Multiculturalism In Western Psychology

Multiculturalism is a pan-cultural thought prevailing in the western world that opposes to the discrimination, demands the recognition of the minority race\ethnicity and their cultures, respect the cultures, traditions, values of all the races\ethnicities. The term pluralistic culture covers all the areas of social science, politics, sociological, anthropology, philosophy, and especially the newly emerged cultural research that takes it as its main theme. Coping with the trend in social science, the multiculturalism in psychological research asserts the diversity, differences and equality of cultures, it is an attitude and style of thinking, which oppose to the scientism and cultural imperialism in the conventional psychological study. Due to the influence of positivism, western psychology takes the physical science as its ideal, imitates it in the methodology. The traditional psychologists maintained that they should do value indifferent research and try to find the universal law about the human mind and behavior, without considering the social cultural factors, which might affect them. The consequences are: the social cultural attributes of human mind and behavior have been deserted deliberately; the cultural centralism or cultural imperialism in the traditional western psychology has emerged. Since the research and practice of mainstream psychology stems from the western cultural, its theories reflect the western cultural values, its conclusions are limited by the western culture, but when these research results are taken as the universal law and applied to the other non-western cultures, it will result in necessarily taking the western culture as standard to measure and evaluate the mind and behavior of other cultural groups, and drawing the inappropriate conclusions. The multicultural perspective is different from the cross-cultural orientation in psychological research and practice. In some ways, it is the further development of the cultural psychology. Although the cross –cultural psychology do its research in the cultural specific context. The aim of it is to validate the universality of these conclusions, to find the similarity and difference in the psychological structures and psychological abilities of the people in different groups from various areas. From this we can see "cultural deprivation"is the foundation of cross-cultural research, whereas the aim of the multiculturalism in psychology is to impart the "deprived "cultural factors into the psychological research, to use the culture-centered perspective to emend the defect of "cultural blindness"in the traditional psychological theories and control the research, to have the research and practice rooted in the multiple cultural context, to reflect the cultural specific psychological context, to show the difference, respect the traditions and values of all the multiple groups, and regard their cultural specific psychological thoughts without bias and discriminations. The traditional western psychological theories stems from the Euro-American cultural context, every theory deals with one aspect of humanity. Different culture has different values and perspectives on humanity, which are not similar to the Euro-American culture. As a theory emerged in a given time, although it can only meet specific demand, it has the potential to adapt to the other cultures. So we don't need to seek new theories to replace them, but we should converge them on the stand of culture-centered perspective. The multiculturalists don't ask to give up all the conventional psychological concepts, they argued to give more concerns to the cultural factors functioning in those concepts, ask the researchers to reexamine the already existed theoretical hypothesis. So multiculturalism won't compete with the traditional theories, which will improve and reinforce the traditional theories. The multiculturalists don't demand the researches to abandon the traditional theories, they ask the psychologists to combine the cultural perspectives into their work, they show concerns to the development and integration of every theoretical school in nowadays social context, they emphasized on the cultural applicability of every psychological theory. The culture referred in multiculturalism is defined broadly. The multiculturalists argued that we should investigate the people in all cultures, not only concern the western and non-western cultures, but also the people in the other cultural dimensions, such as the female, the old, the disabled and so on. Concerning the research method, the multiculturalism claimed that we should integrate objective method with the...