ABSTRACT
Richard Shweder has championed “cultural psychology” (Shweder, 1991)—essentially an approach emphasizing anthropological study, focusing on the way local cultural traditions shape the “ethnic divergences in mind, self, and emotion” (p. 73). Shweder, Mahapatra, and Miller (1987, 1990) reported a study comparing participants from Hyde Park, Illinois (American sample), with participants from the Hindu temple town of Bhubaneswar, India (Indian sample). Shweder started with the procedure of Turiel’s domain analysis. First, he compiled a list of acts that transgressed social norms. The list was based on careful preliminary field work and included some transgressions that are particular to India (e.g., a widow eating fish, the eldest son having a haircut the day after his father’s death, eating beef) and also acts that were not particular to India (ignoring an accident victim, a father breaking a promise to his son, cutting in the line for a movie). Second, he asked the questions for separating domains of morality from convention (seriousness of the transgression, alterability, contingency, generality). Shweder reported findings that were contrary to those reported by Turiel:
• In India, many of the social convention transgressions were considered more serious than the moral transgressions.
