Outlook: Contours of a Cultural Psychology in the 21st Century

Psychology emerged at the beginning of the 20th century with the claim to improve the world of humans, to provide them with a basis for ethical action and confidence in dealing with fundamental human problems. To some extent, these goals have been realized. Only an interdisciplinary-oriented cultural psychology, which reflects its images of humans, is capable of responding appropriately with an ethic to the challenges of the 21st century—such as preserving humans, co-inhabitants and the environment from the negative consequences of climate change, responsible handling of the threats to humans through technical interventions (transhumanism) and through digitization with its effects on human coexistence, and mitigating the dangers of an economically unequal lifestyle for identity and social cohesion. Cultural psychology must, as a world psychology between cultural relativism and universalism, research, develop and present forms of human understanding in their cultural contexts.