naloob applies to all social relationships, whether family, relatives, friends, colleagues, or even strangers, and sometimes to people whom one considers as enemy. It binds people to their home community or home country. It is a calling for people who go overseas to retain strong ties with their homeland (Pe-Pua & Marcelino, 2000).

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The experience of the misinterpretation of an indigenous concept also applies to the Japanese concept of on and giri. The Japanese psychologist Azuma said that on and giri was interpreted as “indebtedness, bound to be repaid in the same amount within a certain time. From the Japanese viewpoint, the very thought of comparing and balancing on and giri is unacceptable… it is not genuine on if the donor gives help with the expectation of binding the recipient to giri. And the recipient will be accused of lacking in the sense of giri if he says he is paying back the exact amount he received as on and no more” (Azuma, 1984, p. 50). The clarification of indigenous concepts is very important as part of the first step in cross-indigenization. Once these are clarified, there are opportunities to examine them further and integrate various and similar concepts from different indigenous psychologies to develop a tentative theory which could be tested later. Cross-Indigenous Theorizing of Affection and Expectation Another example of potential cross-indigenization is related to affection and expectation. In my research, I found two indigenous concepts from two different cultures that are very similar. These are the Japanese amae and the Filipino lambing. Amae is defined by Yamaguchi (1999, cited in Yamaguchi & Ariizumi, 2006) as …presumed acceptance of one’s inappropriate behavior or request. In close relationships, one is able to presume that one’s inappropriate behavior or request will be accepted due to the positive or at least non-negative attitude of one’s counterpart. This definition of amae implies that two components, the inappropriate behavior or request and the presumption of acceptance, are involved in amae episodes. (p. 165)

Two common examples of amae are: a ten-year-old boy asking his mother to dress him, and a husband behaving like a child to his wife. Yamaguchi and Ariizumi (2006) differentiated the concept of amae from dependence and insecure attachment, thus paving the way for making this indigenous concept more understandable to Western psychologists. Its difference to dependence is that amae requesters can be independent psychologically since they know what they want or they

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know how to adapt to the environment. Amae is different from insecure attachment since it is the secure attachment that the amae requester has with the counterpart that makes them able to request amae. With my familiarity with Philippine indigenous concepts, I could readily identify with amae and see its stark similarity with the Filipino concept of lambing. Perhaps the closest English translation of lambing is “sweetness” or “endearment.” Just like amae, one can engage in lambing only with people one is close to, or with whom one feels secure attachment. Lambing can involve presumed acceptance of inappropriate behavior, and lambing can be both an expression of or request for affection or love, as well as a “manipulative” strategy to get something. Lambing has not been studied widely, unlike amae, but there is great potential for collaborative research on this in two settings where such is considered a societal value, or at least a predisposition. Combining amae and lambing into a tentative cross-indigenous theory and testing it in two settings for a start will lead to greater clarification and possibly broader generalizability of the concept. As a caveat, I decided to “experiment” on cross-indigenizing amae and lambing. During my month-long stay in Japan as a visiting scholar at Tokyo University in 2009, working on my research on IP, I befriended the administrative staff at the Department of Social Psychology there. During my last few days there, I approached the female head administrative officer and said in a soft-speaking voice, “____-san, I heard that you make excellent green tea.” She smiled, apparently amused. My husband was shocked and felt it was inappropriate for me to drop such a hint and expect to be served. I explained that I have been reading about amae, that it is no different from lambing, and that one will be regarded more favorably (highly) if one knows how to make an amae request. After an hour, ___-san came to my office with a wonderful cup of delicious green tea. I accepted with gracious gratitude and response, “Arigato! I will cherish this!” I was able to confirm a few months later that this interpersonal exchange has made an impact on ___-san which explained the special assistance she bestowed on me the day before I finally left Japan at the end of my research visit.

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Prospects for a “Genuine, Global Human Psychology” Approaches to Constructing a Global Psychology Allwood (2020, this volume) pointed us to Yang’s proposed three approaches for constructing a global psychology (GP): the cross-cultural indigenous approach, Enriquez’s cross-indigenous method, and what Yang calls assimilative synthesis or integration by indigenization. Allwood (2020, this volume) commented that “Yang’s approach to GP is broad in the sense that it abstractly describes a number of different ways of integration. However, it is also sketchy in that it does not provide much specific detail about how the different ways of integration should be carried out, nor about how the different avenues should be combined.” Allwood then outlined some of the issues with regard to the integration process. My personal opinion is that Yang could not provide any more detail since it will be up to the implementor of this integration to discover the best strategy to do this. It is in the doing that the details will come out. And it will probably take a number of iterations and reiterations for them to get it right. The concerns raised by Allwood will serve as a checklist of things to look out for, address, and document, so that the process of integration can be done more systematically. It is obviously not going to be easy and straightforward, but it will be rewarding in the end. It is important to have a positive and persistent attitude in this endeavor. John Berry is a mainstream cross-cultural psychologist who is highly supportive of IP. In his article on global psychology, he wrote: the achievement of a more global psychology may be within reach if we use some concepts and methods now available in psychology from both the dominant Western sources and from those working in the rest of the world. A global psychology would be based on a sampling of behaviours in many cultures, using indigenous concepts and methods, and then examining them for their commonalities. The perspectives to be employed include using the distinction among process, competence, and performance; prevention strategies to avoid domination by Western psychology; the intercultural strategies of separation and integration (while avoiding assimilation and marginalization); and the development of indigenous psychologies around the world, followed by comparisons among them. (Berry, 2013, pp. 399–400)

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For cross-indigenization to be successful, we need robust indigenous theories. Indigenous concepts and semi-theories need to be developed into fuller theories. But this is not as simple as it looks, nor is the process as straightforward. I found that some indigenous scholars are divided in their thinking on whether indigenous theories are useful, i.e., “are these just confined to the indigenous cultures or do they have potential to be universal? (Pe-Pua, 2015, p. 793).” My own view on this, having now become more cross-indigenous, is that cross-indigenization is a good pathway “for extending the applicability or relevance of indigenous concepts and theories to a more international context (Pe-Pua, 2015, p. 793).” Bringing out the indigenous could lead to cross-indigenous knowledge. I found that some Japanese psychologists are able to do this without even knowing that this is what cross-indigenization is about. When they identify a “Japanese” (they do not readily use the word “indigenous”) concept, they try to understand it from the indigenous perspective, relate it immediately to the Western concepts closest to it, and try to collect empirical data, not only with Japanese subjects but also with non-Japanese subjects. In many cases, part of the comparison is with Western subjects (Pe-Pua, 2015, p. 793).

I have not seen much of this kind of cross-indigenous collaboration elsewhere. I believe that there is a fair amount of indigenous conceptualizing and theorizing in different parts of the world that are in various stages of development, and at different paces. Some IPs are more advanced than others. What Yang envisioned as “integrating” these into a global psychology can actually happen, with enough support and guidance of the indigenous psychologists of each other, Needless to say, the support from all sides of the spectrum of psychologists is needed. After all, this global psychology is meant to be for all. A case can be made for cross-indigenization’s potential for helping us discover universal concepts or theories. An example that comes to mind is the amae concept that Yamaguchi and Ariizumi (2006) speculated to be an etic construct—an insight gained from investigating this across three cultures. Will my IP extend to other contexts? Do others’ IP apply to me? Can I relate with others’ IP? I constantly ask these and even tested them out.

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For example, in doing research in Australia, I use indigenous research methods from the Philippines, whenever they are appropriate. I even teach my university students about these methods. They work! I learned that the kapwa categorization applies to many groups in Australia; they even add to my theoretical knowledge in this area. On the other hand, I can relate to Yang’s and Hwang’s theories—both from my Filipino and my Chinese culture. I also find that the IPs will find their way easily into many Western societies marked by cultural diversity in their population. The popular “scientific” approaches we have been trained on will not necessarily produce reliable knowledge—even the Western societies need the IPs from other countries. Teo and Afsin’s (2020, this volume) use of the critical perspective concept of psycholonization is intriguing and relevant to our understanding of indigenization. If psycholonization is the process of making relevant what is not relevant in psychology, then Westernization of psychology in non-Western societies is the process of making relevant what is not relevant in those societies. Does it follow then that indigenization is making indigenous what is not indigenous? Perhaps. Cultural validation will then be making obvious or articulating what is innately indigenous. And would cross-indigenization then be checking the relevance to many societies of what have been found to be indigenous in one society? Perhaps. As a caveat to this, we must be mindful of Teo and Afsin’s (2020, this volume) interpretation of “relevance.” Both technical relevance and emancipatory relevance are relevant! At the end of the day, important conversations and collaborations need to be held between and among indigenous psychologists from different cultures. In the same token that we are used to distinguishing between Western and non-Western psychology/psychologists, we also have a tendency to use the indigenous vs non-indigenous dichotomy. In a forum in Taiwan in 2009, I proposed that there should also be a “middle way”— the co-indigenous psychologist, someone who is an indigenous psychologist working with or trying to understand another IP. Surely, it is easier for a co-indigenous psychologist than a non-indigenous psychologist to appreciate an IP other than their own. And if we approach this collaboration with an open mind, using cross-indigenization as approach, I believe there will be very positive prospects for a “genuine, global human psychology.”

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Prof. Yang and I discussed scenarios for such conversations and collaborations among indigenous psychologists from different cultures.2 We favored small meetings over big conferences. We can get the participating indigenous psychologists present their emerging or advanced indigenous theories and give them enough time to elaborate on this. In this workshop-like atmosphere, we could critique each other’s theories. A key ingredient here is the pantayo approach—culture-bearers exploring their IPs among themselves, all indigenous psychologists—assuring a safe environment where any criticism would only enrich their theorizing instead of placing them on the defensive. It can also serve as a “litmus test” of how outsiders of a particular IP can understand it and whether they can relate to these indigenous theories. We have a further chance of showing possible modification, enhancement, or even conflicting ideas to these indigenous theories. Such workshops or meetings will give flesh to my contention that we need to get the conversations going in order to start the cross-indigenization that will lead us to global psychology. Prof. Yang organized such an international workshop in Taiwan in 2001, entitled Scientific Advances in Indigenous Psychologies: Philosophical, Cultural and Empirical Contributions. A product of this workshop was an edited volume entitled Indigenous and Cultural Psychology: Understanding People in Context (2006, Springer). The Politics of Indigenous and Global Psychology Moghaddam and Hendricks (2020, this volume) share the critical perspectives expressed by Teo and Afsin (2020, this volume). They believe that “This critical scholarship is not given enough attention by Yang and most others writing in the ‘indigenous psychology’ debate (p. 2).” Their emphasis on our requirement to give attention to group-based inequalities when doing psychology in general is paramount, whether we are looking at IP or global psychology. Also, the unequal distribution of resources and power (exemplified by publishers and editorial boards who hold the power to produce or not produce the knowledge we collect) is something that many IPs can relate to. Agenda-setting is important, i.e. for topics to research, methodology to use, and so on, but we need to be on those

2 Interview of Rogelia Pe with Yang Kuo-Shu, 7 October 2009, Taiwan.

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editorial boards or persuade those who occupy the seats of power in our field to support us. Moghaddam and Hendricks (2020, this volume) point out the “dual perceptions” in nations that are divided between a “modern” sector (Western-influenced psychology) and a “traditional” sector (more indigenous in orientation). They criticized the trend of having psychology apply to just 1% of the population, be this in non-Western or even Western societies. The use of a critical perspective is so important to our discussion of a global psychology. In fact, Teo and Afsin (2020, this volume) opted for the term “alter-global psychology” instead of global psychology, to reflect what to me is a decolonizing attitude to the universalization of psychology. This is like the difference in perspective between crosscultural psychology and cross-indigenous psychology. Be that as it may, using “alter-global” could give the impression that there is already a global psychology, and we are simply looking for an alternative. This can be confusing. In reality, we are aiming for a genuinely global psychology that still does not exist. Teo and Afsin (2020, this volume) made a very persuasive case for their assertion that “Given the current global external and internal circumstances an alter-global psychology in the vision of Yang is not possible. The international academic system that is based on hierarchical competition for recognition and power makes it difficult to focus on marginally marketable ideas, while this system itself is embedded in the international project of neoliberal globalization (p. 17).” The issue of power and dominance of the current system in our discipline of psychology should go into the “checklist” of issues to be aware of—not to paralyze us, but for us to know how to address them. But what is more significant is their holding on to hope: “Thus, despite these conditions and problems, we suggest that we should pursue the project of an alter-global psychology (p. 19).” Without trying to confuse, let me throw in another food for thought. Are we saying that cross-indigenous psychology is part of the global psychology envisioned by Yang? Or are we saying that cross-indigenous psychology is what we are aspiring for, rather than global psychology? Atoy M. Navarro (personal communication, 12 June 2019), a Filipino historian in the pantayong perspective and socialist traditions, shared that in the disciplines of history and political economics in the Philippines, “global”

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carries a baggage of hegemonization (Westernization) and homogenization. In relation to psychology, it implies that there is just one/uniform psychology. Why not just call it “cross-indigenous” or “trans-indigenous” (indicating bridging and translating indigenous characteristics to each other), or “interindigenous” (indicating relationship between and among indigenous characteristics)? Every “indigenous” is also “intra-indigenous,” meaning it consists of several different indigenous characteristics. This discussion reminds us of the long-standing debate between the right-leaning “globalism” and left-leaning “internationalism” (which due to the problem with “nation” is more appropriately called the “inter-people” or “people-to-people” orientation). In other words, there is a recognition of difference among the indigenous peoples in the world, but the goal is the same—for them to have a just and fair relationship… Teo at Afsin’s (2020, this volume) “alterglobal psychology” reminds me of the global social justice movement of “alter-globalization” or “alternative globalization” (which is different from “anti-globalization”) that promotes global cooperation but rejects the negative effects of economic globalization. The problem with this category is, it still starts with and uses “globalization” as a springboard and platform. In other words, if there is no “global,” then there is no “alternative” to “global.” For me, let’s just call it “cross-indigenous psychology,” or “transindigenous psychology,” or “inter-indigenous psychology.” Let’s not fall into the trap of “global psychology” (Navarro, personal communication, 12 June 2019).

This is obviously something we will need to consider in the future, when we advance the cross-indigenization endeavor. Supporting IP and Cross-Indigenization Is Supporting Global Psychology When IPs are encouraged and supported, then the ingredients for a global psychology become available. When the wider psychology community accept and value IPs, then the whole discipline would benefit from the rich knowledge that is added to our discipline. A potential outcome of cross-indigenization is the bridging of the gap between East and West once the flow from East to West begins to happen. This is not a competition at all but an enriching of the discipline. We must

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also note that in fact, the flow within what we call “East” will also have a significant outcome in terms of understanding Eastern psychology. A Fair Global Psychology Yang (2012, p. 11) stated, “all the IZPs developed in various non-Western countries can be creatively integrated with all the IPs formed in Western countries to construct a genuine, balanced global human psychology (K in Fig. 12.1) as envisaged by Yang (2000).” For as long as our IPs are regarded as IZP only, and IPs are considered to be coming from Western countries only, the global psychology that Yang envisioned will not be “genuine,” “balanced,” and “human.” All genuine IPs originating from Western and non-Western countries should be placed on equal footing, If it is indigenized, then it is inferior to the genuinely indigenous. And by genuinely indigenous we do not mean “pure” but rather, “native,” based on the indigenous culture. It is not necessarily found in one culture only, that’s why we talk about integration of IPs. By global psychology also, we must expect diversity. We might discover convergences, complementarities, expansion, elaboration, restriction, narrowing, and so on. We need to be careful that when we want to be global, that we mean internationalization of the IPs, instead of homogenizing psychology. In the same way that many IPs went through a process of decolonization, we also do not want to impose our IP where it does not fit. Therefore, in envisioning this global psychology, the sense of “balance,” “genuineness,” and “humanness” must be our guidepost. Let this be an inclusive, open collaborative project.

Concluding Comments Teo and Afsin (2020, this volume) clarify that despite challenges we face in IP and global psychology, Doing justice to psychology means not to abandon the insight into the necessity of an alter-global psychology that is comprehensive, modest, and sensitive, for and with people, despite seemingly impossible internal and external conditions for achieving that. Injustice has to be named even when one cannot find a solution (p. 19).

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I would like to end this chapter with an anecdote from the late Professor Alfredo Lagmay (1919–2005) of the University of the Philippines. I heard this true story from him sometime in 1990–1991. Not so long ago, so the story goes, there was a variety of small fish in a river, the only one found in this tiny body of water. Then the people in the state planned to build a dam for further development. But the dam would destroy the river where the fish lived, and there would be none of its kind left. One environmentalist did his best to campaign against the building of the dam, and he and his supporters won. The dam was never built. The compelling argument which won the day was: “We must save this fish. Who knows, this fish might contain the genetic characteristic needed to save the whole planet some day.” According to Lagmay, indigenous psychology is like this small fish. It must be preserved, for it embodies the genuine reactions of people to their realities and surroundings. (Pe-Pua, 1991, pp. 163–164)

Who knows, indigenous psychology might contain the main ingredients we need to save the indigenous population. And a cross-indigenous global psychology might contain what we need to save our discipline and our planet some day. A final personal anecdote: When Virgilio Enriquez was dying (in 1994), I was already in Australia. I remember very clearly my last talk with my mentor before he passed away. Somebody rang me in Australia and said: “You better ring him now; he’s not going to last.” So I rang him. He was very sick, but he was at that point about to make a major decision also, of leaving the Philippines, but he was very concerned about the future of the indigenous psychology movement. I said to him, “Look, just like me, you have in fact spent more of your life on this.” I remember saying one thing, which I have said to some people here, that once it is out there, indigenous psychology— in the case of my own discipline—has a life of its own. There may be a change of leadership, but once it is articulated, once it is started, there is a momentum, it will have a life of its own. And true enough, I did not return to the Philippines, but that offered the opportunity to develop a new generation of leaders, who would make their own mark, who would define the field their own way (Whitnui et al., 2015, p. 276).

I am proud to be part of the pioneering and sustained tradition in Filipino indigenous psychology. My association with Dr. Enriquez, both as

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a student and a colleague, has shaped my essential orientation to this discipline profoundly. Professor Yang’s mentorship has helped sustain my orientation. Both big names in IP, and another one, Durganand Sinha (1922–1998) of India, have passed away, but they have left such an important legacy. I hope that many more will embrace the valuable project that we call indigenous psychology—for there is no turning back now—and together, we will work toward attaining a truly “genuine, balanced global human psychology.”

