Me, culture, and my thesis

After much prodding on Sandra's part :) I'm finally making a post. But in putting together something from a slightly academic perspective I'm setting up people for some major disappointment for future posts that I can assure you won't be nearly as thoughtful, cohesive, or enlightening...

So as you guys all know, I moved around every 2-3 yrs growing up. I've lived in 6 countries in all, and I always took my "wordliness"--or whatever you want to call it--for granted because everywhere I went I was surrounded by kids in pretty similar situations. When I went to middle school in the US for the first time (Texas, public, trashy, etc) I first became aware of America's gross level of intolerance and ignorance. Even as a kid, I was completely appalled. Granted, this WAS Texas, not exactly known as the liberal capitol of the world, but I know it still reflects the beliefs of a wide cross-section of America's public (judging by Bush's re-election, I think it's safe to say...) After that tragic two-year blip in my life, I moved to Tokyo where all was good and well, and cosmopolitan and DIVERSE and then, on to Princeton where I'm constantly being caught off-guard both by some people's over-the-top ethnocentrism and WASPishness, and other ppl's unbelievable acceptance of/enthusiasm for learning about ppl of different backgrounds.

And here's where I segue way into cultural psychology, the field of psychology of relevance to my thesis, because I'll be talking about that soon per Sandra's request :) My interest in psychology stems from my belief that physical human-to-human interactions lie at the root of all crossroads between cultures. Whether these meetings are of a business, diplomatic, or merely social nature, an appreciation and understanding for how humans think and perceive each other is critical to achieveing meaningful relationships. Through studying the intersection of culture and psychology scientifically, we have some substantial hope for realizing common ground between people of different backgrounds. Seeing the world through other ppl's lenses, putting ourselves in other ppl's shoes, understanding why we regularly face misunderstandings and are unable to draw the same conclusions when presented with the same information: all these important principles we've been taught (hopefully) since preschool, so why (without calling the opposition extremists or tyrants) aren't we able to put them into practice?

And now, even more on the importance of cultural psychology and some details: cross-cultural differences in decision making, social interactions, and cognitive processes have wide implications to business and diplomacy. Previous studies for example have shown that while Americans approach problems at work logically, those of Asian cultures are more attune to their intuitions and reason dialectically. Similarly, Asian cultures are more likely to attend to their environment and situational context, while Westerners tend to focus on individual people or salient objects within the environment. So far, the study of PEOPLE in psychology has been limited to the Western sphere of the globe, and for the most part the young, white, male sub-population of the western world. Does anyone see problems with this? As if you could take all the attributes of a young American male as the prototype of human existence and apply it universally to all people of all cultures... It's a rather obnoxious, selfish view of the world.

Maybe my interest in all this stems from my own background and the unique position I find myself in being "betwixt and between" different cultures, not knowing where to call home, and feeling like I don't quite belong ANYwhere...But anyways that's an intro justification for my thesis; more later.