Enculturating Psychological and Development Sciences: A Focus on Sub-Saharan Africa

Study Context

Psychological science is limited by a reliance on samples from individualist, WEIRD (Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, and Democratic) contexts. Its potential to accelerate development, poverty reduction, and emotional wellbeing in the Global South is thus also limited. One promising way to productively diversify the behavioral science toolkit, as well as build a more comprehensive science of human behavior, is to take account of more interdependent psychological tendencies, including relational motives, holistic cognition, tight social norms, and orientations towards in-group honor and reputation (Thomas & Markus, 2022). This project proposes to advance rigorous cultural psychological theory around interdependent psychological tendencies in motivation, cognition, self-concept, and emotion within sub-Saharan African settings, as well as to link those tendencies to socioecological factors, including environmental unpredictability and resource scarcity.

Study Design

This four-country study will assess samples of size N=100-300 in each location (Kenya, Ghana, Japan, and the United States) for a total of approximately N=700 participants. The latter two sites serve as points of comparison for the patterns found in Kenya and Ghana. In each site, participants will complete a battery of lab tasks and self-report measures of cognition (e.g., holistic versus analytical reasoning), motivation (e.g., better than average effect), emotion (e.g., ideal affect) and relationality (e.g., enemyship, status). This study seeks to situate sub-Saharan African contexts on these standardized tasks in relation to well-studied contexts.

Results and Policy Lessons

For studies in Africa, the team piloted materials and experimental set up with the Busara Center for Behavioral Economics in Kenya. They conducted both pilot lab sessions and qualitative debriefing and interviews with participants. They have identified a set of tasks and measures to run in a full lab study to be conducted in the fall of 2023 as well as in a follow up study. The team also conducted a secondary data analysis of the World Values Survey, using machine learning to see which self-report psychosocial and ecological items predict the sub-Saharan region compared to other regions of the world. Additionally, the team conducted a forecasting exercise to see if there are differences in how Western online samples (N=300) predict findings from survey studies in Niger. The forecasts were useful to demonstrate whether Westerners have different assumptions about motivational orientations in West Africa.