References Adair, J. (2006). Creating indigenous psychologies. In U. Kim, K.-S. Yang, & K.-K. Hwang (Eds.), Indigenous and cultural psychology (pp. 467–485). New York: Springer. Allwood, C. M. (2020, this volume). Yang’s global psychology and beyond. In L. Sundararajan, K.-K. Hwang, & K.-H. Yeh (Eds.), Global psychology from indigenous perspectives: Visions inspired by K. S. Yang. Palgrave Macmillan. Allwood, C. M., & Berry, J. W. (2006). Origins and development of indigenous psychologies: An international analysis. International Journal of Psychology, 41(4), 243–268. https://doi.org/10.1080/00207590544000013. Andres, T. D. (1994). Dictionary of Filipino culture and values. Quezon City: Giraffe Books. Azuma, H. (1984). Psychology in a non-Western country. International Journal of Psychology, 19, 45–55. Berry, J. W. (2013). Global psychology. South African Journal of Psychology, 43(4), 391–401. Church, A. T., & Katigbak, M. S. (2002). Indigenization of psychology in the Philippines. International Journal of Psychology, 37 (3), 129–148. https://doi. org/10.1080/00207590143000315. Enriquez, V. G. (1975). Mga batayan ng Sikolohiyang Pilipino sa kultura at kasaysayan (The bases of Filipino psychology in culture and history). General Education Journal, 29, 61–88. Enriquez, V. G. (1976). Sikolohiyang Pilipino: Perspektibo at direksyon [Filipino psychology: Perspectives and direction]. In L. F. Antonio, E. S. Reyes, R. E. Pe, & N. Almonte (Eds.), Ulat ng unang pambansang kumperensya sa Sikolohiyang Pilipino (pp. 221–243). Lunsod Quezon: Pambansang Samahan sa Sikolohiyang Pilipino. Enriquez, V. G. (1977). Filipino psychology in the Third World. Quezon City: Philippine Psychology Research House. Enriquez, V. G. (1978). Kapwa: A core concept in Filipino social psychology. Philippine Social Sciences and Humanities Review, 42(1–4), 100–108.

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Enriquez, V. G. (1987). Decolonizing the Filipino psyche: Impetus for the development of psychology in the Philippines. In G. H. Blowers & A. M. Turtle (Eds.), Psychology moving East: The status of Western psychology in Asia and Oceania (pp. 265–287). Boulder and London: Westview Press. Enriquez, V. G. (1992). From colonial to liberation psychology: The Philippine experience. Quezon City: University of the Philippines Press. Enriquez, V. G. (1994). Pagbabangong-dangal: Indigenous psychology and cultural empowerment. Quezon City: Akademya ng Kultura at Sikolohiyang Pilipino. Hollnsteiner, M. R. (1961). Reciprocity in the lowland Philippines. IPC Papers No. 1. Quezon City: Ateneo de Manila University. Hwang, K.-K. (1987). Face and favor: Chinese power game. American Journal of Sociology, 92, 944–974. Hwang, K.-K. (2012). Foundations of Chinese psychology: Confucian social relations. New York: Springer. Hwang, K.-K. (2013). Indigenous psychology. In K. D. Keith (Ed.), The encyclopedia of cross-cultural psychology (pp. 716–718). Chichester: Wiley. Hwang, K.-K. (2019). Culture-inclusive theories: An epistemological strategy. Cambridge University Press. Hwang, K.-K. (2020, this volume). Philosophical reflection on Prof. K. S. Yang’s vision of global psychology and indigenous compatibility. In L. Sundararajan, K.-K. Hwang, & K.-H. Yeh (Eds.), Global psychology from indigenous perspectives: Visions inspired by K. S. Yang. Palgrave Macmillan. Kaut, C. (1961). Utang na loob: A system of contractual obligation among Tagalogs. Southwestern Journal of Anthropology, 17 (3, Autumn), 256–272. Kim, U. (1990). Indigenous psychology. In R. W. Brislin (Ed.), Applied crosscultural psychology (pp. 143–160). Newbury Park: Sage. Kim, U., & Berry, J. W. (1993). Indigenous psychologies: Research and experience in cultural context. Thousand Oaks: Sage. Kim, U., Yang, K. S., & Hwang, K. K. (2006). Indigenous and cultural psychology: Understanding people in context. New York: Springer Science + Business Media, Incorporated. Moghaddam, F. M., & Hendricks, M. J. (2020, this volume). Psychology for the global 99%. In L. Sundararajan, K.-K. Hwang, & K.-H. Yeh (Eds.), Global psychology from indigenous perspectives: Visions inspired by K. S. Yang. Palgrave Macmillan. Pe-Pua, R. (1991). UP pioneers in indigenous Filipino psychology. In B. Aquino (Ed.), The university experience (pp. 152–164). Quezon City: University of the Philippines Press. Pe-Pua, R. (2015). Indigenous psychology. In J. Wright (Ed.), International encyclopedia of social & behavioral sciences (2nd ed., Vol. 11, pp. 788–794). Oxford: Elsevier.

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Pe-Pua, R. (Ed.). (2018a). Handbuk ng Sikolohiyang Pilipino, bolyum 1: Perspektibo at metodolohiya (Handbook of Filipino psychology, volume 1: Perspectives and methodology). Quezon City: University of the Philippines Press. Pe-Pua, R. (2018b). Unpacking the concept of loob: Towards developing culture-inclusive theories. In R. Pe-Pua (Ed.), Handbuk ng Sikolohiyang Pilipino, bolyum 1: Perspektibo at metodolohiya (Handbook of Filipino psychology, volume 1: Perspectives and methodology) (pp. 382–394). Quezon City: University of the Philippines Press. Pe-Pua, R. (Ed.). (2019). Handbuk ng Sikolohiyang Pilipino, bolyum 2: Gamit (Handbook of Filipino psychology, volume 2: Application). Quezon City: University of the Philippines Press. Pe-Pua, R., & Perfecto-Ramos, P. (2012). Philippines. In D. B. Baker (Ed.), The Oxford handbook of the history of psychology: Global perspectives (pp. 395–411). New York: Oxford University Press. Pe-Pua, R., & Protacio-Marcelino, E. (2000). Sikolohiyang Pilipino (Filipino psychology): A legacy of Virgilio G. Enriquez. Asian Journal of Social Psychology, 3(1), 49–71. Pickren, W. E. (2013). Indigenization. In K. D. Keith (Ed.), The encyclopedia of cross-cultural psychology (pp. 698–699). Chichester: Wiley. Ratner, C. (2008). Cultural psychology, cross-cultural psychology, and indigenous psychology. New York: Nova Science Publishers. Salazar, Z. A. (1991). Ang pantayong pananaw bilang diskursong pangkabihasnan. In V. Bautista & R. Pe-Pua (Eds.), Pilipinolohiya: Kasaysayan, Pilosopiya at Pananaliksik (pp. 46–72). Maynila: Kalikasan Press. Santiago, C. E. (1976). The language of food. In G. F. Cordero (Ed.), Culinary culture of the Philippines (pp. 133–139). Quezon City: Bancom Audiovision Corporation. Schweder, R. A. (2020, this volume). The role of reason in cultural interpretation: Some Talmudic distinctions for indigenous and cultural psychology. In L. Sundararajan, K.-K. Hwang, & K.-H. Yeh (Eds.), Global psychology from indigenous perspectives: Visions inspired by K. S. Yang. Palgrave Macmillan. Sinha, D. (1997). Indigenizing psychology. In J. W. Berry, Y. H. Poortinga, & J. Pandey (Eds.), Handbook of cross-cultural psychology (2nd ed., Vol. 1, pp. 129–169). Boston: Allyn & Bacon. Teo, T., & Afsin, B. (2020, this volume). The impossible conditions of the possibility of an alter-global psychology. In L. Sundararajan, K.-K. Hwang, & K.-H. Yeh (Eds.), Global Psychology from indigenous perspectives: Visions inspired by K. S. Yang. Palgrave Macmillan. Whitnui, P., Pe-Pua, R., Nayak, A., Behar, R., Te Awekotuku, N., & Nikora, L. W. (2015). Postscript: Maintaining balance in research climates for indigenous

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academics. In R. E. Rinehart, E. Emerald, & R. Matamua (Eds.), Ethnographies in pan Pacific research: Tensions and positionings (pp. 267–282). New York: Taylor & Francis. Yamaguchi, S., & Ariizumi, Y. (2006). Close interpersonal relationships among Japanese: Amae as distinguished from attachment and dependence. In U. Kim, K-S. Yang, & K-K. Hwang (Eds.), Indigenous and cultural psychology: Understanding people in context (pp. 163–174). New York: Springer. Yang, K.-S. (1995). Chinese social orientation: An integrative analysis. In T.Y. Lin, W.-S. Tseng, & Y.-K. Ye (Eds.), Chinese societies and mental health (pp. 19–39). Hong Kong: Oxford University Press. Yang, K.-S. (1999). Towards an indigenous Chinese psychology: A selective review of methodological, theoretical, and empirical accomplishments. Chinese Journal of Psychology, 41(2), 181–211. Yang, K.-S. (2000). Monocultural and cross-cultural indigenous approaches: The royal road to the development of a balanced global psychology. Asian Journal of Social Psychology, 3, 241–263. Yang, K.-S. (2012). Indigenous psychology, Westernized psychology, and indigenized psychology: A non-Western psychologist’s view. Chang Gung Journal of Humanities and Social Sciences, 5(1), 1–32. Yang, K.-S., Hwang, K.-K., & Chung-Fang, Y. (Eds.). (2005). Chinese indigenized psychology (Vol. 1). Taiwan. Yang, K.-S., Hwang, K.-K., & Chung-Fang, Y. (Eds.). (2009). Chinese indigenized psychology (Vol. 2). Taiwan. Yeh, K.-H. (Ed.). (2019). Asian indigenous psychologies in the global context. Cham: Palgrave Macmillan.

CHAPTER 13

Global Psychology: Symphony or Elephant Rachel Sing-Kiat Ting and Justine Jian-Ai Thong

A Symphony---Tribute to Yang Upon reading the thought-provoking articles by Teo, Dueck, Moghaddam, Allwood, Schweder, and their esteemed colleagues, we felt like front row audiences at a musical theater, hearing the symphony of great minds conversing with each other on the topic of Indigenous psychology (IP)in remembrance of Dr. Yang KS. During his 80th birthday, a tribute written by Gabrenya and Sun (2015) also summed up his life journey chronologically that affirms his mission of life as an IP scholar in Taiwan. Dr. Yang’s Confucius model of psychology has been passed down to his many disciples, such as Dr. Hwang and Dr. Yeh, who were known for their works on Face, Filial Piety, Guanxi and other Indigenous concepts among Chinese society (Hwang, 1987, 1997, 2011; Yeh & Bedford, 2003; Yeh, Yi, Tsao, & Wan, 2013). Besides reading his classic

R. S.-K. Ting (B) · J. J.-A. Thong Department of Psychology, Jeffrey Cheah School of Medicine and Health Sciences, Monash University Malaysia, Subang Jaya, Selangor, Malaysia e-mail: [email protected]

© The Author(s) 2020 L. Sundararajan et al. (eds.), Global Psychology from Indigenous Perspectives, Palgrave Studies in Indigenous Psychology, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-35125-0_13

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publication on IP (Yang, 2012), we also appreciate Yang’s writing on his development as an IP scholar as a Western-trained social psychologist (Yang, 2005). To follow in his footsteps of self-reflexivity and mentoring, I (the first author) invited my current Ph.D. student (the second author) to journey with me in attending this “symphony” in remembering Yang. Then we will summarize the critique toward the maestros on stage (authors in Part II of this book). Lastly, we will try to modestly propose our own “utopia” of global psychology (GP) through our study of the Indigenous and ethnic minority groups in our homelands. The potential challenges in fulfilling this vision of GP will also be discussed.

Our Journeys of IP The First Author: Something Is Missing Similar to Yang, I am also an ethnic Chinese who is educated in Chinese society and brought up with Confucian values. Yet different from Yang, I am the third generation Chinese born in a small town (Sibu) on an ex-British colonized Borneo island. The influence of commonwealth culture is deeply ingrained in my ecological niche of Sarawak (my home state which became part of Malaysia in 1976). As many Chinese diaspora in Southeast Asia, we emigrated and migrated like a rootless water plant. After more than 20 years of studying and working in Taiwan, United States, China, and now back in Malaysia, my cultural identity switched from Chinese Fuzhou to a “global” citizen. I still hold dear to my grandparent’s root in China (Fujian province), yet my dream of IP has been more inclusive of the others (particularly Indigenous people). That makes me distinctive from all the maestro on the stages, who are rooted in a more developed country and liberal land. Though I (the first author) have not been mentored in person by Dr. Yang, his writings have influenced me since my graduate school days in California. While attempting to find a footing in mainstream psychology (MP) as an international student from Southeast Asia, from the year 2001 to 2006 I immersed myself into APA sub-disciplines such as cross-cultural psychology, multicultural counseling, and international psychology. At the same time, as a doctoral study at Fuller Graduate

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School of Psychology,1 I learned about liberation psychology, postmodern psychology from my advisor (Dueck), and how my unique cultural experiences could counteract the hegemony of WP. It was not until I read about IP in Chinese form (ben tu xin li xue) proposed by Yang, that I felt alive and passionate about psychology again. His ideal of Confucius psychology suddenly opened up a whole new world of research for me. For that, I am forever grateful for Yang’s pioneering voice in my time, like the rest of the authors in this book. Choosing to return to Asia has been my calling of IP as well, inspired by Yang and my mentors. After hearing plethora critiques of MP during my doctoral study in California, I asked myself “what next?” Only by returning to Asia, I could build and construct an IP for my own “people.” That was the first stage of IP scholar in me. However, I found that many theories and paradigms proposed by IP were rather abstract and not “down to earth” for many local Indigenous people. The discourse of IP was mainly restricted to a guild of international social psychologists, not to the clinical practitioners in my realm. That was when I started to “experiment” with integrating different traditional resources in therapy practice as a non-MP psychologist (Ting, 2012, 2016; Ting & Ng, 2012). Some parts of me want to avoid the “contamination” of MP by doing research in my own niche, as I was extra cynical toward MP theories. Only through my later serendipitous exposure in humanitarian work since 2010 (I found a Barefoot voluntary services with my social work students 6 years ago), and the research mentorship of Louise since 2014, that I started to realize the intertwined destiny of human fate. Under Louise’ empowerment, I started to walk out of my “ghetto” of IP (Sundararajan, 2019), and seeing the importance of sharing my insights with other researchers globally to build more culturally fair psychological theories and models. Only till last year when I finally entered an MP-oriented pedagogy in Malaysia, I went through quite a “cultural shock,” learning that what I hold dear (social justice and IP) was not an ethos within the circle. When I read of Teo’s critique on Yang’s utopia of IP—“why would the people on status quo (MP) care about the marginalized voices (IP)?,” I couldn’t 1 It is a professional graduate school of psychology accredited by APA, yet with an additional requirement to receive a master-level theology course in the pursuit of Ph.D. in clinical psychology. It has been perceived as a non-mainstream professional institute due to its religious affiliation.

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agree more. His critique of how the non-West academic psychology emulates the hegemony of positivism by taking impact factor and citation as crown of scholarship, definitely struck a chord in me. Journal with high metrics (e.g. citations index) becomes the golden rule of publication, and the scholars are judged based on their “H-index” (a metrics generated by Google Scholar based on the numbers of citations). How could IP thrive if we as the academician put moral mandate as secondary to the academic race of “publish or perish”? This is the imminent challenge to my passion of IP, and I wonder what Dr. Yang would have to say about this. The Second Author: A Return to the Drawing Board My (second author’s) foundations of exposure to psychological research as an undergraduate and later on postgraduate student have been largely of an MP pedagogy. Thus, my later exposure to IP and the critique of MP was some sort of a “rude awakening” but also one that was eye-opening. Like so many students of psychology, I entered the field with expectations that the study of psychology would illuminate my understanding of myself and my community. Later on, as a clinical psychologist, I once again sought answers and understanding from research studies and from the larger body of psychological research and theories. I also sought and applied knowledge from MP in my therapeutic practice and methodologies. Nevertheless, along the way as I dealt with different people from various communities and backgrounds in my local country of Malaysia, I realized that something did not seem to quite “fit.” It seemed to me that “psychology” and my field of study and practice were only applicable to a certain section of community; primarily the urban, white collared and more westernized society in Malaysia. Even among the latter, there were elements of cultural exposure and generational differences that did not from my perspective seem quite to fit with the “answers” and “explanations” or tools used in MP. For example, in my practice as a psychologist in Malaysia, I found some of my clients to have more family-based values, less verbal affective expression and often less abstract local mentalities. These, in turn, led a lack of fit of pure western cognitive behavioral therapy (often a research recommended first line treatment for depression and anxiety) which privileges abstract thinking and individualistic autonomy with some of my clients (particularly the less westernized individuals). Assessment tools looking at IQ or adaptive abilities often did not do our children (even those in urban settings) justice;

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measuring types of thinking, learning and information that those particularly from local education contexts and curricular were not exposed to. This tension of “cultural misfit” also appeared in my role of researcher with regard to MP theory and research tools. For example, in Malaysian Chinese culture, authoritarian parenting styles are widely adopted and typically accepted while MP literature largely pathologized such parenting methods. Therefore, I found there was a need as Yang wrote to “suspend judgement” and learning to tolerate the “vague and ambiguous state” in dealing with these incompatibilities. After exposing myself to different social classes and groups in my country, I was experiencing an “indigenization of MP” (Yang, 2012) through “self-reflection” and an “imaginative role taking process” leading to an increasing awareness of the lack of compatibility between MP and these different cultures. With this awareness, I felt challenged as a third-generation Malaysian Chinese, to further understand my own subculture, to deepen my knowledge of the “universality without uniformity” (Shweder, 2020, Chapter 6) as Malaysians and further adapt my practice and knowledge of psychology to the local mentalities and styles of “being.” Hence, my journey of IP, is a return to the drawing board. An acknowledgment that much of what I have been seeking to understand is yet unknown and a re-examining of the “tried” and “tested”; the “replicated and generalizable” epistemologies of MP. Nevertheless, there is a rumbling of excitement at the vast possibilities of untrodden territory and a journey toward asking the right questions.

