Cross-Cultural Topics in Psychology

Leonard W. Doob

Why should you read this book? Look at the Contents and you will immediately discover topics with which you may already be acquainted: They range from emotion and moral reasoning to human beliefs and personality, from language and child development to gender and mental health. Ah, yes, but the approach here is cross-cultural. Consequently, these topics are given more than a twist that will be useful as you contemplate your self and your society.

This Preface is not argumentative--of course not, a scholarly preface never ever argues--rather, it is unabashedly personal. Let me begin with some scattered autobiographical notes. As I sat uncomfortably in a large German auditorium on a few occasions and listened to Hitler during his campaigns to attain political power in 1930-32, my thoughts often competed with what he was shouting. I wondered whether we Americans could ever tolerate such a skillful demagogue. In the lectures by the founder of a new psychology at the university I was attending there, I tried and failed to find an explanation for the support being given Hitler. Later during those rallies it seemed that what I was being taught by another savant concerning utopias and ideologies provided some insight into the Nazis and their beloved leader. More than a decade later as British and U.S. planes began heavy and continual bombardments of Germany and other occupied European countries, colleagues and I in a Washington war agency decided, that Fortress Europe, which the Nazis were claiming could never be breached, was in fact turning out to be a "Fortress without a Roof" (eine Festung ohne Dach sounded pungent). Had we who devised this propaganda line been inspired by psychology and the social sciences? In the mid-1950s I was doing what I considered research on acculturation in East Africa and learned that the

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