The Truth About Psychology: Not One-Size-Fits-All

Myth: Psychology’s ideas are the same for everyone

Psychology’s been around for a long time – since 1915 in India – and it’s definitely come a long way. It used to just be something you’d find in labs and clinics, , it has now made its place in fields of education, media, sports, workplaces, and everyday life. More people than ever are talking about mental health, behavior, and well-being— which is a great thing!

But here is the catch: Suddenly, everyone is a ‘mental health expert,’ throwing around terms like gaslighting, trauma, toxic, and self-love as if they know it all. Social media is flooded with self-proclaimed psychology gurus promising life-changing advice, and some even claim they can “cure” mental health issues overnight. But is psychology really that simple? What does psychological research really say? And does it apply to everyone in the same way? 

Let’s dive in and separate fact from fiction!

Who is being studied?

Myth: Psychology is the study of human behaviour. This means it applies to everyone in world. 

Fact: WRONG!

Most psychological research is done in Western countries like the U.S. and Europe. And guess who’s usually in these studies? Urban, college-going, white students. Do their experiences with things like stress or happiness really line up with yours? Probably not. Exactly our point. An earlier analysis of research published between the years 2003 and 2007, found that 96% of psychological samples came from countries representing only 12% of the world’s population.

So, Why does this matter?

You may be thinking, so what? Is the human nature not the same? Maybe and maybe not. Well, we do have a lot of biological stuff in common, but when it comes to our thoughts, behavior, and actions, things get more complicated. Culture, environment, upbringing, social relationships, and even personality play a big role in how we think and act, always what makes us all unique. This means that all psychological research does not apply to everyone equally. Every person’s behaviour is made up of multiple factors including biological, social, economic factors.

Take India, for example: the psychology of someone living in a bustling city is way different from someone living in a rural area. These differences are real, and they matter!

In the next section, we try to explain how this plays out.

Exporting Psychological Theories.

Let’s talk about a popular example: Attachment theory. You’ve probably heard of “secure” and “avoidant” attachment styles floating around social media. The idea behind it is that for a child to develop emotionally, they need one consistent, loving caregiver – usually a parent, often a mother. This idea is pretty well accepted in Western psychology. 

But in India, parenting does not work that way. Parenting is a whole community affair. It’s not just about one person (usually a mom) raising the child. It involves grandparents, aunts, uncles, neighbours, cousins, and even older siblings. So, the idea that a single caregiver shapes a child’s emotional development doesn’t really fit in places where childcare is more collective. A very cool anthropologist Heidi Keller called it the “Many children, many adults” model.

Prof. Nandita Choudhary, an expert on Child Psychology, in an interview said,

“No Indian language possesses an equivalent term for ‘Parenting.’ The term is always childcare and nurture, “paalan poshan.” This is profoundly reflective of the concept that the focus is on what is done with the child rather than who does it.”

So, when research from the West, with its one-parent focus, is applied globally, it ignores some really big cultural differences. And this can have a huge impact on policies and treatments that don’t fit every society. It can even harm many societies. This is especially true considering how the evidence supports differences across cultures in areas related to parenting, children’s learning processes, and other tasks. 

What happens next?

Unfortunately, psychological knowledge is mostly flowing one-way—from the West to the East. Research on people is almost always based on Western participants; we just assume it applies everywhere.

Imagine how different the lives of a rural farmer in Bangladesh, a young girl in India, an American college student, and a 20 year old boy in the Abu Dhabi will be.

So, if you want to understand a young person in India, you can’t just ignore their gender, caste, class, family background, economic status, and all the other factors that shape their experience. When Western research is used to study an Indian teenager, a lot of important factors get left out. This can lead to misunderstandings and even misdiagnoses.

Dangers of (Mis)Diagnosis

Here’s where things can get a little tricky: if we start looking at people through a purely Western lens, we risk mislabelling them. Let us understand this with an example of PTSD. 

PTSD was originally studied in U.S. war veterans. But what if you’re a survivor of a natural disaster or political violence, like those in Sri Lanka or West Bengal? Your distress might be connected to community divides or resource conflicts—not just the individual symptoms that PTSD typically focuses on.

Your distress might even look very different, and your priorities might be different too! This means your healing would also be different.

So when these Western definitions of PTSD get applied to people in different cultural contexts, the results might not be accurate. Some similar cases can be found in attempts to study depression, loneliness, childhood development.

Misunderstanding the “Self”

When you remove a person from his social, political and economic setting, you are also removing a part of his psyche that is shaped and makes sense because of his social life.

Psychological research within India often focuses on issue related to youth in urban areas. As Singh (2021) explains, that even in the non-WEIRD (white, educated, industrialised, rich and democratic) Indian context, one can still be WEIRD — what West is to India, the metropolitan could be to the rest of India such as the rural India. With most of its population still residing in rural areas, psychology needs to move beyond the limited sample of Indian Population in metropolitan cities. 

The way forward

Okay, now that we’ve explored how Western psychology doesn’t always fit everywhere, how do we fix this?

1. Moving towards a Global Psychology- Instead of fitting Western theories in societies across the globe, Psychology researchers, especially from non-western nations, need to move towards ‘Global Psychology’ (GP). This is about developing a way to study and understand human behavior that respects different cultures, histories, and social contexts. Instead of trying to force Western theories into every culture, we need to start looking at local psychologies (called indigenous psychologies) from different parts of the world and consider how culture shapes behavior.
2. Not seeing non-Western societies as less or inferior: 

Another important shift is moving away from the idea that people in non-Western societies are somehow “deficient.”  From Darwin to Stanley Hall, they spoke of colonized people as “primitive savages.” Today, we need to embrace a more inclusive view, one that sees every culture as offering valuable insights into the human experience. 

3. Respecting people’s experiences and stories – Most of the psychology carried out today is still quantitative. 

Right now, a lot of psychology is focused on surveys and experiments that group people together and look for general patterns. But that does not take into account the unique experiences of individuals. To truly understand people, we need more qualitative research—things like interviews and case studies—that take context into account.

If Psychology is to truly apply to people everywhere, it must embrace the diversity across the globe, of people, their experiences, cultures, sense of self, language, histories, and way of being. Only then can we hope for a psychology that really works for everyone.

Ayushi Jolly

Ayushi Jolly is a PhD Candidate in Social Psychology at Jawaharlal Nehru University, India. Her research aims to foster a more holistic understanding of the human psyche that acknowledges the intricate interconnections between individual lives and the broader societal tapestry. She is dedicated to restoring the 'social' in social psychology.

Outside the academic sphere, she relishes the joy of travel and trekking and finds