ABSTRACT
The study of psychological functioning across cultures provides an opportunity to test a phenomenon in a number of senses. First, we can consider whether all extant knowledge (including theories, concepts, tests, and data) generalize to other human populations; do we find essentially the same thing in other cultures, or do we find a clear impediment to claiming our present knowledge to be universal? Rarely are we able to claim such universality, and so we confront a second issue: What are the cultural conditions under which things remain the same, and under which things change? The answer to this second question allows us to identify and test the relationship between culture and behavior in a way we would be unable to do had we stayed home, limited to a single culture. However, we can do better than merely using this search and discovery procedure: We can take the extant theoretical postulates within our theory, and seek out relevant cultural conditions in order to predict and test specific features of our theory. In this last sense of testing, we treat the range of available cultures as a natural laboratory in which we may actually extend the theory beyond its original limits. We are thus, in turn, able to use the cross-cultural method to check (and perhaps limit), relate, explore, verify, and extend original theories.