Our Dialogue with the Maestros on Stage A common theme prevalent among the authors in their dialogue with Yang was with regard to his definition of IP vs MP, which comes across as de-contextualized and de-politicized.2 In fleshing out an identity for 2 Yang (2000) defined Indigenous psychology as “an evolving system of psychological knowledge based on scientific research that is sufficiently compatible with the studied phenomena and their ecological, economic, social, cultural, and historical contexts” (p. 245). He pointed out that all these definitions “express the same basic goal of developing a scientific knowledge system that effectively reflects, describes, explains, or understands the psychological and behavioral activities in their native contexts in terms of culturally relevant frames of reference and culturally derived categories and theories” (pp. 245– 246)….Indigenized psychology (IZP) is a knowledge system based on the accumulation and integration of theoretical, methodological, and empirical accomplishments of research

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IP, Dr. Yang (2012) experienced pessimism regarding the existence of a truly pure IP in non-Western territories, given the strong Western underpinnings in our psychology training. Hence, he concluded on Indigenized psychology (IZP) instead as the counterbalance to MP, proposing that an integration of MP with IZP would be needed to achieve a balanced GP. His definition of IP and IZP has been challenged by Teo and Allwood, as there is no single fully “integrated” WP in the Western realm (divided between academic and popular psychology). These arguments disputed Yang’s assumption of WP being a true IP. Another challenge posed by the authors in Part II of this book (Teo, Dueck et al.) was toward Yang’s assumption of the independence of MP from political agenda. Though Allwood applauded Yang’s efforts in de-politicizing IP, Teo and Dueck both provided counter-arguments, likening MP to a “trojan horse,” carrying within its belly “neoliberalistic” underpinnings and constructed on foundations of unequal economic forces between countries. Moghaddam for example, cited his own research in poverty and cognition in criticizing MP for only serving 1% of the world population. Four of these authors (Allwood, 2020, Chapter 7; Dueck, Song, & Marossy, 2020, Chapter 8; Hendricks & Moghaddam, 2020, Chapter 9; Teo & Af¸sin, 2020, Chapter 10) expressed skepticism toward MP as a sufficiently “just” approach for many non-Western populations. Shweder, on the other hand, writes as a highly supportive figure of Yang’s vision of IP. We see this in his observations of the similarities between cultural psychology (CP) and IP. While his posture toward MP appears neutral, he does highlight the need for a psychology of “universalism without uniformity.” Whether GP envisioned by Dr. Yang is “apolitical” or not, as a scholar trained in West, who also harbors a sense of “jun zi” (as known by his protégé Dr. Hwang), Yang’s critique of MP might be softened up by his sense of “moderation” (zhong yong ) rather than a true empathy for the Western scholars. To our knowledge, he practices the virtue of Confucianism, and would not take a stance of extreme criticism on MP or IP. His choice of term—“balanced” GP also speaks of his mentality

with a sufficient degree of Indigenous Compatibility (IC) (Yang, 2000). A well-developed non-Western IZP can be as comprehensive as American IP in the scope of fields and in the multiplicity of research paradigms. All the IZPs developed in various non-Western countries can be creatively integrated with all the IPs formed in Western countries to construct a genuine, balanced global human psychology as envisaged by Yang (2000).

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of “moderation.” This posture of balance is mirrored in Shweder’s essay on Yang and his writings promoting an assumption of reason and the necessary acknowledgment of the inevitable diversity present in what people believe, value, feel, and desire to do. Shweder however, gently challenges Yang’s assumption of drastic differences between various intellectual traditions (as if they are incompatible). Instead, Shweder’s attitude toward these contrasts is that of “one mind, multiple mentalities.” In the essence of Yang’s vision, we think that Allwood’s writings about Yang could be a more accurate reflection of the latter, as he attempts to portray an “equitable” GP in following Yang’s argument closely and carefully. Nevertheless, he also questions Yang’s “utopia” of an IP research paradigm as one that is vague and difficult to imagine in reality. Unlike Yang, Allwood, and Shweder, the rest of the authors on the other hand seem to have focused their critique on the power structures embedded in MP, and taken upon themselves the roles of advocacy for the marginalized, third world, and ex-colonized lands. All of them have varying degrees of hope toward a GP, but not all have attempted to construct IP from ground up like Yang. Besides the debate of “what” is IP, some authors on stage also raised the question of the identity and necessity of IP. Why should the “whole world” need IP if its only concern is the cultural relevance of psychology in non-Western societies? Yang does not answer this specific question in a forceful and compelling manner. Making psychology more “culturally relevant” or “Indigenous compatible” is not a strong enough message against the trend of MP uncritical exportation and importation, as argued by some authors like Teo and Dueck. Dueck et al. (2020) critically pointed out about the diminishing of non-Western cultural values due to the uncritical importation of neoliberalistic values embedded in MP. Using the concept of “forgiveness” as an example, Dueck et al. (2020) criticizes how MP de-moralizes “forgiveness” as a religious virtue, but repackages it as a positive psychology value. This reminds us of a similar concept—“mindfulness” that suffers a similar fate. Originally rooted in Buddhism tradition, mindfulness in the recent decade has been de-spiritualized, and operationalized as a “useful tool” in psychological intervention. Mindfulness self-help books are all over the best-sellers nowadays, and many psychologists opt to integrate mindfulness in their practice without acknowledging its origin. However, how would this de-historical and de-political approach of cultural resources have adverse implications at both a local and global level? This is where both Yang and

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the scholars on stage did not address sufficiently. This is where we hope to provide our two cents, as psychologists from the “East.”

Our Vision of GP---A Voice from the East As the world changes with globalization and migration cultural boundaries have been blurred by intersectional identity and cultural diversity. For example, in a country like Malaysia which is made up of three major races who are also encouraged to “mix” and unite under one “national identity,” a Malaysian IP would need to look beyond the parameters of nationality toward subgroup of local cultures. In the past, Chinese IP has always been defined by a monoculturalistic approach, where Chinese from Taiwan, Hongkong, Mainland China are dominating the major voice for “Chinese psychology” (Bond, 2010). However, the main population of diaspora Chinese (migrant Chinese settled in other multiracial societies) was underrepresented in the discourse of the Chinese psychology IP movement (Ting & Foo, 2018). This is why we believe that it is necessary for Yang’s vision of IP to be refreshed to properly address and account for the diversity within the Indigenous culture, including the factors that influence cultural adaptation. In our perspective, the relationship between IP and GP, are like two sides of a coin (yin vs yang). The former looks particularly within a given culture/context, the latter looks for universality across culture. We can learn from the anthropological perspective of emic-etic in defining psychological research, so that the contrast between IP and GP is not merely stark, black and white, West or nonWest, but dialectical and dynamic. Without IP, GP is not complete. Without GP, IP is not distinct. In other words, the existence of IP is not only for the “local native context,” but to complement the “global context” as well and to contribute to the scholarship of general psychology. The next generation of psychologists need not pledge their loyalty to either WP (MP) or IZP, but see all psychology traditions as a piece of GP. This GP could then capture those ethnic groups who do not represent the mainstream culture in their residing host countries, such as Chinese diaspora, refugees, migrants, Indigenous and tribal people, and ethnic minorities.

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Methodology of Future GP (How)— From Ghetto to Cross-Disciplinary Collaboration In the last decade, I (the first author) have been “experimenting” with various research methodologies that may serve to unearth indigenous resources or wisdom tradition in a nonintrusive way through cross-cultural immersion in China (mainly in southwest region where Miao, Tibetan, and Yi are the dominant groups). As Allwood was questioning whether Yang’s “cross-cultural IP research paradigm” is possible, I believe our humble study among Yi ethnic group could provide an affirmative answer to him and serve to complement Yang’s vision of GP. In 2014–2016, I was fortunate and privileged to receive an international grant to actualize this venture by incorporating anthropological research methods and psycholinguistics in a mixed-method study in the deep mountain ranges of China. There were a few IP principles we adhered to in order to be culturally sensitive and empowering while conducting psychological research with the ethnic minority groups in China (Ting & Sundararajan, 2018). First, we used a multidisciplinary research team that consisted of individuals from sociology, psychology, social work, and religious disciplines. The team members came from three different countries—though all were Chinese—and were rooted in different cultural backgrounds. We were also diverse in age group and level of education, ranging from sophomore students to senior scholars. Secondly, we adopt a mixed-method that could account for both the etic and emic approach to a universal human experience such as suffering. Learning from the anthropological approach, we decided to invest at least a one-year span in following up research participants and taking notes of their changes. Rather than collecting data in the lab or distributing questionnaire in the school, we did a cultural immersion in the field where the ethnic minority live. We spent half a year before we conducted a semi-structural interview because we wanted to ensure that there was sufficient trust toward us as “outsiders” from the local community. As a result, we found that even a strong-ties society like the Yi group could accept us as their “insiders” and address us with familial terms, such as “sister.” Thirdly, we used linguistic analysis to quantify interview transcripts, so that we could do a cross-sectional comparison between two religious groups (Bimo vs Christian Yi). After thematic coding on qualitative data for each Yi religious group, we created a categorical scale that could encompass the taxonomy specific to the domains we were assessing. The hypothesis about the group differences was tested based

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on these scales, by manually counting the occurrence of each categorical variables. Later on, we found the manual coding was also comparable to the results of machine coding (Sundararajan, Ting, Hsieh, & Kim, 2019). The psycholinguistic analysis method can overcome the problem of many cultural insensitive instrument/scales that were developed based on Western sample, and language/literacy barrier for studying grassroots lay persons. Fourth, as a research team, we acknowledged our own power differentiation and cultural myopia while carrying out our IP research in China. Therefore, using reflexivity in our theoretical construction became critical for us. For example, when our research assistants encountered a village heavily impacted by HIV, their field notes that day were emotionally laden with a lot of parallel cognitive processes between the research assistants and the participants. These kinds of reflective memos actually served as important data for us to construct cultural theory, because we found that through empathy the researchers may unconsciously mimic the cognitive, emotional and relational profile in the ecological system in which they were immersed. Lastly, as a gesture of giving back to the community we investigated and reached out to some deprived households after completing our data collection. We introduced an organization that helps to sponsor children for education and also provides medical care for those participants suffering with HIV/AIDS. As a parting gift, we also compiled the pictures and videos of them taken during the interview sessions (with their permission) and edited it into a 30-minute video clip. Then we watched the video clip together with them to gain feedback and ecological validity. In short, IP has always been seen as the counterbalancing force to MP, by reflecting critically on the power structure embedded in both global and local psychology. However, the reflexivity of the researchers as a powerful tool has typically been undermined, when we practiced our cynicism. As Teo suggested, acknowledging the power difference embedded in the researchers and the researched is an imperative first step. Our study on Yi took the second step by reflecting on the cultural identity as a researcher/research team and found great enlightenment of doing so in our IP research. We believe our research paradigm could be extended to future GP research seeking to look within the diversity of a particular culture (or ecological system). Using a mixed-method study, we also employed a “voice-giving” (Bhatia & Priya, 2019) and “peaceable” (Dueck & Reimer, 2009) approach to the marginalized Yi

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participants, in respect to their cultural heritage and uniqueness. We are extending Yang’s Chinese IP from “nation-based” to “tradition-based,” so that the results could go beyond the country borderlines, and be comparable to other tradition likewise. We believe a research paradigm like this will generate more human solidarity by studying our common experiences such as suffering, as Allwood suggested, than testing WP tools on a non-Western community among a vulnerable group. It is our hope that a future GP would go beyond patriotism to humanitarianism, by constructing equitable IP methodology. Epistemology of Future GP (What)—From Weak-Ties to Strong-Ties Mentality The theoretical framework that guides our Yi within-group comparison is the Ecological Rationality framework (Todd & Gigerenzer, 2012), which posits that cognitive styles both shape as well as are being shaped by different types of adaptations in response to varying environmental demands. Our implied definition of culture is also aligned with this model, where each ecological niche potentially represents a unique cultural system with unique symbols and cognitive styles, such as religious tradition or wisdom tradition. This theory was extended by Sundararajan (2015) to explain the difference in cognitive styles across cultures, using strong vs. weak ties as ecological niches to replace the collectivistic vs. individualistic societies/cultures. In our framework of cultural analysis, we posit two basic ecological niches in the remote past of human civilization—strong ties and weak ties (Granovetter, 1973)—each privileging the development of certain cognitive styles (see Diagram 1.2 in Ting & Sundararajan, 2018). Cast in the context of evolution and stated in simple terms, ecological rationality proposes that the cognitive skills of an organism evolve to serve the purpose of its ecological niche and in turn shapes this niche. For example, in the ecological niche of the beaver, it is advantageous to build dams, hence beavers have evolved the skills to do so; in turn, these dams play a role in shaping the beaver’s environment. For illustration, consider the two different cognitive orientations—internal versus external. Cognitive orientation refers to attentional focus—external focus on the physical space versus internal focus on the mental space. Internal focus is privileged by weak-ties societies, in which one frequently rubs elbows with strangers through trade, whereas external focus on

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the physical space is privileged by (some) strong-ties societies, characterized by a sharp in-group and out-group distinction due to the centrality of bloodline-based connections in the sedentary agricultural community (Ting & Sundararajan, 2018). We adopted and adapted the Ecological Rationality framework further to explain the differences between Yi people from Bimo and Christian traditions in our previous research (Ting & Sundararajan, 2018). The traditional Yi culture stresses the importance of bloodline membership (family clan), which makes it characteristic of a strong-ties society. However, Christianity stresses the inclusion of outsiders (the others) into the community as its membership was built on shared belief and faith, rather than familism. The Yi–Christian community thus might possess characteristics of both strong-ties and weak-ties society, according to the ecological rationality model. This hypothesis was validated in our previous study (Ting, Sundararajan, & Huang, 2017). According to Ecological rationality model, the cognitive style dimensions, including information processing, cognitive effort, cognitive orientation, could be seen as a continuum anchored at two extreme ends. Most cultures could fall along this bidirectional continuum on varying degrees. We propose that all cognitive styles are equally useful in the ecological niches which they evolved to function adaptively and creatively. Thus, internal focus is not necessarily better than external focus. Nor does external focus need to have the connotations of superficiality, lack of depth, and so on. Second, while cognitive styles are assumed to be equally useful and adaptive in their respective ecological niches that initially gave rise to and co-evolved with them, cognitive styles do have good and bad consequences—due to historical contingencies. For instance, if the river dries up, the beaver’s dam-building skills would be useless and might even drain cognitive resources that it could have used for other skills. One important contingency in modern times is globalization, which privileges the weak-ties rationality, which some strong-ties societies may not be prepared for (Ting & Sundararajan, 2018). This model also resonates with Dueck et al.’s (2020) argument of MP as a Trojan horse of neoliberalism; given that Western psychological research built on a weakties society, would create a cultural misfit through the importation of MP in a strong-ties society. Through our previous study with Yi people on their suffering experiences (Ting & Sundararajan, 2018), we discovered a few psychological concepts that could be explained through the lens of the strong-ties

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ecology, complementing the existing WP model that privileges explicit emotional expression, internal manipulation of religiosity, abstract cognitive attribution style, trait-like resilience, and individual coping. Rather than labeling the traditional Bimo tradition as “superstitious,” their emotion as “repressed,” their coping behavior as “materialistic,” our study removed those stereotypes toward Yi people by honoring their unique language of suffering within their cultural system. The strong-ties mentalities would account for many sophisticated communal characteristics in the psychological concepts (e.g. social relation, face, favor, help-seeking, resilience, empathy) that has not yet been fully extrapolated in MP. Therefore, we propose that this flexibility in switching from weak-ties analysis to strong-ties would be an essential skill for our future GP if our identity is based on cultural-inclusiveness (Hwang, 2014; Yang, 2012). Ontology of Future GP (Why)—From Guild-Building to Voice-Giving Both IP and GP need an “identity” (reason of being) as a justification for its existence (ontology). Rather than building a fortress of IP or GP pedagogy, we propose instead to adopt the identity of a “voice-giver” or “story-teller” rich in its own unique tradition while still connected to global development. Our Yi study also showed us that no culture or ethnic group is immune to the encroachment of globalization and modernization. For example, a Yi migrant worker could be found working for a Korean company in Guangzhou. A HIV virus that originated in Africa could be transmitted to the Yi Liangshan mountain villages. Thus, when we listened to their stories of suffering, we found within these narratives the threat of urbanization and globalization for these migrant workers from different ethnic backgrounds (Ting & Sundararajan, 2018). Unfortunately, Yang has never included or mentioned ethnic minorities in his study among “Chinese society” as Confucius tradition mainly deals with the practices of ruling class (mainstream Chinese). Hence, we are not surprised that Yang in his lifetime lacked a chance to explore the psychological concepts among Indigenous peoples or ethnic minorities in Taiwan or China which could certainly widen his theoretical framework of guanxi (social relation). As Allwood advocated for a GP addressing issues of common human destiny, we agree with him in that it is an urgent calling as many minorities are suffering from unsustainable development in developing countries. Ethnic minorities in China, especially

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those residing in remote border provinces, are faced with challenges with retaining their ethnic roots while absorbing the values of individualism and atheism embedded in the process of modernization (Ting, Zhang, & Huang, 2019). Indigenous people in Malaysia (Orang Asli) are also faced with problem of poverty and malnutrition due to deforestation caused by the greed of unrestrained development (Tay & Ting, 2019). IP, henceforth, is able to give voice to the cultural narratives of these people groups at this juncture of globalization without pathologizing their uniqueness. By adopting the identity as “global citizen,” a future GP stands to benefit from a mutually reciprocating relationship with IP to address the impact of global migration, border issues (e.g. refugees and immigrants), decolonization, terrorism, global warming, deforestation, pollution and so forth, on the “hybridized” (Gergen, Sharma, Sameshima, Wu, & Yang, 2019) human identity and complex human psyche. However, there are still challenges faced in establishing IP; popular MP perception is that IP is only valid for specific local/Indigenous people while IP researchers often fail to see their potential contributions to MP due to the assumption of “cultural incompatibility” (Yang, 2012). For instance, our research on Yi people was not published in top ranked journals (but in a monograph format) and hence MP scholars who primarily read “journal articles” are unlikely to know of its existence. This segregation between MP and IP scholars might not be due to their lack of interest on each other (as we all live in a global platform) but due to the lack of easily accessible channels of communication. The only channel MP relies on information dissemination is high impact journal publication, which typically is dominated by MP scholars. Ironically, the heat of globalization is mostly first sensed by scapegoats in third world countries. Thus, the suffering of marginalized groups only successfully gains the attention of MP scholars through taunting news, such as the recent bombing situation in Sri Lanka church on Easter Sunday and the shooting incident at Mosques in New Zealand. Without breaking away from the economic classism as discussed by Moghaddam, and classism within the field of psychological academia itself as suggested by Teo, our future GP is likely going to end up only serving the 1% of the world population. As we live in a global village, we cannot expect to serve the 1% without experiencing repercussions from the 99% (such as natural disaster, civil war, terrorism, and the influx of refugees). There are issues concerning a universal human fate should we continue to turn a blind eye. For example, increase of terrorist attacks in major global developed cities (e.g. recent attacks in Sri Lanka 5-star

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hotel), spreading of fatal epidemic (e.g. H1N1, HIV) and ecological pollution (e.g. the war on plastic and clean air). The above are our reasons for aligning ourselves with Allwood’s comment that a future GP needs to consider issues pertaining to our common human fate. Only human suffering can serve as a foundation of global solidarity (Rorty, 1989). If our future GP’s ontology is apolitical and blind to the racial tension, religious conflict, political oppressions and so forth, then we will eventually reap the consequences of our ignorance.

