A Deep Culture Approach: Insights from Cultural Psychology for Intercultural Education

This paper proposes a “deep culture” approach to intercultural education grounded in insights from cultural psychology. It argues that foreign experiences are psychologically challenging and that insights from cultural psychology and related fields can help learners better navigate foreign experiences. It contrasts how culture and cultural learning are conceptualized in intercultural education and cultural psychology. It presents key psychological insights that are useful in intercultural education, including: an embodied view of culture; predictive processing; dual-processing models of cognition; Oz moments (culture bumps); cultural variation in various psychological domains; the cognitive processes related to empathy; and cognitive bias and ethnocentrism. Examples are given of how these ideas are being applied. The authors call for a greater integration of cultural psychology insights into intercultural education.