2006 cornejo comment on matsumoto 2006

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Commentary
Abstract In his paper, David Matsumoto (2005) offers a critical
approach to the adequacy of verbal reports as representations of
culture, arguing that they represent a cultural ideology (what he
calls ‘consensual culture’ or a ‘consensual cultural worldview’)
rather than a culture’s actual complexity (‘cultural ways’ or
‘actual cultural behaviors’). I agree with the author that we make
mistakes when describing our own culture. But the fact that we
may sometimes err does not necessarily mean that we always do.
The problem with such a view is that the denial of the epistemic
value of verbal reports also invalidates the capacities of the
scientist as a member of the culture, unless we consider the
scientist to exist outside her/his culture. This is the classical
objectivist approach in science and, furthermore, the assumption
tacitly accepted by cross-cultural studies.
Key Words anthopological universalism, cross-cultural
methodology, etic/emic approaches, verbal report
Carlos Cornejo
Pontiﬁcia Universidad Católica de Chile
To Believe or Not to Believe in Verbal
Reports: The Denial of First-Person
Authority and the Blind Spot of
Universalist Cross-cultural Studies
In general terms, the central statement proposed by Matsumoto (2005)
is an important and appealing one. The main thesis has two possible
interpretations: either as a methodological criticism or, more radically,
as questioning what we understand by ‘culture’. Matsumoto opts for
the former while I consider the latter more fruitful. Matsumoto’s major
criticism is towards the unavoidable social desirability implied in all
forms of cultural verbal report. This criticism leads to a distinction
between a biased, socially adequate ‘cultural worldview’ and the
actual culture of a community. Cultural reports would deal with the
former, while the source of information for the latter is still unknown.
In order to refer to the more real cultural aspects, Matsumoto uses
expressions such as ‘actual cultural behaviors’, ‘cultural ways’,
‘cultural practices’, ‘culture in its totality’ or simply ‘culture’. But how
Culture & Psychology Copyright © 2006 SAGE Publications
(London, Thousand Oaks, CA and New Delhi) http://cap.sagepub.com
Vol. 12(1): 63–67 [DOI: 10.1177/1354067X06061593]Culture & Psychology 12(1)
does he get acquainted with this ‘actual culture’? Tracing a limit
between the whole (the culture) and a part of it (the cultural world-
view) necessarily implies the recognition of cultural contents that are
not discernible in the cultural worldview.
Methodological criticism can lead us to defend the introduction of
new methods in order to discover the unexplored cultural contents
excluded from the ‘cultural worldview’. This is precisely Matsumoto’s
choice, and is reﬂected in many passages of his paper: he emphasizes
the importance of introducing methods to overcome the inherent
problems of verbal reports (e.g. measuring implicit attitudes); he criti-
cizes statistical artifacts which over-represent intergroup variance and
artiﬁcially diminish intragroup variance; he claims that cultural values
do not predict behavior; and he states that ‘individualism’ should be
differentiated from ‘autonomy’.
However, if Matsumoto’s criticism were applicable, even the intro-
duction of all these methodological improvements would not change
the original diagnosis: cultural comparisons always risk over-
simpliﬁcations and, moreover, they can be ideologically used for
certain (or uncertain) objectives. In my opinion, this is the most import-
ant point made by Matsumoto. Eventual improvements in the method-
ology of comparing cultures will not solve the more fundamental
problem of the instrumentalization of social sciences.
A good example of this point is the cultural literature cited by the
author. Convincingly, Matsumoto shows how Ruth Benedict’s (1946)
analysis of the Japanese culture was accomplished without ethno-
graphic fieldwork. Nevertheless, Benedict’s work was later
immensely cited, to a great extent due to its clear-cut description of
Japanese (supposed) ‘collectivist’ culture. Regarding this point, I
miss an analysis of the situation of the scientist when making
cultural comparisons. I would expect not only methodological criti-
cism in order to improve the instruments that allow us to diagnose
a culture, but also reflection on our (cultural) situation when making
cross-cultural observations. Benedict’s analysis is an example of an
etic approach to another culture: the analysis is made without aban-
doning the compromise with the analyst’s own cultural values. The
individualistic–collectivist dichotomy, as well as the search for
universal cultural dimensions, reflects a typically occidental modern
form of knowledge. This procedure strongly contrasts with an emic
approach to cultures (e.g. Clifford Geertz’s [1973] ‘thick descrip-
tion’), which demands the suspension of our own criteria when
evaluating cultural institutions and behaviors. Matsumoto’s obser-
vation triggers the reflection upon cultural values that is implicit in
64Cornejo Verbal Reports
the act of making cross-cultural comparisons over universal, trans-
cultural dimensions. Nevertheless, and unfortunately, it is not
sufficiently developed.