Future Challenges for Solidarity Among GP Looking forward, we would humbly offer two observations from our position in Asia, in terms of the common tensions faced by psychologists from the developing countries such as China and Malaysia. Challenge 1: Theory vs Practices As a clinical psychologist trained in the West, I (the first author) often found that psychotherapy models imported to Asia are potentially harmful if not being critically modified. However, those critical IP theories developed by academic psychologist like Yang were hard to translate into practice by the local professional practitioners. Hence the dichotomous reality I found in many third world countries is that IP academicians doing culturally relevant research on one end (people like Dr. Yang and his disciples), yet practicing psychologists carrying out therapy or interventionbased Western models (such as Freudian analysis and CBT). How to bridge the gap of academia and practitioners has been my quest in IP. For instance, Richard Katz, a clinical psychologist who is trained under gurus like Erickson, Murray, Skinner in the 70s Harvard Ph.D. program, eventually turned away from a MP approach, by delving into Indigenous wisdom tradition and promoting Indigenous healing methods (Katz, 2017). His journey is inspiring and empowering, yet seldom seen in the writing of CP as he did not conduct cross-cultural studies. For academicians, the power of knowledge resides through publications, yet practitioners hold the power of publicity through public campaign and media exposure. This tension of IP scholars and IP practitioners are evident in a country like China, where debates between two schools of thoughts are salient. Both claim knowledge of IP, host their own conferences about IP, and publish their own IP theories (Feng, Li, & Zhang, 2015). This disjoint

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telos between Chinese IP researcher and IP practitioners will continue to threaten its ontology, epistemology, and methodology. Challenge 2: Power and Market Interestingly, while teaching in Malaysia, many psychology students show a desire to study local phenomena such as, “Why do people rarely seek help from mental health professionals?” as their thesis topic. Ingrained in an MP mentality, the typical assumption made is that these “barriers” toward mental health services should be removed, so that more local people can “benefit” from psychologists or counselors. This is how deeply our MP influences the next generation of psychology students through the Introduction to Psychology course. We have often failed to teach our students to listen attentively and respect the “why not” embedded in the cultural tendencies of this part of the world. An IP-oriented GP would first ask our students to reflect on questions such as the following: “Why should we bring suffering individuals into the therapy room? What part of their cultural identity allows for help-seeking behavior from the mental health profession? When they do not seek help in therapy, where do they go to seek help instead? What is the risk/benefit of them seeking help from other sources (such as spiritual medium, religious leader, traditional healers or peers)?” An IP-oriented GP would start a PSY 101 (introduction to psychology) course with a reflection on our cultural assumption of mental health or mental illness, and tradition of wisdom. An IP-oriented GP would include other lay helpers into research realm and therapy room. Yet, for many MP trained practitioners, paradoxically we face the problem of “marketing” when we receive insufficient clientele referrals. In turn, this “market crisis” perceived by MP practitioners drives the kind of research we do—“how to sustain our market and promote our professional identity.” As long as we continue in our ignorance of that which resides in the Trojan horse, many IP scholars and practitioners will continue seeing psychology as a profitable market/profession in turn collectively influencing the development of the field into an economic-oriented, consumerism trapped discipline. Like Teo and Af¸sin (2020) pointed out, that as long as psychology fails to challenge these existing conditions that are infused with power and self-serving interests, we will become a “discipline of the status quo.”

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Epilogue--Parable of the Blind Men and the Elephant To conclude this chapter, we would like to reiterate an old folk tale here: There was once six blind men who stood by the road-side every day, and begged from people who passed. One day, an elephant was driven down the road where they stood. They had heard of this strange animal but being blind, they had never seen one. Out of curiosity, they thought by touching him they could learn just what kind of animal he was. The first one put his hand on the elephant’s side and said “This being is exactly like a wall” The second felt the elephant’s tusk. “You are wrong. He is more like a spear than anything else.” The third happened to take hold of the elephant’s trunk and said, “Anybody who knows anything can see that this elephant is like a snake” The fourth grasped one of the elephant’s legs and thought he was round and tall like a tree.” The fifth happened to take hold of the elephant’s ear, and believed that the beast was like a huge fan. The sixth man, grabbed the animal’s tail and thought it was exactly like a rope. (Adapted from Baldwin, 1896, p. 130)

To the end, we fully celebrate and appreciate Yang in pioneering and championing the IP movement. In this chapter, we have been critical to WP and the colonialism embedded in the psychological tradition. Along with the symphony played by the authors in Part II, we share their underlying concern about the future of GP—our concerns of it becoming another tool of empiricism and neoliberalism. While GP is an aspiration yet to be achieved, our visions of IP or GP are bound by our value systems and personal subjectivity while we strive for lofty goals of world peace and social justice. Without acknowledgment of the limitations of our imagination, we run the risk of being like the blind men in the parable above, limiting our vision based on our own subjective truths. Yet, the diversity of our varying subjective experiences are needed in order to construct a more complete image of the “elephant” (GP). If only we blind men would firstly acknowledge our blindness, and pay attention to what each other has to say (equitable and balance perspectives), perhaps we would be able to accomplish the “impossible possibility of GP” (Teo) and “universalism without uniformity” (Schweder). It is unhelpful if only one “blind man” holds the privilege of English publication, while another has access to international funding, and meanwhile another comes from a third world country without good English proficiency. This is why Teo advocates for epistemic humility, which we wholeheartedly agree and applaud. Without

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a posture of humility and global citizenship, IP scholars run the risk of becoming MP scholars who are socialized into the status quo of power. Without the willingness to let go of the comforting perimeters of the status quo, IP scholars run the risk of inevitably silencing other IP scholars with metrics-based pedagogical standards. The collective orchestra of GP would then become one whose symphony was dominated by the loudest tune and most strident player muting out the rest of the instruments. Instead, we envision GP as an “invisible elephant” whose presence could spark a hopeful dialogue between us (the blind men/women) who start from equal footings and limitations. Hence without reflexivity, IP would not be able to lead to a construction of future GP, and Yang’s vision would end with our generation.

References Allwood, C. M. (2020). Yang’s global psychology and beyond. In L. Sundararajan, K.-K. Hwang, & K.-H. Yeh (Eds.), Global psychology from indigenous perspectives (pp. 45–75). Cham: Palgrave Macmillan. Baldwin, J. (1896). Fifty famous stories retold. Retrieved from http://www. gutenberg.org/files/18442/18442-h/18442-h.htm#Page_130. Bhatia, S., & Priya, K. R. (2019). From representing culture to fostering ‘voice’: Reassessing vistas of indigenous psychology. In K. H. Yeh (Ed.), Asian indigenous psychologies in global context (Chapter 2, pp. 19–46). New York, NY: Palgrave Macmillan. Bond, M. H. (2010). Introduction reaching this stage in studying the psychology of the Chinese people. In M. H. Bond (Ed.), The Oxford handbook of Chinese psychology (pp. 1–5). https://doi.org/10.1093/oxfordhb/9780199541850. 013.0001. Dueck, A., & Reimer, K. (2009). A peaceable psychology: Christian therapy in a world of many cultures. Grand Rapids, MI: Brazos Press. Dueck, A., Song, R., & Marossy, M. (2020). Forgiveness in indigenous psychological research: A Trojan Horse, a Western knockoff, or a traditioned sensibility? In L. Sundararajan, K.-K. Hwang, & K.-H. Yeh (Eds.), Global psychology from indigenous perspectives (pp. 129–143). Cham: Palgrave Macmillan. Feng, F., Li, G. X., & Zhang, J. H. (2015). The history and current situation of Chinese local psychotherapy. Psychological: Techniques and Application, 8, 55–58 (in Chinese). Gabrenya, W. K., Jr., & Sun, C.-R. (2015). Kuo-Shu Yang: Scholar, leader, activist. In G. J. Rich & U. P. Gielen (Eds.), Pathfinders in international psychology (pp. 201–212). Charlotte: Information Age Publishing.

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Gergen, K. J., Sharma, C., Sameshima, T., Wu, S.-J., & Yang, L. (2019). Cultures in motion: Challenges to future inquiry. In K.-H. Yeh (Ed.), Asian indigenous psychologies in the global context (pp. 47–67). New York, NY: Palgrave Macmillan. Granovetter, M. S. (1973). The strength of weak ties. American Journal of Sociology, 78(6), 1360–1380. Hendricks, M. J., & Moghaddam, F. M. (2020). Psychology for the global 99%. In L. Sundararajan, K.-K. Hwang, & K.-H. Yeh (Eds.), Global psychology from indigenous perspectives (pp. 145–157). Cham: Palgrave Macmillan. Hwang, K.-K. (1987). Face and favor: The Chinese power game. American Journal of Sociology, 92(4), 945–974. Hwang, K.-K. (1997–1998). Guanxi and mien tze: Conflict resolution in Chinese society. Intercultural Communication Studies, 7 (1), 17–37. Hwang, K.-K. (2011). Face dynamism in Confucian relationalism. China Media Research, 7 (4), 13–24. Hwang, K.-K. (2014). Culture-inclusive theories of self and social interaction: The approach of multiple philosophical paradigms. Journal for the Theory of Social Behaviour, 45(1), 40–63. Katz, R. (2017). Indigenous healing psychology: Honoring the wisdom of the first peoples. Rochester, VT: Healing Arts Press. Rorty, R. (1989). Contingency, irony, and solidarity. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. Shweder, R. A. (2020). The role of reason in cultural interpretation: Some Talmudic distinctions for indigenous and cultural psychology. In L. Sundararajan, K.-K. Hwang, & K.-H. Yeh (Eds.), Global psychology from indigenous perspectives (pp. 95–110). Cham: Palgrave Macmillan. Sundararajan, L. (2015). Understanding emotion in Chinese culture: Thinking through psychology. New York, NY: Springer. Sundararajan, L. (2019). Whiter indigenous psychology. Journal of Theoretical and Philosophical Psychology, 39(2), 81–89. Sundararajan, L., Ting, R. S.-K., Hsieh, S.-K., & Kim, S.-H. (2019). Religion, cognition, and emotion: What can automated text analysis tell us about culture? Unpublished manuscript. Tay, A. Y. T., & Ting, R. S.-K. (2019, August). Exploring the spirituality and suffering among indigenous people in Malaysia: A qualitative study. Poster session presented at the 127th American Psychological Association (APA) Annual Convention, Denver, CO. Teo, T., & Af¸sin, B. (2020). The impossible conditions of the possibility of an alter-global psychology. In L. Sundararajan, K.-K. Hwang, & K.-H. Yeh (Eds.), Global psychology from indigenous perspectives (pp. 159–174). Cham: Palgrave Macmillan.

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Ting, R. S.-K. (2012). The worldviews of healing traditions in the East and West: Implications for psychology of religion. Pastoral Psychology, 61(5–6), 759–782. Ting, R. S.-K. (2016). Celebrating life and death: Resiliency among postearthquake Tibetans’ religious community. Journal of Psychology and Theology, 44(2), 124–132. Ting, R. S.-K., & Foo, P. L. (2018). Counseling Chinese communities in Malaysia: The challenges and needs in mental health service deliverance. In A. J. Jegathesan & S. S. Abdullah (Eds.), Multicultural counseling applications for improved mental healthcare (pp. 23–49). IGI Global. Ting, R. S.-K., & Ng, L. O. (2012). Use of religious resources in psychotherapy from a tradition-sensitive approach: Cases from Chinese in Malaysia. Pastoral Psychology, 61(5–6), 941–957. Ting, R. S.-K., & Sundararajan, L. (2018). Culture, cognition, and emotion in China’s religious ethnic minorities: Voices of suffering among the Yi. London, UK: Macmillan. Ting, R. S.-K., Sundararajan, L., & Huang, Q. B. (2017). Narratives of suffering: A psycholinguistic analysis of two Yi religious communities in southwest China. Journal of Research in the Social Scientific Study of Religion, 28, 232– 255. Ting, R. S.-K., Zhang, K., & Huang, Q. (2019). An inclusive indigenous psychology for all Chinese: Heeding the mind and spirit of ethnic minorities in China. In K.-H. Yeh (Ed.), Asian indigenous psychologies in the global context (pp. 249–275). New York, NY: Palgrave. Todd, P. M., & Gigerenzer, G. (2012). Ecological rationality: Intelligence in the world. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press. Yang, K.-S. (2000). Monocultural and cross-cultural indigenous approaches: The royal road to the development of a balanced global psychology. Asian Journal of Social Psychology, 3(3), 241–263. Yang, K.-S. (2005). Meaning and development of indigenized psychology. In K.-S. Yang, K.-K. Hwang, & C.-F. Yang (Eds.), Chinese indigenized psychology (pp. 3–54). Taipei, Taiwan: Yuan-Liou Publishing. (in Chinese). Yang, K.-S. (2012). Indigenous psychology, westernized psychology, and indigenized psychology: A non-western psychologist’s view. Chang Gung Journal of Humanities and Social Sciences, 5, 1–3. Yeh, K.-H., & Bedford, O. (2003). A test of the dual filial piety model. Asian Journal of Social Psychology, 6(3), 215–228. Yeh, K.-H., Yi, C.-C., Tsao, W.-C., & Wan, P.-S. (2013). Filial piety in contemporary Chinese societies: A comparative study of Taiwan, Hong Kong, and China. International Sociology, 28(3), 277–296.

PART IV

Conclusion

CHAPTER 14

Taking Stock and Moving Forward from IP to GP: Building on the Legacy of K. S. Yang Louise Sundararajan

Professor Kuo-Shu Yang and I have never met in person. Yet, through my reading of the heart-warming accounts of his life by his colleagues and former students in the first section of this volume, I felt distinctively his presence as a genuine Confucian gentleman/scholar, who inspired his intellectual colleagues (Bond, this volume; Gabrenya, this volume), mentored and nurtured his students, and took his social responsibilities seriously to stand up against a repressive regime. My analysis of his article of 2012 further revealed a profound soul, in whose deep concerns for IP I am able to cast my anchor like a boat finding its moorings. According to Yeh (this volume), Yang’s vision centers around three goals: First, developing a more culturally sensitive and contextually grounded knowledge system of psychology; second, achieving academic autonomy; and third, developing “a genuine, balanced global human psychology” (Yang, 2012, p. 11; see Appendix). Since the first goal is well established, judging by the fine scholarship of Yang and his former students, such as Hwang (2012) and Yeh (2019), my overview will focus

L. Sundararajan (B) Rochester, NY, USA e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s) 2020 L. Sundararajan et al. (eds.), Global Psychology from Indigenous Perspectives, Palgrave Studies in Indigenous Psychology, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-35125-0_14

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primarily on the second and third goals of Yang—autonomy and global psychology (GP). Bringing to bear insights from the contributors to this volume, I present a critical evaluation of Yang’s legacy, followed by an appreciation of his deep concerns for IP, and conclude with some suggestions for the way forward.

Purity-Based Autonomy? As authors in Part II of this volume point out, Yang’s notion of academic autonomy is fraught with contradictions. First, he claimed that autonomy is characteristic of an ideal IP, which is self-directed and not under any foreign influence, hence pure. Furthermore, he claimed that such a pure psychology existed only in the West. While this entails an undue pessimism regarding the existence of IP in non-Western societies (Ting & Thong, this volume), what is more troubling is the insistence on purity as the condition for autonomy, and the projection of this condition onto Western psychology. As Allwood (this volume) points out, a viable culture cannot possibly be pure—the content of people’s memory representations and the contexts they think in are often already a hybrid mix of influences from various countries and societies. A pure culture is necessarily a monoculture, which, as many contributors (Teo & Afsin, Allwood, Hwang) in this volume have pointed out, does not describe Western psychology—the epitome of IP. Purity stems from the obsession with the place of origin, which gives rise to the dichotomy of exogenous versus endogenous. Yang (1993) claimed that “What we mean by indigenous psychology is restricted to endogenous indigenous psychology, and that is what we seek” (p. 44). As Hwang (this volume) points out, Yang’s (1993) emphasis on locality in defining the concept of indigenous compatibility had been challenged, such that he had to concede to the possibility for foreign scholars to do indigenous research. Allwood (this volume) has identified a number of problems with this formulation of the indigenous: First, Yang used the expression “contaminated,” which indicates that he assumed that there could be “pure” cultures completely insulated from outside influence; second, there is a tension between Yang’s recommendation for IP researchers to follow their own intellectual tradition, on the one hand; and on the other, his aspiration to be scientific, knowing full well that science is imported from the West.

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Yang’s Approach to Global Psychology Yang’s agenda for global psychology is also fraught with difficulties. Since only Western psychology can measure up to the ideal (pure) IP, the best that non-Western psychologies can be is IZP (indigenized psychology), a form of locally modified foreign import. An integration of these two forms of psychology constitutes Yang’s (2012) global psychology. Pe-Pua (this volume) is quick to point out the inherent contradiction of a presumably equalitarian (“balanced”) GP with such a two-tiered structure: “If it is indigenized, then it is inferior to the genuinely indigenous”. Questionable method. Allwood is impressed that Yang was original among the IP authors in his detailed discussion of a method toward the construction of GP. Unfortunately, the method is wrong headed, according to many critics. Both Liu (this volume) and Hwang (this volume) expressed doubts about Yang’s inductive approach to theory integration based on empirical results from bottom up. A conceptually more serious problem is pinpointed by Allwood (this volume), namely, Yang’s complete reliance on the empirical method for theory integration suggests that Yang may have implicitly assumed that GP should continue to study the same types of questions and pose the same types of research problems as IPs or MP [mainstream psychology] in general have: “business as usual.”

