It is difficult to imagine daily life in western, industrialized countries today without psychology – the academic discipline, the professions that use and promulgate psychological knowledge, and the burgeoning self-help industry. Psychology has undoubtedly played an influential role in modern societies. Over the last hundred years or so, psychologists' ways of explaining individual lives have become increasingly central to many people's self-understandings (Rose, 1989, 1996). In addition, psychological ways of helping people and addressing social issues have become commonplace and are increasingly advocated. If psychology did not exist, many of people's daily experiences would be understood in quite different ways than those now in vogue. If psychology creates particular ways of making sense of daily life, then, without psychology, people today would perhaps even have different kinds of experiences than they do.

While psychology has influenced the cultures of modern societies, those cultures also have influenced and molded psychology, such that one could talk about cultures of psychology. Could psychology in its current guise in modern, western, industrialized societies have developed elsewhere? Hardly. The social mores, traditions, and zeitgeists in European and North American societies were decisive in specifying and identifying the most pressing social problems for psychologists to investigate and solve. Psychologists, eager to promote their discipline, were keen to respond to such societal needs; psychology's aims and trajectory were thus shaped in line with social trends. As social needs and problems changed historically, so has psychology changed, both in its research foci and its societal roles and functions. For much of its history, the discipline was peopled almost exclusively by white, middle-class men; this, too, shaped the form and direction of psychologists' endeavors. This too has now changed. Change continues. Such continual change is to be expected of a field that is so firmly wedded to the social. It is also to be expected that the cultures of psychology will be different across regional and national boundaries.