Three studies investigated the implicit constructions of reality associated with cultural differences in enemyship (personal relationship of hatred, malice, and sabotage). Results of interview (Study 1; N = 98) and questionnaire (Study 2; N = 166) research indicated that enemyship was more prominent among Ghanaian participants than among U.S. participants. Additional evidence located a potential source of these differences in different constructions of relationship. Responses linked the prominence of enemyship to constructions of relationship as inherent, enduring connection (interdependent models). Responses linked the sense of freedom from enemyship to constructions of relationship as the discretionary product of atomistic selves (independent models). An experiment among Ghanaian participants (Study 3; N = 48) provided evidence that increasing experience of inherent connection can be sufficient to increase accessibility of enemyship. Results help to illuminate the cultural grounding of personal relationship and other phenomena that are typically invisible in mainstream theory and research.

Despite unprecedented access to information and diffusion of knowledge across the globe, the bulk of work in mainstream psychological science still reflects and promotes the interests of a privileged minority of people in affluent centers of the modern global order. Compared to other social science disciplines, there are few critical voices who reflect on the Euro-American colonial character of psychological science, particularly its relationship to ongoing processes of domination that facilitate growth for a privileged minority but undermine sustainability for the global majority. Moved by mounting concerns about ongoing forms of multiple oppression (including racialized violence, economic injustice, unsustainable over-development, and ecological damage), we proposed a special thematic section and issued a call for papers devoted to the topic of "decolonizing psychological science". In this introduction to the special section, we first discuss two perspectives—liberation psychology and cultural psychology—that have informed our approach to the topic. We then discuss manifestations of coloniality in psychological science and describe three approaches to decolonization—indigenization, accompaniment, and denaturalization—that emerge from contributions to the special section. We conclude with an invitation to readers to submit their own original contributions to an ongoing effort to create an online collection of digitally linked articles on the topic of decolonizing psychological science.

Theory and research in cultural psychology highlight the need to examine racism not only "in the head" but also "in the world." Racism is often defined as individual prejudice, but racism is also systemic, existing in the advantages and disadvantages imprinted in cultural artifacts, ideological discourse, and institutional realities that work together with individual biases. In this review, we highlight examples of historically derived ideas and cultural patterns that maintain present-day racial inequalities. We discuss three key insights on the psychology of racism derived from utilizing a cultural-psychology framework. First, one can find racism embedded in our everyday worlds. Second, through our preferences and selections, we maintain racialized contexts in everyday action. Third, we inhabit cultural worlds that, in turn, promote racialized ways of seeing, being in, and acting in the world. This perspective directs attempts at intervention away from individual tendencies and instead focuses on changing the structures of mind in context that reflect and reproduce racial domination.

In this article, we approach the relationship between neoliberalism and psychological science from the theoretical perspective of cultural psychology. In the first section, we trace how engagement with neoliberal systems results in characteristic tendencies-including a radical abstraction of self from social and material context, an entrepreneurial understanding of self as an ongoing development project, an imperative for personal growth and fulfillment, and an emphasis on affect management for self-regulation-that increasingly constitute the knowledge base of mainstream psychological science. However, as we consider in the second section, psychological science is not just an observer of neoliberalism and its impact on psychological experience. Instead, by studying psychological processes independent of cultural-ecological or historical context and by championing individual growth and affective regulation as the key to optimal well-being, psychological scientists reproduce and reinforce the influence and authority of neoliberal systems. Rather than a disinterested bystander, hegemonic forms of psychological science are thoroughly implicated in the neoliberal project.

This study considers how different constructions of self and social reality influence the experience of relationship. Reflecting the relational interdependence of West African worlds, the authors hypothesized and observed that Ghanaian participants were significantly more likely than U.S.A. participants (ns ¼ 50 each) to advocate caution toward friends and to emphasize practical assistance in friendship. Reflecting the atomistic independence of North American worlds, the authors hypothesized and observed that U.S.A. participants were significantly more likely than Ghanaian participants to indicate a large friendship network; to emphasize companionship, particularly relative to Ghanaian women; and to emphasize emotional support, particularly relative to Ghanaian nonstudents. Results suggest that friendship is not a universal form; instead, it takes different forms in different cultural worlds.