If everything is business as usual, what is the point of having the IP movement at all? A movement that stays put. Yeh points out that indigenization was the original research issue in the Chinese psychological community, but that Yang believed it to be worthy of long-term investment as it had the potential to trigger an academic movement around the globe. Yang was right—the initial research issue in Taiwan did trigger a movement internationally. But somehow a powerfully motivating agenda is missing, as Ting and Thong (this volume) point out rightly: Why should the “whole world” need IP if its only concern is the cultural relevance of psychology in the non-Western societies? Yang does not answer this specific question in a forceful and compelling manner. Making psychology more “culturally relevant” or “indigenous compatible” is not a strong enough message against the [prevailing] trend of MP.

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Yang’s reform agenda might not be appealing to those more used to the revolutionary model of change. As Liu (this volume) points out, Yang’s efforts “resulted in the creation of a fruitful margin (本土心理学 [Indigenous Psychology]) rather than any reform at the center”. Forget about a new heaven and new earth, Yang never pondered an alternative reality, as Liu (this volume) points out: Professor Yang was someone who focused on methods rather than methodology, on the practice of doing scientific research rather than thinking about how one ought to do research in an alternative world.

Yang apparently had a tragic sense of the hero who is committed to the pursuit of the impossible cause regardless of outcomes. But to those who do not share the Confucian ethos, the idea of forever spinning at the margin of business as usual is not appealing. Nevertheless, beyond the conceptual level of propositions, there is a deeper understanding of things, which I shall refer to as Yang’s soul. An analysis of Yang at this deeper level will have to factor in the larger context of his IP agendas, namely globalization.

A Critical Analysis of Globalization Hwang (this volume) points out that Yang approached culture empirically without any critical analysis: “He neither analyzed the structure of Chinese culture at a cultural level, nor explained what modernity means at a theoretical level”. This is consistent with the observation of Moghaddam and Hendricks (this volume) that critical scholarship is not given enough attention by Yang. Allwood (this volume) suggests that we identify communalities, or at least similarities, in understanding between societies. Identifying communalities in the global village turns out to be complicated. As Dueck, Song, and Marossy (this volume) point out, “the glue that connects various parts of a global psychology may … be that of neoliberalism rather than a reflection of the actual experiences of human diversity”. This complication stems from the fact that, as Moghaddam and Hendricks (this volume) have observed, there are two sectors, modern and traditional, in many developing countries—the former is influenced by the Western elite whereas the latter continues to hold the pre-modern indigenous perspective. Similarly, Teo and Afsin (this volume) claim that some forms of

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Western psychology are more relevant to the elite in a developing country than to the marginalized in a Western country. These observations suggest that the modern and traditional sectors of the global village do not fall neatly along the West and East divide; nor is neoliberalism confined to the West. Giving the Trojan horse (Dueck et al., this volume) screw another turn, the big bad wolf may turn out to be the local grandma—as the widely documented ascendency of neoliberalism in China (e.g., Wielander & Hird, 2018) can well attest. Adding psychologization (Teo & Afsin, this volume) to the mix, and the “local people” that the IP researcher seeks indigenous compatibility with may be the first to demand more courses and degrees in positive psychology (for the connection in China among neoliberalism, psychologization, and positive psychology, with its dire consequences, see Jie Yang, 2018). On the shifting sand of globalization, where does IP stand? Contrary to all appearances, Yang’s soul never wavered—he had always stood steadfast with the traditional sector. But Yang was complex—he did not wear his soul on his sleeves. A clue to Yang’s complexity beneath the surface may be sought in the two senses of the term political. At the level of political ideologies, Allwood (this volume) praised Yang’s attempt to keep nationalism and research separate. Yet at the epistemological level of taking a stance against the hegemony of power, Yang’s research agendas were unambiguously political—as evidenced by his vision of a “balanced” GP, especially with respect to improving “the uneven development of psychologies around the world” (Yeh, this volume). To gain some insight into the soul of Yang, we need to start with an analysis of culture, which is a topic that deeply concerned him. The vicissitudes of culture in the globalizing era. Following the good advice of Allwood (this volume) to be specific about what we mean by culture, I begin with a functional definition of culture. Instead of behaviors, social conventions, belief systems, and so on, I propose to understand culture in terms of ecological rationality. Rationality refers to a functional mindset that operates in a particular ecological niche for which it is evolved. More specifically, ecological rationality (Todd, Gigerenzer, & The ABC Research Group, 2012) posits that cultures are rationalities that shape as well as are being shaped by different types of adaptations in response to the varying environmental demands. This framework allows us to decompose culture into two components— rationality and its corresponding ecological niche. In traditional societies, rationality and its ecological niche usually go together like hand and glove.

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A metaphor for the tight coupling of the two is the snail which carries its niche on its back. By contrast, life in the global village approximates that of the hermit crab which has a mobile relationship with its shell/niche. The transition from the snail to the hermit crab, or from traditional cultures to modernity, bifurcates along the divide between those who made it in the economic cosmos of the global market and those who are barely making it—the so-called “economic misfits” (Bourdieu, 2000, p. 28). Yang’s head seemed to be with the modern sector: His former student Chi-jeng Yeh (this volume) recalled that Taking the motto “modernization is an irreversible historical trend” as a premise, Professor Yang has taken a great step to carry on his mission in conducting academic research and promoting social reform.

Also at the intellectual level, Yang (2012) joined those well-adjusted Asians who saw no reason to gripe about colonization: “… it does not make sense to say that Western IP is an academically imperialistic knowledge system forcibly imposed on psychological research in non-Western countries” (p. 21). But his soul gave a very different account of the transition from traditional culture to modernity—an account that is as penetratingly insightful as the best analyses available of the plight of the economic misfits or the global poor (Moghaddam & Hendricks, this volume). In the following sections, I cast Yang’s three psychologies in the framework of an existential account of this traumatic transition.

An Existential Exegesis of Yang’s Three Psychologies Yang distinguished three types of psychologies: ideal IP (mainstream psychology in its own ecological niche, i.e., Euro-North America), WP (imported Western—mainstream—psychology), and IZP (indigenized psychology). My exegesis of his classification is as follows: His ideal IP is a romanticization of the life of the snail (traditional culture); his WP tells the story of how shells on a local beach are taken over by foreign hermit crabs; and his IZP tells the story of decolonization, in which the foreign hermit crabs are being indigenized. Ideal IP—a Utopia. Yang’s account of the ideal IP can be read as the account of a hermit crab who wishes to be a snail instead, as evidenced by deep longings for tight coupling. That his ideal IP refers to the modern

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European-North American psychology is ironic, since it is the projection of a wishful thinking about the ideal state of traditional cultures (the snail). In traditional cultures, as symbolized by the snail, there is a tight coupling between the ecological niche and its co-evolving rationality. This tight coupling symbolizes for Yang the original wholeness of a healthy organism. This explains why tight coupling looms large in his notion of indigenous compatibility, where the researcher and the local people; theory and observed behavior, and so on, are tightly coupled. For instance, Yang (1993) wrote: Owing to the same cultural and biological influence, it tends to form a compatible state between the researcher’s activity of research and knowledge system as well as local people’s psychology and behaviors. This state of being tightly matched, tied, connected, or compatible, existing between local researcher’s concepts as well as local people’s psychology and behaviors. (p. 24)

This tight coupling between the researcher and the local ecological environment resonates with the Daoist notion of nature, as being in its original pre-perturbation state. Herein lies the clue to understanding Yang’s notion of indigenous autonomy. In Yang’s notion of autonomy, the Daoist ideal of being in its original pre-perturbation state is the thread that runs through the following associations as attributes of autonomy: self-direction, original perfection (natural and spontaneous), native/purity, endogenous, freedom from perturbation, or freedom from external interference of power. As a hallmark of the ideal IP, this state of autonomy in the sense of freedom from external perturbation is projected onto psychology in the West. Note the Daoist motifs—being in its natural, spontaneous, pre-perturbation state—in his following description of mainstream psychology: European scientific IP was directly, spontaneously, and naturally formed mainly under the influence of local folk and philosophical psychologies and other sociocultural factors already existing in European countries, without any conspicuous interruption or intervention from a powerful nonEuropean scientific IP (no such psychology existed at that time). (Yang, 2012, p. 7)

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Tight coupling with the ecological environment is part and parcel of this ideal state. Yang (2012) went on to say: “European scientific IP is indeed highly native in nature, specifically designed for its people, and definitely not transported from countries in some other continent” (p. 7). Such a knowledge system that has co-evolved unimpededly with its ecological environment would be highly effective in solving local problems, said Yang: Since the IP knowledge system has high indigenous autonomy, contextualization, and compatibility, it can thus be effectively applied to deal with practical problems in Euro-American people’s personal and social lives. It is in this sense that this system has high indigenous applicability. (pp. 15–16)

Unfortunately, such a healthy and effective system of knowledge is beyond the reach of non-Western IP’s, who could only hope for IZP, according to Yang. IZP signifies the irrevocable loss of indigenous autonomy, defined by Yang (2012) as “the indigenously self-directing freedom or independence of a knowledge system” (p. 14). Cast in the present framework, the difference between IP and IZP is that between the snail and the hermit crab—transition from the former state of existence to that of the latter entails the trauma of de-coupling between rationality and its ecological niche, as if the snail and its shell are being torn apart. Indeed, Yang’s narrative of IZP may be read as an account of globalization that is pulsating with the pain of laceration.

Paradise Lost In sharp contrast to the account of the ideal IP that is cast in the image of the wholeness and efficiency of the tight coupling of rationality and its ecological niche, as symbolized by the snail, Yang’s account of the global village is cast in the image of the hermit crab, and couched in terms of deficits. The hermit crab consists of two kinds—WP and IZP. WP signifies a soulless state in which a foreign rationality has taken over the local niche, resulting in an imposed, “soulless psychology” (1997, p. 65). IZP, on the other hand, signifies a state of existence that is damaged, but still better than soul dead. IZP, marker of an irrevocable loss. Yang’s (2012) estimate about the non-western IPs is that “their IZP will never become as genuine and pure an IP as the one that spontaneously developed in Euro-American

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societies” (p. 11). Consequently, IZPs should be satisfied with “a less than perfect but still useful psychology” (p. 11). It is not necessary for us to agree with his pessimism in order to appreciate the fact that as a decolonization discourse, Yang’s language of IZP serves as an implicit indictment of the violence of colonization. A few examples shall suffice. For instance, “re-rooting” in the following statement of Yang (2012) implies the up-rooting process of colonization: In the case of IZP, a knowledge system is gradually formed through indigenized research in which indigenous-minded non-Western psychologists try to re-root their theoretical, methodological, and empirical accomplishments into their own native culture through a quasi-emic approach. (p. 14, emphasis added)

The reference to conversion in the following statement may be read as a re-conversion to counter the original violence of globalization: “The main purpose of indigenization is to convert a psychology without indigenous autonomy to a psychology with moderate or high autonomy” (p. 14, emphasis added). Bourdieu (2000) can certainly vouch for that. According to Bourdieu (2000), modernity entails the change of “a whole lifestyle or, better, a whole system of solidary beliefs” (p. 23) such that “one must speak of conversion instead of adaptation” (p. 23, emphasis in original). Behind conversion is the logic of replacement which looms large in the following statement of Yang (2012): … the process of indigenization has to be carried out on the basis of an already existing Westernized local psychology, and the Western elements of this underpinning cannot be completely eliminated and replaced by indigenous elements. (p. 11, emphasis added)

Again, when inverted, this decolonization discourse mimics the original violence of colonialism that aimed “to be carried out on the basis of an already existing” local culture to “completely eliminate and replace” it. Hidden inside the Trojan Horse of neoliberalism (Dueck, et al., this volume), the replacement logic of colonialism is prevalent today as it ever was. One prime example is smart machines replacing human workers, rendering whose life long skills a liability to be replaced or retrained. One of the serious consequences of this replacement logic is culture extinction, preceded by the processes of repression and invisibility. This trajectory to

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cultural extinction via repression and invisibility is painfully anticipated by Yang. Here is a poignant passage (translated from Chinese by Hwang, this volume): In our daily life, we are Chinese; when we are doing research, we become Western people. We repress our Chinese thoughts or philosophy intentionally or unintentionally, and make them unable to be expressed in our procedure of research. … Under such a situation, we can only follow the West step by step with an expectation to catch up their academic trend. … Eventually, our existence in the world community of social and behavioral science becomes invisible at all. (Yang & Wen, 1982, p. ii, emphasis added)

Here the authors’ first person account is in perfect accordance with the third person observation of Bourdieu (2000), who points out that the globalization process “suddenly renders obsolete” (p. 40) or “literally unthinkable” (p. 39) the collective representations and dispositions of the traditional societies. Allwood (This volume) thought that Yang might not “have taken seriously the possibility that IP researchers are likely to belong to a modernized, Western-influenced, social class that differs from many (or most) other people in the researcher’s country”. In fact, the opposite could very well be true, namely that Yang was painfully aware of that fact. As Liu (this volume) points out, Yang’s list of do’s and don’ts was meant to provide a practical guide for constructing indigenous compatibility with decolonizing capabilities. In Yang’s (2012) own words: One of the don’ts stresses that indigenously oriented non-Western psychologists should never habitually and uncritically apply Western theories, concepts, methods, or tools before thoroughly immersing themselves in the natural concrete details of the local psychological or behavioral phenomenon and its context under study. (p. 21, emphasis in original)

More specifically, Yang (2012) was invested in cultural consciousness as a strategy to resist the fate of invisibility and cultural extinction: What is needed is a strong cultural consciousness, or cultural-mindedness, through which non-Western psychologists will be able to give up their habit of ignoring their own culture and pay attention to the cultural factors potentially involved in their research. (p. 10)

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This cultural awareness project continues to this day, thanks to the efforts of Yang’s student and colleague Hwang (this volume), who has expanded the vision to a cultural inclusive research paradigm. In sum, more than compensating for the lack of analytical tools, Yang’s soul was sensitive enough to have identified all the major issues of IP in the globalizing era. These deep concerns of Yang give IP not only a sound foundation but also the abiding motivation to strive for the making of a more equitable GP of tomorrow. In more concrete terms, the forgoing analysis of Yang makes it clear that loss of autonomy is one of the consequences of globalization, such that to address the issue of academic autonomy is to strive toward the making of “a genuine, balanced global human psychology” (Yang, 2012, p. 11).

From IP to GP: The Way Forward For IP to be involved in the making of a more equitable GP, it needs to get out of its isolation. Ting and Thong (this volume) suggest that “The next generation of psychologists need not pledge their loyalty to either western psychology (MP) or indigenized psychology (IZP), but see all psychology traditions as a piece of GP”. The sad reality is that, as Pe-Pua (this volume) points out, a genuine GP as envisioned by Yang is in future tense only, as it does not yet exist. Belonging to a community that is yet to come is a lonely business. Making a connection with other IPs can help to reduce this loneliness. Pe-Pua (this volume) recommends connection among IPs: “Will my IP extend to other contexts? Do others’ IP apply to me? Can I relate with others’ IP?”. But so far, nothing much is happening in this direction, as Liu (this volume) points out: … there has not been any research published I am aware of where two nonWestern cultures have used a cross-cultural indigenous or cross-indigenous method across their monocultural indigenous psychologies to build an assimilative synthesis.

Another suggestion, from Pe-Pua (this volume) and Allwood (this volume) respectively, is a research focus on threats to humanity’s common destiny on this planet. One advantage of such a joint agenda shared by all is that it helps IPs to transcend the obsession with points of origin, as Allwood (this volume) points out, “When attempting to solve common problems questions of where the content used originated from might

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turn out to be of less interest”. It is in the same vein that Ting and Thong (this volume) propose for a future GP to go beyond patriotism in order to share the agenda in humanitarianism, and to adopt an identity “rich in its own unique tradition while still connected to global development” (emphasis added). But what exactly is this connection between the local and the global, or the particular and the universal? For a good answer, we turn to Shweder’s famous formulation of “one mind many mentalities” (Shweder et al., 1998, p. 865).

An Epistemological Foundation for GP Shweder’s (this volume) further elaboration of the dictum “one mind many mentalities” offers a useful cognitive map for the transition from IP to GP. First, it refutes replacement logic by affirming the worth of all mentalities as so many different manifestations of the universal mind. Second, it abolishes the epistemological basis for isolationism by envisioning the potential of different mentalities to be mutually illuminating. Third, by postulating the universal mind as the ground of manifested differences in mentality, it affirms psychic unity while celebrating diversity. Lastly, it provides the epistemological basis for IPs to form a global community. From local compatibility to global community. Local compatibility can create incommensurability between groups and societies. The possibility for a global community lies in the human capacity for reasoning which renders the incompatibilities between groups and societies understandable and communicable. Shweder (this volume) cites Thomas Nagel to say that an essential feature of reasoning is its generality, which makes it possible for different mentalities to communicate across the gulf of cultural differences and incommensurabilities. As Yeh and Hwang (this volume) point out, Yang’s definition of indigenous compatibility in terms of tight coupling between the researcher and the local population, or between theory and behavior, is at odds with the principle of scientific investigation that presupposes the existence of gaps and differences between levels of analysis or interpretation. Confronted with gaps and differences among groups where local compatibilities recoil with apprehension, reasoning may gracefully extend its invitation for a dialogue. In sum, to Shweder’s (this volume) question as to whether reason has a role to play in IP, the answer is a resounding yes.

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Practical implications. Shweder’s formulation can facilitate the transition from IP to GP—by exposing the fictional nature of this divide. Shweder’s formulation of the principle of unity in diversity differs in important ways from that in cross-cultural psychology. In cross-cultural psychology, cultures are icing on the cake that has universal ingredients, such as biology and the brain. In this formulation, getting to the universal requires transcending the particular cultures. By contrast, Shweder’s (this volume) formulation asserts that the universal mind is an abstraction, which is not to be equated with biology, behavior or the brain, and which is not an entity separate from the particular, and the cultural. This formulation has some practical implications. How to demonstrate the global relevance and significance of local knowledge? One practical way that flows out of Shweder’s formulation is for the local culture to illuminate a different knowledge system. Here is an analogy: The mind is a gigantic puzzle with an astrological number of pieces that no one has been able to put together. Thus unlike the blind men and the elephant story, we have no clue as to what the universal mind looks like. The only thing we can do is keep putting the pieces of the puzzle together. The pieces of the puzzle that IPs are working on are indispensable to the whole picture of the human mind. Each time we connect our piece with the piece of another knowledge system, we are demonstrating the global relevance of our piece of the puzzle. In practical terms, entering into a dialogue or public debate with other mentalities or systems of knowledge is a viable path to universality or global relevance. Overcoming the language barrier among IPs. As Liu (this volume) points out: “dedicated scholars from other cultures are unaware of indigenous research in their area of specialty when it is not in English … Each culture connects to the English mainstream, and not to one another”. To the extent that information sharing and public debate is the path to global relevance, and to the extent that mutual illumination of mentalities is our aspiration, the language barrier to global communication implies that the loss is on both sides of the language divide. Thus we may safely double the “slight” misfortune—alluded to by Liu (this volume) concerning the unavailability of the large corpus of Yang’s work in Chinese to non-Chinese researchers—into a big loss for all: It is slightly unfortunate that the vast majority of this work is published in Chinese, and so is not readily available to the commentators in this volume

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and elsewhere. But this is exactly what is required of IP for a population that is not predominantly English speaking.

