Psychology is not neutral
Psychology is often seen as a science of the human mind, which is objective, neutral, and universally applicable. Misra and colleagues, five researchers of Asian ancestry, recently co-authored a paper that challenges, critiques, and problematizes the idea of a “universal psychology.” They use the lenses of indigenous and decolonial psychology to argue that psychological knowledge is deeply shaped by culture and history, particularly by the legacies of colonialism. Much of what we take as “standard” psychology today emerged in Euro-American contexts and continues to dominate globally, even in places with very different social realities. This creates a gap between how psychology explains human experience and how people actually live and make sense of their worlds.
“Even after political independence, the colonial legacies in the form of Western-centered hegemonic psychologies prevail in the practice and study of psychology, and many of the institutions of the former colonies continue to promote the former colonizer and subjugate the formerly colonized people.”
The Need for Indigenous and Decolonial Psychology
The mismatch between imported Western theories and concepts and the experiences of people in newly independent nations led to the emergence of Indigenous Psychology (IP). The movement of IP advocates for locally informed and developed theories and practices promoting a contextually rich knowledge of local psychologies. The researchers further propose that IP and decolonization share an interrelation with each in achieving their goals. Decolonizing Psychology refers to the critical examination of the dominance of Western and European perspectives and to the inclusion of local voices and contexts. It prompts psychologists to see people’s experiences in the backdrop of their culture.
Western psychology often presents a reductionist worldview, does not consider context as relevant, and makes scientific claims of value neutrality. In contrast to this view, IP focuses on relational and contextual patterns of life. Decolonial thinking offers an alternative to mainstream psychology approaches.
“It is clear that IP and decolonial theory need each other, and IP may contribute to further the development of decolonial theory… both aim to transform psychology into an emancipatory, social justice-seeking, and status-quo-resisting endeavor… They focus on the nature of human beings situated in “contexts” emphasizing “diversity” and nonlinearity.”
The investigation of colonial influences in Psychology has been limited to “culture” and “ethnicity” as categories, rather than to narratives, values, and identities connected to colonial experiences. Decolonisation would be possible only when psychologists across the globe are ready to accept multiple worldviews and plural ways of living and being
Politics of Method and Relevance of Reflexivity
But if Psychology is shaped by culture and history, then it is not just its theories that need to be questioned, but also how knowledge itself is produced. The researchers argue that research methods in Psychology are often treated as neutral tools when, in fact, they are embedded in particular cultural and political contexts. What gets studied, how it is studied, and how findings are interpreted are all shaped by existing power structures. This is where the importance of reflexivity comes in. Psychologists must critically examine their own assumptions, positions, and the purposes through which they pursue research and produce knowledge.
The researchers maintain that “IP started as an exercise in reflexivity.” As psychologists in several Latin American, South African, and Asian countries grew dissatisfied with Western concepts for addressing problems in their own countries, they began to “self-reflect.” This led to the recognition that Western psychological frameworks were often inadequate for understanding the realities of the majority world. Thus, they realized that using multiple methods to investigate phenomena in local contexts would be more beneficial.
Further, indigenous researchers are required to know the dominant psychological perspective when working with phenomena in their local contexts. As cultural insider researchers, they are required to address existing research from Euro-American settings.
However, researchers from the North are not required to incorporate knowledge from the South when working with cultural phenomena. This culture-centrism of the North shows up across the research process, from what topics are studied, to what methods are considered “scientific,” to how results are interpreted, and even in who gets to publish through North-dominated editorial boards.
Thus, knowledge about the mental life of humans around the world should be built through diverse traditions and multiple methods and should reject one-sided outsider research. Method in psychology, then, is not just a scientific problem, but a political one. For instance, the use of accepted tools to test whether a group of people is intellectually inferior to another makes it seem justified to suggest that they are. Such an approach completely erases the role of historical and cultural context in shaping the group’s embodied ideas, separate institutional opportunities, and historically evolved theories emerging from specific colonised cultures. They write:
“When psychological science reproduces historically constituted injustices and converts them to natural differences through method when science is used to guarantee certain outcomes; when psychology is set up in a way that reproduces and cements superiority and inferiority, normality and abnormality, and standard and substandard; and when the method is used to control and adapt people and to support the status quo, the method becomes also a political project.”
Thus, knowing these realities, IP is also a political project because it aims to dismantle cultural supremacy, and critically questions the idea of “Western representation of mental life having more power than the ones from the Global South.” Ultimately, reflexivity among psychologists worldwide will help question assumptions, prejudices, and values in the research process in both the Global North and South, thereby building an integrative Global Psychology.
Different Ways of Knowing and Living
The researchers further explain these differences through what they call strong-ties and weak-ties ways of relating to the world.
In strong-ties contexts, people’s relationships to family, community, and even land are deep, enduring, and not easily chosen or changed. Life is shaped through close, interdependent connections. In contrast, weak-ties contexts are characterised by more flexible, individual relationships, in which people can move, choose connections, and engage with others more impersonally.
Much of modern Western psychology, the authors suggest, is built on this weak-ties logic, one that values distance, abstraction, and objectivity. However, many Indigenous and non-Western communities experience the world through strong ties, where relationships, land, and identity are deeply interconnected. When psychological frameworks based on weak ties are applied to strong-ties worlds, they often fail to capture lived realities.
