Culture and Cultural Worldviews: Do Verbal Descriptions about Culture Reflect Anything Other Than Verbal Descriptions of Culture?

Abstract

In this paper I delineate the difference between cultural worldviews, cultural practices and actual behaviors, and suggest that verbal descriptions and narratives that are used to extract cultural worldviews and folk theories may not describe actual cultural practices or behaviors that occur in real life. I discuss five types of evidence to support this claim: (1) limitations in the use of selectively chosen verbal statements and (2) some kinds of culture-related literature; (3) the large variability in individual within-culture variance relative to between-culture differences, and the limitations of attitude-based measures to predict actual behaviors; (4) the fact that cultural differences in individual-level measures of psychological culture may not exist when socially appropriate responding is statistically controlled for; and (5) the boundaries of knowledge that can be gleaned from cultural studies of emotion based on verbal descriptions and narratives. Culture researchers who use individual-level measures of culture or other verbal descriptions of culture need to be aware of the theoretical and empirical differences between verbally reported consensual cultural worldview ideologies and real-life behaviors. The former may not be reflective of the latter.