In sum, language barriers aggravate the inherent tension between the two foci—local and global—of IP (Sundararajan, 2019). An IP that privileges local compatibility at the expense of global relevance is likely to be trapped in isolationism, thereby compromising its potential to participate actively in the international endeavors to shape the GP of tomorrow. One solution to the language barriers could be collaboration among IPs of different stripes, for instance between those who publish internationally and those who publish in the local language. Since these two groups of researchers may be working on different clusters of the puzzle pieces, their collaboration holds the potential to widen the relevance of IP by bringing together otherwise disparate clusters of associations (of questions, references, theoretical frameworks, and so on). This collaboration could have a two-tiered structure. The local cluster of the puzzle could be the first tier; and the international cluster of the pieces, at the second, recursive level. Puzzle pieces at the secondary level could function in the form of elaborations, or what is referred to by Shweder (this volume) as justification, “to identify and make explicit the good reasons for doing something implicit, immanent within, or inside diverse cultural customs”. This two-tiered structure is consistent with Schutz’s (1962) differentiation between first-degree of interpretation and second-degree of interpretation. It is also consistent with Ratner’s (2008) notion of IP as a metatheory—theory constructed to shed light on the local theory of a particular group or society. A case in point is the collaboration of Sundararajan, Yeh, and Ho (2019) to publish in English an elaboration on an empirical study published in Chinese (Ho, Yeh, Lu, & Sundararajan, 2018). The outcome is, to paraphrase Shweder’s (this volume) description of cultural psychology, an investigation that constructs a model of Chinese emotions by “thickly describing the specific sources of non- equivalence and non-comparability that arise when stimulus situations [measurement in the present context] are transported from one interpretive community to another”. This two-tiered structure is also operative in a study of ethnic minority groups in China (Ting & Sundararajan, 2018), in which indigenous compatibility that facilitated data collection at the first level was subjected to cultural analysis at the second level to shed some light on the rationality of the local population as well as that of the research teams.

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Yang’s Vision of a Genuinely Equitable GP: Is It Feasible? By way of conclusion, I offer some observations of this volume as an experiment to test the feasibility of Yang’s vision of “a genuine, balanced global human psychology” (Yang, 2012, p. 11). I focus specifically on two elements of Yang’s vision: balanced in the structure of knowledge production, and global in scope. Balanced in composition and structure. In contrast to the one way flow of information, from West to the rest, in mainstream psychology, the structure of knowledge production is balanced in this volume: First, the work of one Asian IP (Yang’s 2012 article) was subjected to critical evaluation by a group of international scholars, who in turn were evaluated by a group of Asian IPs. Going global. For IP to go global, it has to get out of its comfort zone. This volume is an experiment in this respect. First, the points of origin—the fetish of IP—become difficult to keep track of (who said what?) in the dynamic flow of information between the international and the IP scholars. Ideas clash, fuse, merge, and transmigrate—typical of all cultures. Second, local compatibility quickly gave way to gaps and chasms in academic background and training among the contributors. To exacerbate this incompatibility, none of the international scholars share the experimental and cross-cultural background with Yang, as Liu (this volume) was quick to point out. How did it turn out? Outcome. I may be biased, but the outcome looks encouraging. In addition to adding an international and global dimension to IP, and more than a rich collection of stimulating debates, this volume has demonstrated the feasibility of two principles of a genuine GP: First, different mentalities and perspectives can be “mutual illumination” for one another. Second, a viable path toward the integration of IPs is dialogue. Needless to say, future replication is necessary. With this humble start, we hope that the road from IP to GP will be traversed by many more replications in the near future.

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References Allwood, C. M. (this volume). Yang’s global psychology and beyond. In L. Sundararajan, K.-K. Hwang, & K.-H. Yeh (Eds.), Global psychology from indigenous perspectives: Visions Inspired by K. S. Yang. Cham: Palgrave Macmillan. Bourdieu, P. (2000). Making the economic habitus: Algerian workers revisited. Ethnography, 1, 17–41. Dueck, A., Song, R., & Marossy, M. (this volume). Forgiveness in indigenous psychological research: A Trojan Horse, a Western Knockoff, or a traditioned sensibility? In L. Sundararajan, K.-K. Hwang, & K.-H. Yeh (Eds.), Global psychology from indigenous perspectives: Visions Inspired by K. S. Yang. Cham: Palgrave Macmillan. Ho, W.-T., Yeh, K.-H., Lu, C., & Sundararajan, L. (2018). Proper voicing: Emotion refinement in parent-adolescent conflicts. Indigenous Psychological Research in Chinese Societies, 48, 57–119. Hwang, K.-K. (2012). Foundations of Chinese psychology: Confucian social relations. New York: Springer. Hwang, K.-K. (this volume). Philosophical reflection on Pro. K.S. Yang’s vision of global psychology and indigenous compatibility. In L. Sundararajan, K.-K. Hwang, & K.-H. Yeh (Eds.), Global psychology from indigenous perspectives: Visions Inspired by K. S. Yang. Cham: Palgrave Macmillan. Liu, J. H. (this volume). A commentary on commentaries on the prospects for a more equitable global psychology. In L. Sundararajan, K.-K. Hwang, & K.-H. Yeh (Eds.), Global psychology from indigenous perspectives: Visions Inspired by K. S. Yang. Cham: Palgrave Macmillan. Moghaddam, F. M., & Hendricks, M. J. (this volume). Psychology for the global 99%. In L. Sundararajan, K.-K. Hwang, & K.-H. Yeh (Eds.), Global psychology from indigenous perspectives: Visions Inspired by K. S. Yang. Cham: Palgrave Macmillan. Pe-Pua, R. (this volume). From indigenous psychologies to cross-indigenous psychology—Prospects for a “genuine, global human psychology”. In L. Sundararajan, K.-K. Hwang, & K.-H. Yeh (Eds.), Global psychology from indigenous perspectives: Visions Inspired by K. S. Yang. Cham: Palgrave Macmillan. Ratner, C. (2008). Cultural psychology, cross-cultural psychology, and indigenous psychology. In F. Columbus (Ed.), Advances in psychology research. Hauppauge, NY: Nova Science. Schutz, A. (1962). Collected papers I: The problem of social reality. The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff.

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Shweder, R. A. (this volume). The role of reason in cultural interpretation: Some Talmudic distinctions for indigenous and cultural psychology. In L. Sundararajan, K.-K. Hwang, & K.-H. Yeh (Eds.), Global psychology from indigenous perspectives: Visions Inspired by K. S. Yang. Cham: Palgrave Macmillan. Shweder, R., Goodnow, J., Hatano, G., Levine, R., Markus, H., & Miller, P. (1998). The cultural psychology of development: One mind, many mentalities. In R. Lerner (Ed.), Handbook of child psychology (5th ed., Vol. 1, pp. 865–937). New York: Wiley. Sundararajan, L. (2019). Whither indigenous psychology? Journal of Theoretical and Philosophical Psychology, 39, 81–89. Sundararajan, L., Yeh, K.-H., & Ho, W.-T. (2019). From regulation to refinement of emotions: Indigenization of emotion regulation questionnaire in Taiwan. Journal of Theoretical and Philosophical Psychology. Published online https://doi.org/10.1037/teo0000120. Teo, T., & Afsin, B. (this volume). The impossible conditions of the possibility of an alter-global psychology. In L. Sundararajan, K.-K. Hwang, & K.-H. Yeh (Eds.), Global psychology from indigenous perspectives: Visions Inspired by K. S. Yang. Cham: Palgrave Macmillan. Ting, R. S.-K., & Sundararajan, L. (2018). Culture, cognition, and emotion in China’s religious ethnic minorities: Voices of suffering among the Yi. Palgrave studies in indigenous psychology series. Cham, Switzerland: Palgrave Macmillan. Ting, R. S.-K., & Thong, J. J.-A. (this volume). Global psychology: Symphony or Elephant. In L. Sundararajan, K.-K. Hwang, & K.-H. Yeh (Eds.), Global psychology from indigenous perspectives: Visions Inspired by K. S. Yang. Cham: Palgrave Macmillan. Todd, P. M., Gigerenzer, G., & The ABC Research Group. (2012). Ecological rationality: Intelligence in the world. New York, NY: Oxford University Press. Wielander, G., & Hird, D. (Eds.). (2018). Chinese discourses on happiness. Hong Kong, China: Hong Kong University Press. Yang, J. (2018). Mental health in China. Cambridge, UK: Polity. Yang, K.-S. (1993). Why do we need to develop an indigenous Chinese psychology? Indigenous Psychological Research in Chinese Societies, 1, 6–88. (in Chinese). Yang, K.-S. (1997). Indigenizing westernized Chinese psychology. In M. H. Bond (Ed.), Working at the interface of culture: Eighteen lives in social science. London: Routledge. Yang, K.-S. (2012). Indigenous psychology, Westernized psychology, and indigenized psychology: A non-Western psychologist’s view. Chang Gung Journal of Humanities and Social Sciences, 5(1), 1–32. Yang, K.-S., & Wen, C.-I. (1982). The sinicization of social and behavioral science research in China. Taipei, Taiwan: Institute of Ethnology, Academia Sinica.

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Appendix Indigenous Psychology, Westernized Psychology, and Indigenized Psychology: A Non-Western Psychologist’s View*

Kuo-Shu Yang**

Abstract Three kinds of coexisting contemporary scientific psychologies, namely, indigenous psychology (IP), Westernized psychology (WP), and indigenized psychology (IZP), can be meaningfully distinguished and defined. Historically speaking, IP, the first of the three, was directly and spontaneously generated under the sole influence of Euro-American sociocultural factors. This Western psychology was then imported to and implanted in many non-Western countries to form various kinds of WP. The WPs in some of the major non-Western nations have been gradually transformed into IZPs by local psychologists under the academic movement of indigenization. This article systematically describes the dynamic

* The first version of this article was presented as a keynote speech at the XVII International Congress of the International Association for Crosscultural Psychology held at Xi’an, China on August 2-6, 2004. ** Chair Professor, Department of Psychology and Research Center for Psychological Science, College of Science, Chung Yuan Christian University, E-mail: [email protected]. The author is grateful to Dr. Olwen Bedford for editing a previous version of the paper. Chang Gung Journal of Humanities and Social Sciences 5:1 (April 2012), 1–32. © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2020 L. Sundararajan et al. (eds.), Global Psychology from Indigenous Perspectives, Palgrave Studies in Indigenous Psychology, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-35125-0

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process of the successive formation of the three psychologies. These psychologies represent not only three disciplines but also three methodologies which, in turn, produce three distinctive kinds of psychological knowledge. The three knowledge systems are then compared in terms of such epistemological aspects as cultural basis, production method, indigenous autonomy, indigenous contextualization, indigenous compatibility, and indigenous applicability. Keywords Indigenized Psychology, Indigenous Compatibility, Indigenous Psychology, Pseudo-Indigenous Psychology, Western Psychology, Westernized Psychology

In human history, there have been three different kinds of psychology: folk psychology (including common-sense psychology), philosophical psychology, and scientific psychology. Folk psychology refers to the ordinary psychological views, assumptions, beliefs, concepts, conjectures, theories, preferences, norms, and practices that have been naturally and gradually acquired through socialization and that are commonly held by the general population of a society (Heelas, 1981; J. B. P. Sinha, 2003). The content and structure of a folk psychology are not themselves scientific knowledge, but they can be used as original data for scientific analysis by anthropologists (e.g., Dickason, 1984; Heelas, 1981) or psychologists (e.g., Heider, 1958; Wundt, 1916). The folk psychology of a society may be regarded as part of that society’s little tradition in Redfield’s (1956) sense. In contrast, philosophical psychology refers to the formal systems of psychological thought as proposed by a society’s philosophers. For example, philosophical psychological theories and concepts are plentiful in Indian philosophy (Moore, 1967a; Radhakrishnan and Moore, 1954; I. B. P. Sinha, 2003), Chinese philosophy (Fung, 1948; Moore, 1967b), and Western philosophy (Burnet, 1980; Copleston, 1962-1977). Philosophical psychology may be regarded as part of an ethnic or cultural group’s great tradition in Redfield’s (1956) sense. Different from both folk and philosophical psychologies, scientific psychology denotes a psychological knowledge system constructed by academic or expert psychologists using scientific methodology.

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Nearly all societies have their own naturally developed folk and philosophical psychologies, but only some Western societies have an endogenous scientific psychology. The emergence of these scientific psychologies is a rather late historical phenomenon. They originated in European countries in the late nineteenth century and have flourished, especially in the United States, since World War II. European and American scientific psychologies have been continuously imported by non-Western countries (e.g., Adair, 1999; Churck and Katigbak, 2002; Jing and Fu, 2001; Oyama, Sato, and Suzuki, 2001; Ustun and Smith, 1999). As a result, various versions of the Western scientific psychologies have been formed in various non-Western societies. This article explores why and how this importation has occurred. One tenable explanation may be made from the perspective of Wallerstein’s (1974, 1980) world-system theory, which addresses the influence of globalization on all countries. Wallerstein pointed out that the original expansion of European colonial powers in the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries is the historical beginning of the capitalist world-system of international relations. According to his framework, in the early capitalist world-system, core nations (mostly European) had advanced military, political, economic, cultural, and educational capacities that they tended to use to increase their own advantages by exploiting their unequal-power relations with peripheral nations (mostly underdeveloped or developing non-Western countries). In the contemporary capitalist world-system, core nations are the highly industrialized powers (mostly Euro-American), peripheral nations are the less developed countries (mostly non-Western), and semiperipheral ones (also mostly non-Western) are those that occupy the intermediate position between the core and the periphery. Within this capitalist world-system, internationally political, military, economic, cultural, and educational influences have been basically unidirectional, that is, from core nations to semi-peripheral and peripheral ones. In fact, these unilateral influences have not been limited to the military, economic, political, cultural, and educational realms, but have also occurred in the academic domain. Just as there is a Western-dominated world-system for the international economy, there is a Western-dominated world-system for international psychology as an academic discipline. The persistent importation and transplantation of scientific psychologies indigenous to Europe and America into non-Western countries, especially in the last century, can thus be understood in terms of the structural and

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functional factors of international relations and interactions as defined by Wallerstein’s world-system theory. In most cases, what has been formed by the continuous, powerful importation and transplantation of Euro-American scientific indigenous psychology is a sheer mimic of Western psychology, which may be called Westernized psychology in almost all major non-Western countries. However, many scholars(e.g., Adair, 1999, 2006; Atal, 1981; Azuma, 1984; Doi, 1992; Enriguez, 1989, 1992, 1993, 1997; Gibson, 1985; Kim, 2000; Kim and Berry, 1993; Kim, Park, and Park, 1996; Pandrey, 2004; D. Sinha, 1997; and I. B. P. Sinha, 2000) have repeatedly pointed out that Western psychological theories are highly culture-bound and thus have only limited cross-cultural validity, generalizability, and applicability. There has been a worldwide need or call for the indigenization of psychological research in the various countries in Americas, Asia, Europe, the Middle East, and Oceania (Adair, 2006; Allwood and Berry, 2006; Kim and Berry, 1993a; Kim, Yang, and Hwang, 2006a). More specifically, the first academic movement of establishing an indigenous psychology was promoted in the Philippines in the 1970s, under the leadership of the late Virgilio Enriquez and his followers (Enriquez, 1989, 1992, 1993, 1997; Pe-Pua, 2006; Pe-Pua and Protacio-Marcelino, 2000). Since then, “other energetic centers of indigenization have appeared, notably in Taiwan, Japan, Korea, and India” (Ho, Peng, Lai, and Chan, 2001: 927). All in all, in the last three decades or so, local psychologists in an increasing number of non-Western nations have been earnestly engaging in an academic movement to create an indigenized local psychology to replace their Westernized one. Thus, there now exist three coexisting scientific psychologies in contemporary world psychology, namely indigenous psychology (IP), Westernized psychology (WP), and indigenized psychology (IZP). This paper first defines each of these three psychologies from a historical perspective, and then examines indigenized psychology as a discipline and a methodology.

1. Indigenous, Westernized, and Indigenized Psychologies: Their Formation in a Historical Perspective This section delineates the three psychologies in a psycho-historical context and defines them in terms of their respective salient characteristics. Figure 1 shows the historical sequence in the emergence and development of indigenous, Westernized, and indigenized scientific psychologies.

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(A) European folk psychologies, philosophical psychologies, and other sociocultural factors

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(B) Non-Western Countries’ folk psychologies, philosophical psychologies, and other sociocultural factors

(C) American folk psychologies, philosophical psychologies, and other sociocultural factors (E) Non-Western countries’

(D) European scientific psychology (European

Westernized scientific psychology

scientific indigenous psychology)

(F) American scientific psychology (American scientific indigenous psychology)

(G) Imposed-etic cross-cultural psychology (Westerndominating c-c psychology) (H) Western (Euro-American) scientific psychology (Western scientific indigenous psychology)

(I) Non-Western countries’ indigenized psychology

(J) Cross-cultural quasi-indigenous psychology (cross-cultural quasi-emic psychology) Strong influence Weak influence Negligible influence

(K) Genuine, global human psychology

Figure 1 Historical Developmental Relations of Indigenous Psychology, Westernized Psychology, Indigenized Psychology, Imposed-etic Crosscultural Psychology, Cross-cultural Quasi-indigenous Psychology, and Genuine, Global Human Psychology

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(1) Indigenous Psychology (IP) The first scientific IP in the world emerged in Europe (especially Western Europe) in the late nineteenth century (Jahoda and Krewer, 1997). It was one of the last basic disciplines to split from philosophy to become an independent field of scientific inquiry. As can be seen from Fig. 1, European scientific IP (D) was directly, spontaneously, and naturally formed mainly under the influence of local folk and philosophical psychologies and other sociocultural factors (A) already existing in European countries, without any conspicuous interruption or intervention from a powerful non-European scientific IP (no such psychology existed at that time). It is a pure form of scientific IP, which may be defined as a discipline that applies the scientific method to the study of the psychological and behavioral phenomena of people in a specific ethnic group or cultural tradition for developing a systematic psychological knowledge system. This system has been constructed in such a way that its theories, concepts, methods, and tools are highly compatible not only with the studied psychological and behavioral phenomena themselves but also with their ecological, economic, social, cultural, and historical contexts. As pointed out by Kim and Berry (1993), IP is “the scientific study of human behavior that is native, that is not transported from other regions, and that is designed for its people” (p. 2). After reviewing Kim and Berry’s (1993) and several other indigenously-oriented psychologists’ definitions (e.g., Ho, 1998; Yang, 1993, 1997b), Yang (2000) defined indigenous psychology as “an evolving system of psychological knowledge based on scientific research that is sufficiently compatible with the studied phenomena and their ecological, economic, social, cultural, and historical contexts” (p. 245). He pointed out that all these definitions “express the same basic goal of developing a scientific knowledge system that effectively reflects, describes, explains, or understands the psychological and behavioral activities in their native contexts in terms of culturally relevant frames of reference and culturally derived categories and theories” (pp. 245-246). European scientific IP is indeed highly native in nature, specifically designed for its people, and definitely not transported from countries in some other continent. The knowledge system generated by such a psychology tends to be highly compatible with European people’s psychological and behavioral functioning in daily life and is thus particularly useful in understanding, explaining, and predicting European people’s psychological and behavioral characteristics and in solving their personal and social problems.