Ecological Grief of the Orang Asli
The experience of the Orang Asli can be better understood through the idea of strong ties, in which land is not just a resource but is central to identity, belonging, and survival. The Orang Asli (“original people” in Malay) are the earliest inhabitants of Peninsular Malaysia. Available statistics categorise them as economically very poor. During colonization by Spain, Portugal, the United Kingdom, and Japan, the Orang Asli’s ancestral lands were taken away by colonizers to build dams, mining facilities, and tea plantations. The uprooting from their ancestral lands has caused them considerable suffering as they live in rural settlements without full ownership of their ancestral lands.
Further, schemes and developments around their resettlement have led to major lifestyle difficulties like the onset of diabetes due to the introduction of a modern diet by the government and an increase in human-wildlife conflict due to deforestation, illegal mining, etc. These changes have not only affected their material conditions but have also led to a profound sense of loss. The researchers describe this as ecological grief: a form of distress tied to the loss of land, culture, and ways of life. The authors note:
“The Orang Asli find everything they need—from food to herbal medicine to flowers for religious ceremonies and sanctification in daily life—in the forest, their ancestral land: “This place is indeed the place of my blood”; “Our heart is in the forest. … Not in the city, not in the towns. … We Orang Asli’s heart is in the forest”; “Love the forest. We love … because our ancestors they lived in the forest. … Our medicines are original. Like betel, we go and take it. … The plant. it grows … we drink … swallow. That’s what we love … love … love a lot”
For many Orang Asli communities, the forest is not just a physical space but central to their identity, livelihood, and sense of belonging. As one participant describes, “our heart is in the forest,” pointing to a deep, lived connection between land, culture, and self. The uncertainty of land ownership and repeated displacement has led some community members to question where they truly belong, asking: “Where is our home?”
Such experiences highlight how distress is not simply an individual condition but is shaped by broader social, political, and environmental realities. This kind of suffering cannot be easily understood through standard psychological categories such as depression or anxiety. It is deeply relational, rooted in histories of displacement and ongoing marginalisation.
The example of the Orang Asli illustrates a key limitation of mainstream psychology. When psychological frameworks ignore context, they risk reducing complex, historically shaped experiences into individual symptoms. Indigenous psychology, in contrast, draws attention to these relational worlds, showing that understanding mental life requires engaging with land, community, and lived histories.
The Chinese Xin
Another example discussed in the paper comes from the Chinese concept of Xin, often translated as “heart.” Unlike in mainstream psychology, where the mind and body are treated as separate and emotions are distinguished from cognition, Xin brings these elements together. It refers not only to feelings, but also to thinking, moral judgment, bodily experience, and relational life.
In this framework, mental life cannot be reduced to individual inner processes. Instead, it is understood as something that emerges through relationships between people, and between the individual and the wider social and moral world. Distress, therefore, is not seen as a problem located solely within a person, but as something that reflects imbalances in these relational and ethical worlds.
This challenges many assumptions of Western psychological frameworks, which often rely on clear distinctions between mind and body, individual and society, or emotion and reason. The concept of Xin does not fit neatly into these categories. It resists rigid classification and instead emphasises fluidity, interconnectedness, and balance.
For instance, Xin can be both the source of distress and the basis for healing, highlighting a more dynamic and less linear understanding of mental health.
“Xin goes beyond the binary of inner and outer, micro and macro, and private and public, presenting an epistemological challenge for Euro-American psychology, where that web of relations serves as a mere backdrop for the individual psyche.”
Approaches to care grounded in Xin also differ from standard psychological models. Rather than focusing solely on the individual, they emphasise harmony within relationships, families, communities, and the broader social world. Healing, in this sense, is not about fixing an isolated problem, but about restoring balance across these interconnected domains.
The example of Xin highlights the limits of assuming that psychological concepts are universal. It shows how different cultural traditions offer alternative ways of understanding the mind, distress, and care that cannot be fully captured within dominant psychological frameworks.
Recommendations and Conclusion
The researchers have provided helpful recommendations for psychologists. First, they mention that those theories and methods should be used that work with and for participants, opening space for their voices to be heard, making visible their life worlds and cultural practices, sharing the results of the study with them to seek their feedback, and co-authoring studies with them. Second, appropriate methods that do justice to the research question must be chosen. For instance, if the research question itself concerns subjectivity, an outside-observer stance would be useless.
“Decolonizing psychology means a move away from this methodologism to include indigenous tools and indigenous knowledge (including knowledge by indigenous communities). It would also mean changing the psychology curriculum.”
Third, they encourage researchers to engage with a plurality of methods to address the complexity of the psychological world worldwide. Hence, use of “theoretical, historical, cultural, first-person perspective (narrative, reflexive/contemplative approaches), qualitative, arts-based, and quantitative methods (without giving primacy to quantitative ones)” is recommended. Finally, they propose a “change of topics and agents in research” to move away from imitating Euro-American concepts and building on our own Indigenous knowledge through the use of our own tools.
Reference
Research Article Citation: Misra, G., Sundararajan, L., Teo, T., Ting, R. S. K., & Yang, J. (2025). Decolonial research practices from an indigenous psychology perspective: Critical contributions to knowledge. American Psychologist, 80(8), 1171.
Link to Study: https://psycnet.apa.org/record/2026-99383-007
Researcher Contact Info: Louise Sundararajan [[email protected] or [email protected]]
Neha Jain
Neha Jain is a doctoral scholar at the Department of Humanities and Social Sciences, IIT Kanpur. In her doctoral work, she is exploring institutionalized and de-institutionalized mental healthcare settings in India to understand the nature of care and recovery in mental health through the experiences of various stakeholders. She is also a counseling psychologist trained in trauma-informed therapy and works through an attachment lens with people in their early adulthood years. Apart from therapy and research, she loves reading personal newsletters and listening to Desi rap music.