When we watch the World Cup in soccer, we can see culturally specific tactics: Catenaccio for Italy, kick and rush for England, Spain for Tiki-taka, etc…Given that we have culturally traditional tactics, do we have a culturally specific mentality? Well, I guess it makes sense, as tactics are partially determined by the player’s physical, technical, and mental characteristics.
To consider this issue, Let’s put the story of soccer or sports aside for now, and let me talk about cultural psychology. No worries. we will come back to sports soon. As a scholar in cultural psychology, there are so many famous and go-to articles to read in cultural psychology. Among them, Heine et al. (2010) is clearly one of them. What they said is something like this:
there are so many psychology articles, but most of the articles have been published by institutes in North America, and we assume that the results can be applied to all human beings. More specifically, lots of articles collected data from undergraduate students in North America and assume that the results of the research can be applied to all human beings in this world. Is this assumption correct, or does it cause overgeneralization? Heine speculated on this issue and decided to investigate how many participants in major psychology journals are from Western countries and how many researchers who published articles are from Western countries. Surprisingly or not surprisingly, the results showed that
96% of participants in major psychology journals are from Western industrialized countries.
73% of the first authors in major psychology journals are from the U.S.
99% of the first authors in major psychology journals are from Western countries.
Following these results, they claimed that participants in psychology journals come from the group called “WEIRD” (Western, Educated, industrialized, rich, democratic). The results have substantial implications and one of them is that we need to collect data from other countries to confirm the results of the articles can be applied to all human beings. In fact, cultural psychologists have revealed cultural variations in emotion, cognition, behaviours, and motivation since early 1990.
This article was out in 2010 and strengthened the field of cultural psychology. In fact, this article has been cited more than 10000 times, which is evidence of the impact of this journal (I would say if your article is cited 1000 times, you are a great researcher). Now, let’s turn our attention to sports psychology. Do you think we can see this pattern in sports psychology as well? Or do sports psychology journals are culturally more diverse? Well, as you can guess, exactly the same pattern emerged, which was revealed by Dorsch et al. (2023), which is mostly 15 years later since Heine et al. (2010) was published. Of the articles which reported ethnicity in athletes, 75.57% were from the U.S., Canada, UK, or Australia. The following countries are Germany, France, China, and Spain, which indicates that all the countries except China are from WEIRD countries. Again, surprisingly or not surprisingly, this article uncovered that the general trend in psychology can be applied to the field of sports psychology.
Even though we now know that most of the research which is published in this world mainly comes from North America, I would say the effect of culture has not been fully examined in sports psychology. This would be mainly because lots of sports psychologists may not be interested in the effect of culture as they are only immersed in one single culture and not so sensitive to the effects of culture. Also, I believe most researchers do not have a strong network across cultures to collect data in at least two countries. Yes, cross-cultural research costs a lot:
we need to have cross-culturally strong networks among researchers
we need cross-culturally strong networks to collect data (yes, we need permissions to collect data from teams, coaches, and sometimes parents of athletes)
we need to translate questionnaires (yes, we need bilinguals for this)
etc…
With that being said, based on our research in my Ph.D. in which we collected data from athletes in Japan and Canada, my speculation is that we would have psychological universals and cultural variations in athletes: for some mental aspects, all athletes possess the same mentality regardless of culture, whereas other mental aspects culturally differ. One of my research on cultural variation in motivation in Japanese and Canadian athletes is currently under review. Once it is published, I will introduce my research as well, but for now, if we see more and more cultural variations in athletes’ mentality, we might need to consider creating and implementing culturally fit interventions to maximize the effect of the existing interventions in the future. Let’s see if my article gets attention in the future once published. To be continued…
References
Henrich, J., Heine, S. J., & Norenzayan, A. (2010). The weirdest people in the world? Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 33(2-3), 61. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0140525X0999152X
Dorsch, T. E., Blazo, J. A., Delli Paoli, A. G., & Hardiman, A. L. (2023). We know what we know, but from whom did we learn it? A sociodemographic history of participant characteristics and reporting practices in sport and exercise psychology. Psychology of Sport and Exercise, 69, 102504. https://doi.org/https://doi.org/10.1016/j.psychsport.2023.102504