Why Ability Assessments Don't Cross Cultures

You Can't Take It With You
Why Ability Assessments Don't Cross Cultures
Patricia M. Greenfield University of California, Los Angeles

A central thesis of this article is that ability tests can be analyzed as items of symbolic culture. This theoretical perspective, based in cultural psychology, provides psychological researchers and clinicians with the tools to detect, correct, and avoid the cross-cultural misunderstandings that undermine the validity of ability tests applied outside their culture of origin. When testers use tests developed in their own culture to test members of a different culture, testees often do not share the presuppositions about values, knowledge, and communication implicitly assumed by the test. These cross-cultural issues have important relevance for ability testing in an ethnically diverse society.

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e thesis of this article is that tests of intelligence d cognitive ability are cultural genres (Cole, 85; Greenfield, in press; Lave, 1986). This thesis is identified with a theoretical perspective that has come to be known as cultural psychology (Bruner, 1990; Cole, 1990; Price-Williams, 1980; Shweder, 1990; Stigler, Shweder, & Herdt, 1990). I develop this thesis by showing how ability tests presuppose a particular cultural framework. Most important, I demonstrate that this framework is not universally shared. Therefore, when it comes to tests of ability and intelligence, it is often the case that " y o u can't take it with you." There is, however, an alternative point of view, briefly summarized as " y o u can take it with you." This view, generally identified with a perspective called crosscultural psychology (Berry, Poortinga, Segall, & Dasen, 1992; van de Vijver & Leung, 1997), is that ability tests are intrinsically transportable from one culture to another. With appropriate linguistic translation, administration by a "native" tester, and (less frequently) the provision of familiar content, the notion is that ability tests

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