ENVIRONMENT, CULTURE AND PSYCHOLOGY AT 21ST CENTURY CROSSROADS

 ENVIRONMENT, CULTURE AND PSYCHOLOGY AT 21ST CENTURY CROSSROADS

Knowledge grows in society and essentially the same way is meant for the society. It describes, explains and offers a vision to the society for its growth and development. Thus, psychology informs us what human nature is, by characterizing it as a functional system. But the nature of human nature that is portrayed in psychology is rooted in a specific sociocultural context. It carries the imprint of that culture in which psychologists conduct their studies and develop theories. While psychological knowledge is often applied to the assessment and treatment of mental health problems, it is also directed towards understanding and solving problems in several spheres of human activity. Psychologists should account for cultural factors in their efforts to explain and understand behavior. Increasing awareness about the discipline of Psychology and its application, not only in understanding abnormal behaviour, health care, but also in numerous other facets of everyday life (education, industry, military, and so on) has led to a significant popularity of the subjects resulting in interdisciplinary and collaborative efforts towards optimizing human functioning. But again the question arise approach an increase. As all other sciences, psychology continues to grow, but in the 21st century research on psychology - culture-environment relations have been among the most active and lively areas of behavioral studies. The reasons for these developments have to do with the inescapable and central role that culture plays in all aspects of human behavior, cognition, affect, preference, and meaning. Culture may be seen as a defining attribute of human species. As a defining attribute culture is an inescapable aspect of any human phenomenon, including how people shape environments, use them and interact with them. At the same time the possession of culture divides the single biological species into groups that are so different and varied that they can be seen as "pseudo-species." This variability of groups is also a very important attribute of humans and also central to understand culture-environment-behavior relations. The three basic questions of culture-environment-behavior relations are: What are the characteristics of people, as members of the species, as individuals and as members of various groups ranging from families to societies that shape the environment and, in design, should shape the environment so that it is congruent with these characteristics and supportive of them? In what ways do which attributes ofenvironments affect what groups of people in which ways, under what sets of circumstances, why and how? Given this two-way interaction of people and environments, they must be linked in some ways: What are the mechanisms that link them? In the first question, these characteristics are partly evolutionary and bio-social, partly psychological, and partly cultural. Culture itself evolved with humans and thus plays a role even at that level, including insights into how human environments evolved from hominid (and even animal) ones. As already mentioned, cross-cultural and indigenous psychology is a major, rapidly growing field so that even psychological characteristics are influenced by culture to varying extents. Thus, affective responses, evaluation, preference, and meaning tend to be much more cultural variable than cognition which, in turn, is more influenced by culture than is perception. Nothing needs to be said here about the role of cultural variables themselves. The role of culture in the second question follows from group variability. Different groups are affected differently by the same attributes of environments. At the same time that different aspects of environments become salient to different groups, their preferences vary on the basis of their different evaluations of environmental quality based on differing values, ideals, images and schemata. Their choices also vary-and choice, or habitat selection, is the major effect of environments on people. The meanings which groups express through built environments (seen broadly as cultural landscapes), how they express them and how they decode such meanings also vary. Thus the variety of environments and their characteristics, and changes to them, are also a result of cultural variables. In terms of the third question, a number of the mechanisms that link people and environments-perception, cognition, preference, affect, meaning, supportiveness, and congruence-are influenced by culture to varying extents. It follows that culture plays a role in all three of the basic questions of EBS. To reiterate: the extent, importance and strength of such influence and the specifics are empirical questions, i.e. to be answered through research; they are not matters of a priori decisions, guesswork, opinion or wishful thinking. An important aspect or expression of culture particularly useful in relation to environments is social variables. It can be shown fairly easily that the types of variables listed - social networks, status, roles, institutions, kinship and family - are rather easily related to specific features and attributes of environments. Status is easily related to location, space organization and access, size, colors, materials and the like. Institutions such as recreation, commerce, shopping and the like can be shown to vary among different groups and can easily be related to the settings which they require. There is currently a large and growing literature on changing gender roles and family structure on housing, neighborhoods and other types of environments. Changes in kinship structures play a major role in developing countries and can be directly linked to changes in a large variety of settings and environments. In other words, once again the point is made - whereas "culture" as such cannot be related to environments, social variables like other aspects of culture can relatively easily be related to various components of environments. By any account psychology ultimately aims to benefit society, but only when it captures the real slots and human behavioural problems with indigenous psychology understanding Indian culture as subjectively created systems of meaning, can it address the critical issues and challenges of our society. India is one of the most religiously and ethnically diverse nations, with some of the most deeply religious societies and cultures. In fact, Psychological studies in Indian context should go one step further by taking informal folk theories of psychological functioning formalizing them into psychological theories. Here, I would like to encourage the young social scientists and researchers to incubate ideas for research that may be formulated, tested and substantiated in actual or stimulated conditions and not restrict the validation process to a western born theory or to draw a parallel with the achievements of our western counterparts with ours or with statistical coefficients, and go beyond prefabricated research designs and to develop indigenous tools to solve indigenous problems of the society. It is time to bring Psychology to the forefront of the society and promote interdisciplinary research with other sciences involving neuroscience, environmentalists, sociologists, cognitive science and cultural sciences, the creation of roadmap from the crossroad of the emerging society towards a better future and standard of human endeavor.