Multicultural psychology is the area of study that deals with human behavior and mental processes through multiple cultures. This stream of psychology focuses on culture specific issues and behavior. This area of psychology can be employed as comparisons in comprehending ethnic identity in viewing similarities and dissimilarities of the structure of culture. In recent times, the original concept of one size fits all psychology has changed to include multicultural psychology that emphasizes on specific cultures and uniqueness within the culture. This model study mainly focuses on how a culture differs from other cultures to how they are alike.
This stream of psychology is closely related to “cross-cultural” psychology. This model mainly deals with people from the ethnic minority and their behavior. Multicultural psychology is the organized study of all features of human behavior as it takes place in settings where people of various cultural backgrounds encounter each other. Multiculturalism is taken as the ‘fourth force’ in the field of psychology, appendaging behaviorism, psychodynamic theories, and humanistic psychology finds its existence. This field focuses on stereotyping, prejudice, acculturation, discrimination, racism, the process of building multicultural competence etc. The simple parlance it seeks to explain the consequences when different kinds of people from different background interact with one another.
Multiculturalism started as a branch of philosophy in Britain and United States as a pragmatic movement in the 19th century. It dealt with political and cultural pluralism. It triggered with the new wave of European imperialism in Sub-Saharan Africa and the massive immigration that hit the southern and eastern Europeans to the United State and Latin America.
Initially, psychology did not emerge as a separate science. It gained its recognition in the latter half of the 19th century. But the concept of psychology was already discovered in 1600 when the French philosopher, Rene Descartes said that the body and the mind are two distinct entities. This is famously known as the “dualism”. In 19th century America, a new concept of psychology emerged that had a relation with sociology too, the concept of functionalism. Functionalism mainly concentrates on how human behavior works in helping people comfortably in their respective environment. As we know from the above definition, that multicultural psychology mainly deals with what happens when two groups from different background interacts. So functionalism tries to explain the reason behind these behaviors of people. It also attempts to explain the influence of stereotyping, prejudice and acculturation on one group over another. In the context of functionalism, acculturation is more prominent than the others. What happens when one group merges with the other group possessing different beliefs and behavior? This question is answered by the concept of multicultural psychology. The emergence of another psychological field attempts to explain multicultural psychology. Behaviouralism deals with observable behavior of people. It can fathom the reason behind prejudice and stereotyping just by observing the actions and expressions of people when they interact with some other ethnic group.
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To solve the problems of millions of victims, multicultural psychology emerged. This attempts to explain why one group of people hates or likes the other groups over another. It attempts to help people to realize that these practices on someone else instigate only problems. So in if the society practices pluralism instead, people of the world will stay in peace. Multicultural psychology helps people to develop love and liking for each other as it solves the problem of prejudice and also to develop a unique culture with elimination of vices of one’s own culture and addition of the virtues of other’s culture.