6 - Variations in social control across societies, cultures, and historical periods

Summary

Introduction

In the previous chapters, our particular psychological approach served us quite well in explaining and integrating many different factors that influence responses to deviance, such as the motivational aspects of different types of deviance, the behavior of the person associated with a deviant condition, the situation in which interaction with the person takes place, and certain individual differences in responding. It is important to realize, however, that most of the psychological phenomena discussed thus far have been primarily observed and documented in modern Western societies. The goal of this chapter is to demonstrate that our psychological approach may also be useful to explain and integrate what is known about differences and similarities in responding to deviance in different cultures and historical periods. Let us first consider different approaches that can be used to describe and explain the influence of culture or society on responding to deviance.

First, we may treat each society as relatively unique and offer fine-grained descriptions and interpretations of patterns of social control in each and every culture, society, or historical period encountered; thereby not pretending to generalize interpretations and conclusions to other societies. This clearly is a much preferred method as the literature is full of rich ethnographic and historical descriptions that have been independently produced by researchers working in a wide variety of disciplines, but unfortunately resulting in extreme fragmentation of this field of inquiry.