Cultural Psychology is an interdisciplinary field primarily between anthropology and psychology. It explores human nature through a deep understanding of the relevant cultural context (including history) and the cultural imperatives embedded within it that shape human cognition, emotion, motivation, behavior, and psychopathologies in cross-culturally divergent ways.

Cultural psychology avoids viewing culture as background noise to be filtered out in order to pinpoint universal psychological mechanisms. Instead, cultural psychology views culture and mind as constitutive parts of each other. This view endorses the idea that humans are biologically programmed to become cultural beings by virtue of the fact that we have the capacity to make meaning of ourselves and the world we live in, both individually and collectively, to live within those systems of meanings, and to organize our psyches in and around them. The product of this universal capacity is psychological diversity.

Furthermore, cultural psychologists believe that culture’s influence is particularly strong for automatic mental processes, including basic mental processes (attention and perception) and higher level mental processes (social cognition, emotion, self-structure, etc.), rather than for explicit attitudes and values. Thus, culture itself is regarded as a psychological topic that informs psychological theories.