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Just after its beginning in the late nineteenth century, European scientific IP (D in Figure 1) was introduced into the United States at the early stage of the development of American scientific IP (F). American IP has formed on the basis of the mainstream American folk and philosophical psychologies and other sociocultural factors (C), which were once under the heavy influence of European folk and philosophical psychologies and sociocultural factors (A). Accompanying the United States’ unprecedented rapid expansion of military, political, economic, cultural, educational, and academic power in the international arena (especially after World War II), American IP (usually called American psychology) has rapidly developed to such an extent that it has become the most comprehensive, full-fledged, and dominant psychology in the world. As the superpower in world psychology, American psychology has also affected European psychology and psychology in Canada and Australia. Together, European, American, Canadian, and Australian psychologies can be labeled Western scientific IP (or simply Western psychology) (H). In the past, Western and non-Western psychologists alike tended to believe that the theories, concepts, methods, and tools of Western psychology are universally or cross-culturally applicable. (2) Westernized Psychology (WP) As indicated in Figure 1, non-Western folk and philosophical psychologies and other sociocultural factors (B) have not had significant influences on the formation of non-Western countries’ Westernized scientific psychology (E). Instead, their Westernized psychologies have been shaped predominantly by European and American scientific IPs (D and F). Over the last century, Western scientific IP’s hegemonic influence on the initiation and development of scientific psychology in non-Western countries has been overwhelming. In most cases, non-Western countries did not have a scientific psychology before the Western one was introduced by visiting Western scholars, missionaries, and returned local students who had studied psychology at a Western university. In order to quickly establish a scientific psychology for their own people, psychologists in non-Western societies have depended on Western IPs, especially the American one, as an ideal model of scientific psychology. They have uncritically adopted or even completely copied Western theories, concepts, methods, and tools in research and application with local people as respondents (Enriquez, 1989, 1992,

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1993; Kim, 2001; Yang, 1993, 1997a, 1999). As a result, local psychologists in almost all major non-Western societies have developed the same kind of artificially transplanted psychology, namely, WP (or more narrowly, Americanized psychology), which is simply the progeny of the unthinking adoption of a Western IP into a culturally exotic non-Western society. Such an imposed-etic psychology, in Berry’s (1989) sense, is nothing more than a distorted non-Western copy of Western psychology. It is impossible for a WP to generate a psychological knowledge system that is able to adequately and effectively reflect and understand the culture-bound psychological and behavioral characteristics of local people in culturally diverse non-Western societies. The imposition of one culture-bound IP on the development of a WP in so many culturally diverse societies is mainly due to non-Western psychologists’ unwitting ignorance of the cultural differences between Western and local societies. It is in this sense that WP may be called a cultureignoring psychology, or more aptly, an imposed-etic psychology or pseudoindigenous psychology. As a pseudo-indigenous psychology, WP can only attempt research in which the theories, concepts, methods, and tools used are congruous with neither the studied local psychological and behavioral phenomena nor their ecological, economic, social, cultural, and historical contexts. Such a culture-irrelevant or culture-alienated psychology can only produce knowledge that has very limited utility in understanding, explaining, and predicting local people’s psychological and behavioral characteristics and resolving their personal and social problems. Despite this limitation, a fully developed WP in a non-Western country may be as comprehensive as Western IP in the scope of fields (e.g., perceptual and cognitive, personality and social, developmental and educational, clinical and counseling, personnel and organizational psychology) and in the multiplicity of research paradigms (e.g., positivism, post-positivism, critical theory, and constructionism, as defined by Guba and Lincoln, 1994). (3) Indigenized Psychology (IZP) In the last 30 years or so, an increasing number of local psychologists in a number of non-Western societies (e.g., Cameroon, Hong Kong, India, Iran, Japan, Korea, Latin America, Mexico, New Guinea, Taiwan, and the Philippines) have expressed their dissatisfaction with the artificiality, superficiality, and incompatibility of their WP in understanding, explaining, and predicting their local people’s psychological and behavioral functioning. Collectively they want to transform their WP into an

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indigenized local psychology (e.g., Adair, 1999; Church and Katigbak, 2002; Yang, 1999). In order to accomplish this grand goal effectively, they have to consciously indigenize their research in such a way that the theories, concepts, methods, and tools used are sufficiently compatible with the studied psychological and behavioral phenomena as structurally and functionally embedded in their ecological, economic, social, cultural, and historical contexts. What is needed is a strong cultural consciousness, or cultural-mindedness, through which non-Western psychologists will be able to give up their habit of ignoring their own culture and pay attention to the cultural factors potentially involved in their research. More specifically, during the indigenization stage, local psychologists prefer to criticize Western models and methods as culturally inappropriate, to adapt psychological tests and methods to the local language and culture, to choose research topics in the national interest, and to study culturally unique thoughts and behaviors (Adair, 2006). Adair also pointed out that the spread of Western psychology around the world follows the following sequential stages: Importation → Implantation → Indigenization → Autochthonization. He defined autochthonization as “the processes leading to a self-perpetuating discipline independent of its imported source, the culmination of the indigenization process” (p. 472). A purposely created IZP in the autochthonization stage can be gradually formed in a non-Western country as a “critical mass of mature, established scholars focus on research problems that are culturally appropriate and nationally important” (p. 472). A well-developed non-Western IZP can be as comprehensive as American IP in the scope of fields and in the multiplicity of research paradigms. The primary purpose of the indigenization of WP is to help nonWestern psychology re-find its sociocultural roots so that the knowledge generated will have sufficient sociocultural relevance to the mind and behavior of local people. The process of indigenization, however, can never be as effective and complete in its cultural footing as endogenous formation (as in the case of the development of Western IP) because of three major factors. First, the process of indigenization has to be carried out on the basis of an already existing Westernized local psychology, and the Western elements of this underpinning can not be completely eliminated and replaced by indigenous elements. Instead, cross-fertilization (Ho, 1998) of Western and native ideas may frequently occur in various ways (Yang, 1998). Second, the process has to be carried out under the continuing powerful influence of Western psychology whose new

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theories, concepts, methods, and tools are incessantly imported into non-Western societies. In many non-Western countries, English texts and journals will continue to be used as teaching materials in the psychology departments of local universities, and successive generations of Western-trained local psychologists will return from abroad and teach at local universities. Third, the process has to be carried out under the condition that a considerable number of local psychologists will persist in conducting Westernized research, and many of them may not sympathize with the indigenization movement for various reasons. Because of these factors, no matter how successful the indigenously minded investigators are in indigenizing their WP, their IZP will never become as genuine and pure an IP as the one that spontaneously developed in Euro-American societies. Non-Western psychologists must realize that they have already lost their historical opportunity to develop a pure IP. It is their duty to strive to construct their country’s own IZP with a sufficiently high degree of indigenousness, and then be satisfied with a less than perfect but still useful psychology. But, non-Western societies need IZP simply because it is much more functional or useful in understanding, explaining, and predicting local people’s mind and behavior as well as solving their personal and social problems. Moreover, all the IZPs developed in various non-Western countries can be creatively integrated with all the IPs formed in Western countries to construct a genuine, balanced global human psychology (K in Figure 1) as envisaged by Yang (2000).

2. Indigenized Psychology as a Discipline In Webster’s II New Riverside University Dictionary (Soukhanov, 1984), discipline is defined as “a branch of knowledge” (p. 383). According to this definition, the three psychologies delineated in the last section may be considered three distinct disciplines of psychological science because they generate different kinds of psychological knowledge. Shams (2002) portrayed IP as an independent discipline, although for other reasons. The question is whether or not WP and IZP are also two separate disciplines. To answer the question, this section provides a comparative analysis of the knowledge systems actually or potentially constructed by the three psychologies with respect to six related major aspects of knowledge: cultural

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basis, production method, indigenous autonomy, indigenous contextualization, indigenous compatibility, and indigenous applicability. (1) Cultural Basis of Knowledge The three psychologies differ in the cultural context upon which their respective knowledge systems are based. A knowledge system is composed not only of established empirical findings, but also of theoretical and methodological accomplishments. The IP knowledge system is based on folk and philosophical psychologies and other sociocultural factors in European and North American countries. It is in this sense that IP knowledge has its own native cultural roots or sources. It is a kind of culturally embedded knowledge. In contrast, WP knowledge is generated by a psychology that was developed by importing and transplanting Western theories, concepts, methods, and tools into non-Western societies. Since all these transported items have their roots in Western culture, WP knowledge is at least indirectly based on Western culture rather than being solely based on a nonWestern one. This kind of knowledge has nothing to do with the local folk and philosophical psychologies and other sociocultural factors. It may thus be said that WP knowledge does not have a non-Western local context. It is a kind of psychological knowledge without native roots in a non-Western culture. Unlike both IP and WP knowledge, IZP knowledge is generated by a psychology in which research is done in such a way that the theories, concepts, methods, and tools are well adapted to, or sufficiently congruent with, the local sociocultural context. Through the indigenization process, IZP knowledge is re-rooted in the native culture of a non-Western society. However, this regained non-Western native cultural basis of IZP knowledge may not be as firm as the Western native cultural basis of IP knowledge. The IP, WP, and IZP knowledge systems have not been produced in vacuum but in their respective sociocultural contexts. In order to understand these specific environmental factors, empirical research from the viewpoint of the sociology of science (SoS) should be done. Adair (2006) has conducted studies to identify the sociocultural factors that facilitate or impede, in one way or another, the indigenization process across several countries. In contrast, Gabrenya, Kung, and Chen (2006) did a SoS study particularly on the indigenized psychology movement in Taiwan, focusing on the understanding of the individual, interpersonal, organizational, and contextual factors affecting the community of psychologists engaging

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in indigenizing psychology in a single society. More research by the SoS approach of the Gabrenya type should be carried out to intensively investigate the indigenized psychology movement in such societies or countries as Cameroun, India, Japan, Korea, Mexico, and the Philippines. (2) Production Method of Knowledge The three psychologies also differ in the way in which knowledge is produced. IP knowledge is created by doing research to construct theories or principles of Euro-American mind and behavior in their ecological, economic, social, cultural, and historical contexts. This monocultural knowledge tends to be emic in the sense that it is culture-specific, rather than culture-general (or universal) (Berry, 1969; Berry, Poortinga, Segall and Dasen, 1992; Segall, Dasen, Berry, and Poortinga, 1990). WP knowledge is generated by WP research in which Western theories, concepts, methods, and tools are directly applied to the study of non-Western people’s psychological and behavioral functioning under the assumption that the Western concepts and methods are universally or cross-culturally applicable. Since this sweeping assumption is groundless, non-Western psychologists’ adoption of Western theoretical and methodological notions gives rise to the fallacy of the imposed-etic approach, which is why WP is a kind of imposed-etic psychology. IZP aims to transform WP into a psychology that is sufficiently culture-specific in a non-Western society. But, in this case, “culturespecific” is different in nature from “culture-specific” in the case of IP psychology in Euro-American societies. There are at least two reasons for this difference. First, non-Western cultures have been contaminated by Euro-American culture through the process of Western-dominated modernization. Second, it is rather difficult for non-Western psychologists to make their research really locally specific because most of them are Western-trained, or at least have habitually depended upon Western psychology to such an extent that it is no longer easy for them to conduct culture-specific studies. Their approach is at best quasi-culture-specific or quasi-emic. The knowledge produced by the quasi-emic approach is of course quasi-emic in nature. (3) Indigenous Autonomy of Knowledge Indigenous autonomy refers to the indigenously self-directing freedom or independence of a knowledge system. The IP knowledge system has the Euro-American native culture as its indigenous root and is produced

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through Western theories, concepts, methods, and tools as if it were universally or cross-culturally applicable. In the case of IZP, a knowledge system is gradually formed through indigenized research in which indigenous-minded non-Western psychologists try to re-root their theoretical, methodological, and empirical accomplishments into their own native culture through a quasi-emic approach. These local researchers are especially sensitive to and dissatisfied with the WP’s lack of indigenous autonomy and strive to make the IZP knowledge system as indigenously autonomous as possible. The main purpose of indigenization is to convert a psychology without indigenous autonomy to a psychology with moderate or high autonomy. It is quite understandable that indigenously oriented psychologists are highly conscious of the moderate or high autonomy of IZP knowledge. (4) Indigenous Contextualization of Knowledge The IP knowledge system is highly indigenously contextualized in the sense that its theories, concepts, methods, and tools have been endogenously developed in the ecological, economic, sociocultural, and familial contexts existing in Euro-American societies. These local contextual factors also determine or facilitate the formation and manifestation of Western people’s mind and behavior for which the IP knowledge system has been established. The WP knowledge system lacks indigenous contextualization simply because its theories, concepts, methods, and tools have been imported from countries that have nothing to do with non-Western countries’ ecological, economic, social, cultural, and historical contexts. For a nonWestem culture, WP knowledge is simply misplaced, dislocated, and decontextualized. The IZP knowledge system is generated by a process of indigenization, the major purpose of which is for non-Western investigators to locally contextualize the theories, concepts, methods, and tools for their indigenized research. Consequently, the obtained knowledge tends to be moderately contextualized. (5) Indigenous Compatibility of Knowledge Yang (1997b, 1999, 2000) recommended that indigenous psychological research be conducted in such a way that the researcher’s theory, concepts, methods, tools, and findings sufficiently reflect, represent, and reveal the natural structure and process of the studied local psychological or behavioral phenomenon as embedded in the sociocultural context. He

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termed this condition of congruity indigenous compatibility (IC). Since the IP knowledge system is derived from highly indigenous research by Euro-American psychologists, it has a high level of indigenous compatibility. On the other hand, the WP knowledge system is produced by Westernized research in which a non-Western investigator’s theory, concepts, methods, tools, and findings do not adequately reflect, represent, or reveal the natural structure and function of the studied phenomenon in its local context. Consequently, a WP knowledge system tends to lack indigenous compatibility. Unlike either of these knowledge systems, IZP is created by indigenized research in which a non-Western investigator consciously strives to make his or her theory, concepts, methods, tools, and findings sufficiently reflect, represent, and reveal the structure and function of the studied phenomenon in its local context. A knowledge system so developed has a moderate level of indigenous compatibility. (6) Indigenous Applicability of Knowledge The primary purpose for psychologists to establish a knowledge system is to interpret, understand, predict, and change people’s minds and behavior such that personal adjustment can be improved and social problems prevented or solved. Since the IP knowledge system has high indigenous autonomy, contextualization, and compatibility, it can thus be effectively applied to deal with practical problems in Euro-American people’s personal and social lives. It is in this sense that this system has high indigenous applicability. In contrast, the WP knowledge system lacks indigenous autonomy, contextualization, and compatibility, and hence cannot be applied effectively to cope with practical problems in non-Western people’s personal and social lives. The system has only negligible indigenous applicability. The IZP knowledge system is in between. It has moderate indigenous autonomy, contextualization, and compatibility, and can therefore be somewhat effectively applied to deal with practical problems in nonWestern people’s personal and social lives. This system may be said to have moderate indigenous applicability. So far in this section, the IP, WP and IZP knowledge systems have been systematically compared in terms of six aspects of knowledge. The qualitative and quantitative differences identified from the comparative analysis are summarized in Table 1. This systematic comparison makes it

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Table 1 Major Differences among the Three Kinds of Psychological Knowledge Generated by Indigenous, Westernized, and Indigenized Psychologies Aspects of knowledge

1. Cultural basis

2. Production method 3. Indigenous autonomy

4. Indigenous contextualization 5. Indigenous compatibility 6. Indigenous applicability

Knowledge from indigenous psychology in Euro-American countries Directly based on Euro-American culture (directly rooted in Western native culture) Emic approach High autonomy (low or moderate consciousness of autonomy) High local contextualization High compatibility High applicability

Knowledge from Westernized psychology in non-Western countries Indirectly based on Euro-American culture (indirectly rooted in Western native culture) Imposed-etic approach Lack of autonomy (low consciousness of autonomy) Lack of local contextualization Lack of compatibility Low applicability

Knowledge from indigenized psychology in non-Western countries Directly based in a non-Western local culture (re-rooted in a native culture) Quasi-emic approach Moderate or high autonomy (high consciousness of autonomy) Moderate local contextualization Moderate compatibility Moderate applicability

clear that the three psychologies produce distinctive knowledge systems that differ from each other on important points. If a discipline is defined as a branch of knowledge, the three psychologies can be considered to be three separate disciplines in contemporary psychological science. If psychology as a whole is a discipline, the three psychologies may be regarded as three subdisciplines. As a psychological discipline or subdiscipline, IZP makes special sense for non-Western psychologists.

