Culture and Cultural Dimensions

Culture is one of the most important concepts in the sociocultural approach, yet it is notoriously difficult to define. Broadly, culture refers to the shared beliefs, values, norms, behaviors, and symbols that a group of people transmit from one generation to the next. Culture provides the mental framework through which people interpret the world, and because different cultures provide different frameworks, people from different cultural backgrounds may perceive, reason, and behave in systematically different ways. Studying these differences allows psychologists to test whether findings from one society generalize to humanity as a whole, or whether they reflect the particular culture in which the research was conducted.

To study culture scientifically, researchers often use the idea of cul