ABSTRACT
The real history of cross-cultural perspectives begins in the nineteenth century, and it does not seem to have been recognized that John Stuart Mill may be regarded as the founding father of cross-cultural psychology. Cross-cultural comparisons are undertaken in many different ways and for many different purposes. Cross-cultural comparisons, if any, are made between systems rather than aggregates of individuals. Hence, the results of social psychological and anthropological comparisons are nearly always totally incommensurable. Cross-cultural comparisons in the social-psychological sphere concerned with attitudes, values, norms, roles, and such are almost invariably characterized by an exclusive focus on the individual in isolation from the social and cultural setting. Cross-cultural psychologists study the way in which culture-specific social behavior comes to be transmitted, but the nature of the sociocultural system itself is within the domain of anthropologists.