3. Indigenized Psychology as a Methodology Methodology studies “the methods by which science arrives at its posited truths concerning the world and explores alleged rationales for these methods” (Audi, 1995: 611). As a psychological discipline or subdiscipline, IZP represents a unique methodology for exploring non-Western people’s psychological worlds and makes the production of an IZP knowledge system possible. IZP methodology is unique not only in the sense that it differs from the methodologies of IP and WP, but also in the sense

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that it is a methodology specifically designed for non-Western psychologists to indigenize WP. The unique purpose of this methodology is to gradually convert WP into a culture-specific IZP. IZP methodology involves a set of methodological issues or problems that Western indigenous psychologists have never encountered in conducting research. One such issue, the issue of indigenous compatibility, is how to judge whether or not a piece of research is indigenized. Another, the issue of the ways to achieve indigenous compatibility, is how to achieve a sufficient level of indigenizedness for a specific study. These two essential issues are discussed in the following. (1) Indigenous Compatibility as a Criterion for Judging the Degree of Research Indigenizedness In order for a non-Western psychologist’s research to be indigenized, the theory, concepts, methods, and tools used must be sufficiently congruous with the native participants’ psychological and behavioral contents, processes, mechanisms, and patterns as embedded in their ecological, economic, social, cultural, and historical contexts. Yang (1993, 1997, 1999, 2000) has termed this requirement of congruity for indigenized psychological research indigenous compatibility (IC). Yang (2000) distinguished two major types of IC: context-dependent and context-independent. Context-dependent IC stresses the compatibility of the non-Western researcher’s theory, concepts, methods, and tools with the studied local psychological or behavioral phenomenon-in-context as a whole, instead of the phenomenon in isolation from its context. In other words, this type of IC requires that the phenomenon, its context, and the phenomenoncontext relationship have to be analyzed in the same study and the concepts and methods have to be designed so as to be compatible with the phenomenon, the context, and their relationship. In doing indigenized psychological research, non-Western psychologists with a culturalpsychological perspective especially tend to prefer this kind of IC. In contrast, context-independent IC emphasizes the compatibility of the investigator’s theory, concepts, methods, and tools with the studied psychological or behavioral phenomenon itself, without taking its context into direct consideration. As Yang (2000) pointed out, in studies stressing context-independent IC, the studied psychological or behavioral phenomenon itself is observed as naturally embedded in its original context, but the context itself is just implicitly assumed to be there as a silent

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given, without actually identifying and assessing its content and relationship to the phenomenon. Because the researcher does not want to pay much attention to the context, he or she can simply try to make research activities sufficiently compatible with the focused phenomenon. Decontextualized IC may be called phenomenon-focusing IC or implicit-context IC. There are at least two factors that greatly benefit the accomplishment of IC. One is the native researcher’s use of self-reflection to understand personal psychological and behavioral characteristics and functioning. This inner understanding can be formed through a researcher’s self-experiencing and self-observing over time and through intensive introspection of personal motives, thoughts, feelings, and actions that fall into the same category of mind and behavior under study. Given that the researcher as a local person tends to be similar in psychological and behavioral characteristics to other members of the society from which the research sample is drawn, such a reflective understanding can facilitate the intensification of IC (Yang, 1999). Another facilitative factor is the native researcher’s understanding of participants’ psychological and behavioral characteristics and their functioning through an imaginative role-taking process. This outward understanding can be formed in three ways: (a) investigators extensively and intensively review the relevant research literature that bears on the psychological and behavioral characteristics to be studied with certain kinds of local people as participants, and then imagine what the potential participants as typical local people would think and feel, and how they would behave under specific conditions or situations; (b) they take advantage of their tacit knowledge (Polanyi, 1962) acquired in the past about local people’s mind and behavior, and then imagine what potential participants would think and do in specific conditions or situations; and (c) they exercise their empathetic ability to imagine what potential participants would think and do in specific conditions or situations. These imagined or anticipated thoughts and actions can serve as an important basis upon which sufficiently indigenized theory, concepts, methods, and tools can be created or developed. In other words, use of imagination and role-taking can substantially raise the level of IC. IC is the basic general criterion for judging whether or not a piece of research is sufficiently or adequately indigenized. Only research with at least moderate or high IC can help build a real IZP in non-Western

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societies. In this sense, IZP is a knowledge system based on the accumulation and integration of theoretical, methodological, and empirical accomplishments of research with a sufficient degree of IC (Yang, 2000). In contrast, WP in a non-Western society is a knowledge system formed on the basis of research with no or low IC. The concept of IC is also applicable to IP in Western countries as a general criterion for judging the degree of indigenousness (rather than indigenizedness in the case of IZP) of research. Hwang (1999) and Yang (1999, 2002) advocated a multi-paradigm research strategy for conducting indigenized studies. Indigenously oriented psychologists from the same non-Western nation should adopt ontologically, epistemologically, and methodologically different or even conflicting paradigms like positivism, postpositivism, critical theory (and related positions), and constructionism, as delineated by Guba and Lincoln (1994). The first two paradigms tend to adopt natural science as the theoretical and methodological model, whereas the last two tend to apply human science as the model. Yang (2000) recommended that all the four paradigms and the two models be adopted for indigenized research. This recommendation is in consonance with Kim and Berry’s (1993) assertion that the indigenous approach does not assume an inherent superiority of one particular theoretical or methodological perspective over another on a priori grounds. However, the four paradigms and two models differ in their emphasis on cultural-contextual factors. The positivism and post-positivism paradigms and the natural science model tend to stress cultural-contextual factors less than the critical theory and constructionism paradigms and the human science model. Psychological research that adopts a paradigm or model with greater emphasis on cultural contexts is likely to have a higher degree of IC. This should be true of research not only in IZP, but also in IP, and may be partly the reason why Kim and his associates (Kim, 2000, 2001; Kim, Park, and Park, 2000) have repeatedly recommended that the human science model and paradigms other than the positivistic kind be adopted in indigenous psychological research. (2) Effective Ways to Enhance Indigenous Compatibility of Indigenized Research Given that IC is the hallmark of indigenized as well as indigenous psychological research, the next important question in IZP methodology is how to achieve a sufficient degree of IC in research. Yang (1993, 1997,

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2000) recommended seven Don’ts and ten Dos as specific ways for nonWestern psychologists to indigenize their studies. The seven don’ts denote seven things not to do in order to avoid decreasing IC, and the ten dos remind the researcher of ten things that increase IC. Some of the most relevant don’ts and dos are elaborated below as examples of useful measures for enhancing IC. One of the don’ts stresses that indigenously oriented non-Westem psychologists should never habitually and uncritically apply Western theories, concepts, methods, or tools before thoroughly immersing themselves in the natural concrete details of the local psychological or behavioral phenomenon and its context under study. With sufficient understanding of a phenomenon and its context, the investigator will be able to realize that Western concepts and methods can be no longer applied to his or her research. The typical non-Western psychologist tends to ignore the detailed content, function, and cultural basis of a local phenomenon to the extent that it becomes easy for the researcher to impose a Western theory, concept, method, or tool on the study of the phenomenon. The best policy is to begin with an interesting local phenomenon, rather than an interesting Western theory, concept, method, or tool. Another don’t reminds researchers that indigenously minded nonWestern psychologists should not overlook Western colleagues’ important experiences or methods in developing their indigenous theories, concepts, methods, and tools in studying Western people, for the reason that those experiences may well be usefully transferred to the development of non-Western indigenized theories and methods. The prime purpose of constructing IZP in a non-Western country is to create a knowledge system that can adequately reflect, explain, and predict local people’s mind and behavior and to solve their personal and social problems effectively. As a discipline, a non-Western IZP may have nothing to do with the researcher’s nationalistic sentiments. This is especially true of the Chinese IZP as developed in Taiwan, Hong Kong, and China. However, there have been some misunderstandings about the purpose and nature of Chinese IZP. One of them, as pointed out by Leung and Wu (1997), is that this IZP is anti-Western and nationalistically Sinocentric in its basic orientation. It does not make sense to place this stigma on Chinese IZP, just as it does not make sense to say that Western IP is an academically imperialistic knowledge system forcibly imposed on psychological research in non-Western countries. Still another don’t recommends that non-Western researchers should not think in terms of English or any other foreign language during the

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various stages of the indigenized research process in order to prevent inhibition or distortion of the indigenous aspects of the investigator’s contemplation involved in the research activities. According to Whorf’s (1956) linguistic relativity hypothesis, language determines thinking. This hypothesis has received partial or mixed support (e.g., Carroll and Casagrande, 1958). Other studies have shown that language can influence perception and/or memory (Carmichael, Hogan and Walters, 1932) and cognition (Hunt and Agnoli, 1991). These findings seem to provide a plausible cognitive account of the Whorfian hypothesis. More specifically, a non-Western local language has its own terms to denote and conceptualize local people’s culturally unique psychological and behavioral phenomena and their functioning (e.g., Church and Katigbak, 2002; Yang and Ho, 1998). English or any other Western language may simply not have locally relevant terms and hence be unable to adequately denote or describe culturally unique psychic activities and their functioning in non-Western societies. For this and other reasons, Western-trained non-Western psychologists who want to conduct indigenized research with high IC must think in terms of their own native language rather than in a foreign one during the research process. On the affirmative side, one of the ten dos suggests that local researchers should try to be a typical native in the cultural sense as they design and conduct a study, and that they should let their indigenous ideas, tacit knowledge (in Polanyi’s sense), and native ways of thinking be fully reflected in the whole research process. Local psychologists (especially Western-trained ones) in non-Western societies have often observed that when they do research, they temporarily become Westerners in the sense that they think and act like a Western psychologist in their research activities with respect to conceptualizing, theorizing, designing, datacollecting, and results-interpreting. They no longer experience themselves as a carrier of local culture, but instead as a carrier of Western culture. Under these circumstances, there is no way for local cultural elements to be incorporated into the various research stages and activities. This transformation is exactly the way in which the Westernized theoretical, methodological, and empirical accomplishments necessary for the formation of WP are obtained. In order to obtain the truly indigenized accomplishments with high IC needed for the development of IZP, non-Western psychologists must refrain from thinking and behaving as Western psychologists and try to be a typical native when functioning as researchers.

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Another do urges local investigators to tolerate vague and ambiguous states and suspend decisions as long as possible in dealing with theoretical, methodological, and empirical problems until something sufficiently indigenous emerges in their minds during the research process. Almost all non-Western psychologists have been directly or indirectly trained with Western psychology as the only real scientific psychology in the world. They have learned, or even overlearned, Western theories, concepts, methods, and tools to such an extent that in making research decisions they tend to respond quickly in terms of the Western psychological knowledge system. Such responses are very useful for them to eliminate unpleasant feelings due to vague or ambiguous states when they lack a solution or decision. But, these responses are basically Western in nature and they effectively inhibit the emergence of indigenous and indigenized solutions. In order for indigenous and indigenized solutions to have a chance of being manifested consciously, indigenously-minded non-Western psychologists should suppress their Westernized responses as long as possible until an indigenous or indigenized solution emerges. This process is an effective way of lifting the level of IC in research. The third do emphasizes giving priority to the study of local people’s culturally unique psychological and behavioral phenomena. Examples of notably unique phenomena are Philipino pakikisama (getting along with or making concessions to others) (Lynch, 1973) and kapwa (recognition of shared identity with others) (Enriquez, 1977), Japanese amae (depending and presuming upon another’s benevolence) (Dai, 1956), Chinese face (Ho, 1976) and yuan (predestined relational affinity) (Yang and Ho, 1988), and Korean woori (an inclusive group: we or us) and cheong (human affection) (Choi and Kim, 2003; Choi, Kim, and Choi, 1993). Since these and other culturally unique psychological phenomena have never been studied in Western psychology, there are no relevant Western theories, concepts, methods and tools available for non-Western psychologists to adopt in investigating them. This means they have to rely upon themselves to conceptualize and theorize these local phenomena and to design proper methods and tools for assessing them. This is a perfect way to wean local psychologists from their overdependence on Western psychology. They themselves have to develop innovative indigenized theory, concepts, and methods for a systematic study of each of the unique phenomena in their respective societies. Through such a process, they can learn how to do indigenized research with a high level of IC from start to finish without depending upon Western psychology.

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The fourth do urges non-Western psychologists to base their research on the intellectual tradition of their own culture rather than on that of Western culture. As shown in Figure 1, Western IP is well grounded in the Western intellectual tradition formed mainly from European and American folk psychologies, philosophical psychologies, and other sociocultural factors. Figure 1 also indicates that non-Western societies’ WP is based on Western IP, which in turn has been shaped by the Western intellectual tradition. In other words, the WP prevailing in non-Western countries has been indirectly and mistakenly connected to the Western intellectual tradition. In order to successfully create an IZP in a non-Western society, native psychologists should strive to do research under the direct influence of the local culture’s intellectual tradition rather than under the Western culture’s intellectual tradition. This shift in intellectual tradition will greatly enhance the level of IC in local research.

4. Conclusion This paper has delineated three psychologies in contemporary world psychology from a psychological historical perspective: indigenous psychology (IP) in Western (Euro-American) countries, and Westernized psychology (WP) and indigenized psychology (IZP) in non-Western nations. Western psychology is the only IP in the world and its hegemonic and powerful transplantation to non-Western societies has resulted in the same kind of WP in almost all of them. Since WP does not correspond to local people and culture and can not be effectually used to help solve their personal and social problems, increasing numbers of psychologists in many non-Western societies have been trying to convert their WP into a local IZP. The three psychologies have produced three corresponding knowledge systems that may be systematically compared with respect to six aspects of knowledge: cultural basis, production method, indigenous autonomy, indigenous contextualization, indigenous compatibility, and indigenous applicability. The qualitative and quantitative differences among the three systems indicate that the three psychologies represent three distinctive disciplines in contemporary psychological science. IZP is not only a discipline, but also a methodology. IZP methodology is unique in the sense that it differs from IP and WP. Specifically, it explores the rationales and methods that are most effective for conducting indigenized research in non-Western countries. Two closely related

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issues of IZP methodology were discussed: (1) indigenous compatibility as a general criterion for judging the degree of research indigenizedness, and (2) effective ways of enhancing the indigenous compatibility of indigenized researc.

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Index

A academic autonomy, 40, 247, 248, 257 alter-globalization, 217 alter-global psychology, 159, 168, 169, 171, 172, 216–218 applied psychology, 161 approaches to global psychology, 7, 117, 212 C Chinese diaspora in Malaysia, 2, 8 Chinese indigenization of psychology, 37, 40, 43 Chinese psychology, 8–11, 15, 23, 33–36, 40, 82–86, 88, 185 critical psychology, 2, 146, 160, 162, 169 cross-cultural psychology, 1–3, 5, 6, 8, 43, 97, 115, 116, 168, 177, 184, 201–203, 212, 216, 259, 269 cross-indigenization, 190, 200–203, 208, 210, 213–215, 217

cross-indigenous theorizing of affection and expectation, 210 cultural psychology (CP), 1–10, 12, 13, 15, 42, 47, 63, 95–104, 106, 107, 115, 116, 186, 260 cultural system approach, 64 cultural validation, 195, 202, 214

E ecological rationality, 11, 12, 251 epistemic globalization, 17, 170 epistemic modesty, 171 equitable, 2, 4, 5, 7, 11, 13–15, 17, 112, 123–125, 180, 257, 261 ethics in psychology, 2, 146 ethnic affirmation, 17 export model, 161

F A fair global psychology, 218 five phases, 34

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2020 L. Sundararajan et al. (eds.), Global Psychology from Indigenous Perspectives, Palgrave Studies in Indigenous Psychology, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-35125-0

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INDEX

forgiveness, 7, 8, 65, 66, 129, 130, 135–140, 183, 184

G globalization, 8, 12–14, 41, 133, 161, 169–171, 216, 217, 250, 251, 254–257, 267 global psychology (GP), 1–18, 20, 28, 34, 43, 55, 56, 60–65, 111–118, 120–125, 129–131, 140, 146, 150, 159, 160, 168–172, 177– 180, 182, 184–186, 200, 202, 212, 213, 215–219, 248–251, 257–261

I impact factor, 3, 4, 161, 179 indigeneity, 48, 132, 140 indigenization, 2, 4, 5, 7, 18, 20, 33, 36–38, 40, 42, 50, 52–54, 56, 57, 59, 79, 80, 117, 163, 171, 178, 180, 193–195, 202, 212, 214, 249, 273, 275, 277 indigenous compatibility (IC), 3–7, 9, 10, 53–55, 58, 59, 63, 113, 114, 116, 117, 161, 172, 181, 185, 186, 191, 196, 248, 251, 253, 256, 258, 260, 275, 278–282, 284–286 indigenous movement, 6, 8–10, 17, 28, 37, 38, 43, 185, 186, 219 indigenous psychology (IP), 1–18, 20, 21, 23, 28, 36, 37, 39, 40, 43, 48, 52–57, 60–63, 65, 86, 88, 90, 96–100, 103, 104, 106, 111–115, 117–120, 122–124, 129–134, 139, 145, 146, 154, 159–161, 167, 168, 171, 178– 182, 184–186, 189–201, 203, 210–212, 214–220, 247–254,

256–261, 268, 270, 271, 274, 275, 277–279, 282, 286 inductive approach, 61, 63, 64, 249 international dialogue, 2, 5 M mainstream psychology (MP), 1–8, 10, 12–16, 18, 35, 36, 53, 59, 111–113, 115, 117, 118, 122, 130, 145, 146, 154, 162–164, 166, 168, 172, 178, 194, 197, 252, 253, 257, 261 modernity, 6, 7, 16, 25, 37, 41, 42, 46–50, 79, 86, 89, 90, 182, 183, 250, 252, 255 N neoliberalism, 4, 12, 17, 48, 49, 69, 129, 130, 132–135, 137, 140, 164, 250, 251, 255 P psycolonization, 5, 164–169, 181, 194, 214 R rationality, 2–4, 12–15, 62, 64, 96, 97, 106–109, 180, 251, 253, 254, 260 reason, 3, 97 S Sinicization, 15, 23, 53 social orientation, 38, 203, 205, 207 solidarity, 11, 15, 170, 209 T Taiwan, 1–5, 7–10, 13, 17, 18, 20, 21, 27, 33–39, 41, 45–47, 49,

INDEX

50, 52, 56, 57, 78–80, 82, 85, 87, 89, 90, 98, 118, 129, 179, 181, 183–185, 189–191, 198, 206, 208, 214, 215, 249 Three worlds of psychology, 3, 5, 147, 149 W wealth inequalities and psychology, 3–5, 147–149 Westernized Chinese psychology, 13, 19, 35, 51

295

Y Yang, Kuo-Shu, 1–29, 34–43, 46–61, 63, 64, 77–80, 82–89, 95, 96, 98–100, 103, 109, 111–122, 124, 129–132, 134, 136, 137, 140, 145–147, 149–151, 154, 159–161, 163, 167, 170–172, 177–187, 189–196, 198–200, 202, 203, 205–209, 212–216, 218, 220, 247–257, 261