Prof John Berry discusses cross-cultural psychology (FULL INTERVIEW)

The policy and practice of multiculturalism came into force in Canada in 1971, but it had some forays into the field 15 years earlier.

In 1956, the conference on the integration of immigrants following the Second World War, held in Havana, Cuba, had a position paper by the Canadian delegation that said assimilation had not worked anywhere in the world as a matter of public policy and would no longer be attempted by Canada.

So 15 years later, it appeared as a statement to the House of Commons by the then Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau, and he proposed two very important principles: one, that cultural diversity is a public good.

These two principles, diversity and equitable participation, have remained the core of Canadian multiculturalism, but in some other countries, the issue of diversity has largely been overemphasized and the issue of opening up everyone's right and opportunity to participate has been deemphasized.

No, in fact, it emerged from work I was doing in Australia in the 1960s, when we were working with Australian Aboriginal communities, and they identified these two core ideas as being the most important for their way of interacting with the rest of Australian society.

They said that we want to keep our cultures and our identities as Aboriginal people, and at the same time, we want on this basis to participate in the life of the larger society.

We don't want to be segregated, we don't want to be assimilated, we don't want to be marginalized, we want to be integrated with our cultures intact.

And these ideas were part of my acculturation approach from the late 1960s, and so I was surprised and pleased when an eminent scholar, as well as politician, Trudeau, articulated these two as part of the foundations of the multiculturalism policy in Canada.

I don't claim priority, but I claim convergence of ideas.

Yeah, first of all, I will just emphasize what I mean by integration.

Integration is double engagement, you're engaged in keeping, maintaining and expressing your heritage culture, and at the same time, you are participating in the larger society.

So it's double engagement, it's it's being involved in in in two cultural communities at the same time, or increasingly, in more than two, in many cases where you have multiple cultures involved in a community or a or a city.

Um, why does this particular strategy lead to more positive psychological and social outcomes?

Well, we don't know for sure, but one possibility is, using current notion of social capital, which refers to the complexity of your networks and and access to resources, people who are involved in two cultures have an opportunity to expand their horizons.

They have an opportunity to gain resources from two or more cultures, they have an opportunity to grow by learning two languages or two cultures, and all of these would suggest that they will simply do better in a multicultural context than those who turn their back on one culture or the other, or indeed, don't participate in any cultural network at all.

They do better in psychological terms, essentially, this is feeling well, including positive self-esteem, positive self-regard, a sense of subjective well-being, and a lower level than other people might have of anxiety and depression symptoms, which often accompany the migration experience or the intercultural experience more generally.

And also a lower level of psychosomatic problems such as international travelers experience because they are in a completely different cultural context, sleeplessness, anxiety and so on.

They also do do better in socio-cultural terms, and the distinction between psychological well-being and socio-cultural well-being was articulated by Colleen Ward here at the center a number of years ago.

If we can say that psychological well-being is feeling well, socio-cultural well-being is doing well, and for young people, doing well often means doing well in school, being involved in community activities that are not illegal, such as gang activity or or drug participation, bullying and so on.

But for adults, it involves being adequately employed, being an active participant in the civic life of your societies, whether it's heritage culture and or the larger society.

They are related, they're conceptually different from each other, but they are related, that is to say, people who feel well usually do well, and vice versa, people who do well usually feel well.

And this combination, as we mentioned a moment ago, tends to coincide with those people who are integrating rather than assimilating or being segregated.

There are some exceptions, however, one of the problems that people experience when they try to express their ethnicity and and show it and share it, is that they can be targets of discrimination.

And in another set of studies with a colleague in France, Collette Sabatier, we have found that North African youth who are trying to integrate, that is to say, in part, express and maintain their cultural identity and and behaviors, they experience a lot of discrimination.

And so this tends to suppress the sense of well-being.

So there are universal or general levels of support for this relationship, but there are some specific examples where things are made much more difficult, such as the case of North African youth in Paris.

It mainly contributed to our ability to generalize the relationship between how you go about your acculturation, whether you're integrating or not, and how well you're doing.

Prior to that, we had what we might call one-shot studies, that is to say, we looked say at Vietnamese in Norway or Somalis in Canada or Argentinians in Spain, and we would get this relationship, but it was very difficult to compile these findings into a single general statement.

So the international youth study used the same instrument, collected the same kinds of data from immigrant youth in 13 countries coming from a wide variety of backgrounds, and using the same sources of information, the same kinds of analyses, we came up with this common general conclusion that integration is the way to proceed to successful settlement in the new society than any of the alternatives.

The issue of achieving a global psychology is very central to the kinds of work that I've been doing over the years.

When I first studied psychology, what was being taught was the psychology of a very small number of people, mainly Western Euro-American students and and sometimes real people, adults, and this covers only perhaps 10 or 12% of the world's population, the world's cultures.

So the idea that we have a science of human behavior already in psychology, simply cannot be sustained by using such a limited range of information, so cross-cultural psychology as a field tries to include many, many different cultures, their concepts and data based on these concepts in the other cultures, and try to put them all together, put all of these other cultural examples up on the table, so we can have a good look at their similarities and differences and try to find out what might be common to our humanity, what might be different, and from these differences try to sort out how culture has contributed to these differences and may indeed give us more insight into that underlying commonality.

I think it's inevitable as internationally different cultures come into contact and have to understand each other, and it's inevitable as cultural as societies become more culturally diverse within themselves, that the role of culture in the development and expression of human behavior will become more and more important.

So the future, potential future for cross-cultural psychology, I think is very bright, it should permeate the research, should permeate the teaching, and should permeate the applications of how psychological knowledge is used in in public policy and public programming.

But there is resistance, the potential is not necessarily going to be realized.

Many people think they already know what needs to be known about human behavior based upon their own little corner of knowledge.

And very often they are resistant and and even try to derogate people who are in the cross-cultural field, but I think it will persist, it will continue to advance and take over these naysayers.

And try and be able to convince people that culture is indeed one of the most important factors in human development and in the display of the behavior that they do develop.

In my own work, I've only ever done something that I think will potentially be useful.

I think that's increasingly true for a lot of psychologists, and one of the uses of the kinds of research in cross-cultural and intercultural psychology is to try to provide information to policy makers and program developers who are concerned about the quality of relationships within culturally diverse societies.

So I have worked fairly closely with governments in a number of countries, trying to convince them that the results of our research should be taken into account when they develop policies.

I don't believe that policy should be based on research alone, but I think policy should be informed by research results, and that along with the other realities and constraints such as finances and priorities for other areas, research findings should be acknowledged as a basis for developing policies.

In my own experience, people who who do govern would rather make informed decisions rather than uninformed decisions, even though they may not always be able to implement them.

If they are going to get it right, they think they have a better chance of getting it right when they have good advice and data to to draw upon, rather than simply political pressure and and prejudices perhaps of their own and their and their colleagues.

I've had good working relationships in a number of countries and some successes, not always though.