The Sociocultural Approach

The sociocultural approach to understanding human behaviour emphasizes the influence of social and cultural factors on human behaviour. This approach has grown out of social psychology, which explores how social environments, interaction and relationships shape individuals. Sociocultural psychologists investigate how culture influences values, beliefs and behaviour. The study of cross-cultural psychology developed using an etic approach to compare how different cultures shape human behaviour. Soon it became apparent that this was only part of the story, and psychologists followed the earlier lead of anthropologists and engaged also in an emic approach to research, studying different social and cultural groups from an "insider perspective", allowing for a deeper and more sensitive understanding of behaviour. It is from here that a psychological understanding of Indigenous communities developed into a growing Indigenous psychology.

Acculturation is a key idea of sociocultural psychology, allowing psychologists to develop models and explanations for how individuals adapt to changing their culture, while enculturation is similarly important in understanding how we internalize our own culture's norms from childhood.

The social environment and particular environmental factors, such as poverty, pollution and isolation and others, can also affect human behaviour. These may be investigated using the sociocultural approach.