Interestingly, Matsumoto uses appealing ﬁrst-hand experience to
validate his general claim. Here we have an example of non-appli-
cation of the basic argumentative principle of ‘tu quoque’ (Latin: ‘you
too’): What a scientiﬁc theory says must, in principle, be applicable to
the theory itself or to the scientist him- or herself. ‘Tu quoque’ also
means that a scientiﬁc position must be self-applicable. This is not the
case with Matsumoto’s claim. When he argues that people who
practice Judo are not reporting the culture but (only) a cultural world-
view, we must ask whether Matsumoto himself is not speaking from
his own cultural worldview. Is what he offers in opposition to the
verbal reports given by his participants not a verbal report in itself?
Here we can clearly observe that his claim involves a separation of
himself (as an observer) from the experimental subjects who, accord-
ing to him, fail to reliably describe culture. If we accept Matsumoto’s
thesis, we have to admit that Matsumoto himself, as a member of his
culture, can eventually have the same difﬁculties in separating a
cultural worldview from his own verbal report of his culture. As long
as he does not admit this logical contradiction, we can claim that his
procedure is a typical analysis of a ‘monologic hermeneutics’ (as
opposed to ‘dialogical hermeneutics’) (see Groeben, 1986): he denies
the reﬂexive capacities of his reported subjects, but he ascribes them to
himself (and maybe to social scientists in general). Why then would we
believe that Matsumoto’s intuitions about his own culture are more
reliable that those of his interviewed subjects?
I agree with Matsumoto that we make mistakes when describing our
own culture. (Probably this error is directly related to the level of
abstraction of the judged item: the more abstract the judged item is, the
more likely people are to fall into socially available simpliﬁcations.) It
is unlikely that anybody can make an exhaustive description of an
entity as complex and evolving as culture. But the fact that we may
sometimes err does not necessarily mean that we always do. The fact
that our opinion is fallible does not lead to the conclusion that our
opinion should be ignored.
The negation of the epistemic value of subject reports is certainly not
something new in social sciences. It is to be found at both ends of the
psychological object/subject scale: in the limit between (individual)
mind and (collective) culture; and in the limit between mind and the
neural system. Throughout history, there have been attempts to explain
subjective meaningful construals from the point of view of society or
65Culture & Psychology 12(1)
of neurobiology. In the ﬁrst case, it is argued that individual meanings
are only absorptions of pre-existent, social constructions (Foucault’s
epistème), which leads to the conclusion that ‘the individual does not
exist’. In the second case, individual meanings are only by-products of
neurobiological processes, so the conclusion is that an exhaustive
biological theory will replace any theory of the ‘intentional stance’.
Both cases deny the authority of the ﬁrst person.
Matsumoto’s statement that verbal reports are indicators not of
culture but of cultural ideologies seems close to the negation of the
authority of the ﬁrst person from a socio-macrostructural viewpoint. In
this approach, the position of the social scientist within social reality is
problematic. Denial of the epistemic value of verbal reports also inval-
idates the capacities of the scientist as a member of the culture, unless
we consider the scientist to exist outside her/his culture, and therefore
to have a vision of culture ‘from nowhere’. This is the classical objec-
tivist approach in science and, furthermore, the approach Matsumoto
promotes.
I consider Matsumoto’s proposal to be highly relevant: he warns of
the dangers in believing that verbal reports reﬂect culture directly.
Furthermore, in this context, it makes sense to think of ste