Toward a Psychology of Populations: The Cross-Cultural Study of Personality

An Agenda for Psychological Anthropology

“…Thus variations at the between-population level are shaped by the conventions of communication, thought, and feeling described in ethnographic accounts; they are differences in the central tendencies (means, medians, modes) of statistical distributions that can overlap. A "population psychology" as I have proposed it in the past (LeVine 1966(LeVine , 1973 would follow the lead of other population studies (e.g., demography, epidemiology) and pay attention to differences within and among populations and to environmental features that might account for variations at the population level as well as individual differences. The ethnographic study of conventions captures the environmental features most directly affecting the behavior of individual members of a population.…”

Still the Most Important Influence on Human Development: Culture, Context, and Methods Pluralism

“…What if this would be a desirable attribute for publication in major developmental journals when relevant, along with statistical requirements, sample and methods descriptions, theory, and other research standards? In short, what if the study of human development for the past two generations had been a population psychology (LeVine, 1966), with a cultural-contextual human development emphasis, as a part of its default, research practice? Cultural context would then always be bracketed in as an implicit, expectable part of our research workflow (Hruschka et al, 2018).…”

“…Robert LeVine, the preeminent psychological anthropologist of our era in the study of human development, was a contributor to the 2002 special issue. LeVine in turn cited an article he wrote for Human Development in 1966 proposing then that what he called "population psychology" should be central to developmental psychology and the study of personality (LeVine, 1966). He suggested 36 years later, in 2002, that "As I read the evidence, it is the communicative environment of the child that should be in the forefront of our attention" (LeVine, 2002, p. 292).…”

Populations, Communication and Child Development

“…Thirty-six years ago, I published an article in this journal proposing a 'psychology of populations' analogous to population genetics, epidemiology and demography, in which the distributions of psychological or behavioral characteristics in populations would be studied in relation to societal or cultural characteristics of their environments [LeVine, 1966]. (The idea was not original at that time and it Human Development 2002;45:291-293 LeVine has been reinvented a number of times since then.)…”