Social Psychological Studies of Latin American Cultures with Particular Reference to Brazil

This paper presents an English language translation of a book chapter that was originally published in Portuguese. It is reproduced here in full, by kind permission of the editors and publishers, in order to make it available to English language speakers. The paper first addresses ways of defining culture and the development of measures of cultural variation. Contrasts between the collectivism that defines East Asian culture and the collectivism of Latin America are then identified. Topics addressed include values, self-construal, life satisfaction, emotion, honour culture, social influence and the phenomenon of jeitinho. Although the text leads toward a consideration of research into Brazilian culture, it does so by way of discussing the distinctiveness of Latin American cultures more broadly. Details of comparative studies that have sampled further Latin American cultures have been added at the end.