Human Development in Cultural Context: One Pathway or Many?

摘要

Ever since psychologists began studying the development of human beings, issues of context have intruded themselves into attempts to identify basic processes. Back in the 1960s, my introductory psychology textbook stated that psychology was a science, like physics, only a lot younger. Time, the textbook predicted, would establish the fundamental laws of human development, unburdened by confounding variables arising from the inadequately controlled circumstances in which data were collected. As it turns out, time seems to have had the opposite effect on developmental psychology.