The decolonial lens

The lens in brief

Decolonial psychology starts from history. Modern psychology developed mainly in Europe and North America, at a time when European powers ruled much of the world. Through colonial universities, textbooks, funding and journals, this psychology spread globally and came to be treated as simply "psychology", the universal science of the human mind. Knowledge from other places was treated as culture, religion or folklore.

Decolonial writers ask whose knowledge counts, who decided, and what was lost. In India, Durganand Sinha argued from the 1960s onwards, and most fully in the 1980s, that psychology imported from the West often did not fit Indian lives. He called for indigenisation: building psychology from local concepts and problems. Ashis Nandy examined the psychological effects of colonialism on both rulers and ruled. Sunil Bhatia's Decolonizing Psychology (2018) studies how Western psychological ideas shape the identities of young people in India today.

A key fact behind this lens comes from Joseph Henrich, Steven Heine and Ara Norenzayan (2010). They called the typical participants of psychology research WEIRD: from Western, Educated, Industrialised, Rich and Democratic societies. Drawing on Arnett (2008), they reported that 96% of participants in leading psychology journals came from countries with only 12% of the world's population. They also warned that such samples, "including young children, are among the least representative populations one could find for generalizing about humans".

How this lens reads the study

From 72 children to "children". The Bobo doll study was done with 72 children of one university nursery in California. Within a few years it was taught across the world as a fact about how children learn aggression. It appears in Indian psychology syllabuses and in collections such as Hock's Forty Studies that Changed Psychology. The decolonial lens asks how a local study became universal knowledge, and notes that a similar study of 72 children in Chennai would rarely have been treated the same way.

Other knowledge about learning by example. The idea that people follow the example of those they respect was not discovered in 1961. The Bhagavad Gita, for example, states that whatever a great person does, others follow, and the standard such a person sets, the world follows (3.21). Indian traditions of learning music, dance and crafts through the guru-shishya relationship, in which a student learns by living with and closely watching a teacher, rest on observational learning. These are not the same as an experiment. But the decolonial lens notes that psychology's history credits learning by example to American laboratories, while treating older and non-Western understandings as background or as "culture".

Violence outside the nursery. In 1961, the same year as the Bobo paper, Frantz Fanon, a psychiatrist from Martinique who had worked in colonial Algeria, published The Wretched of the Earth. Fanon analysed violence as produced by colonial rule: by conquest, humiliation and a system that treated colonised people as less than human. Set beside Fanon, the Bobo study's question looks narrow. It treats violence as a behaviour copied by an individual child, not as something produced by political systems. Both views can be true, but only one became a classic of mainstream psychology.

Gender and colonial masculinity. Nandy argued in The Intimate Enemy (1983) that colonialism promoted an aggressive, hard masculinity as the ideal and treated softer qualities as weakness. The Bobo paper's assumption that aggression is "masculine-typed" was a description of American norms. When the study is taught in India as a universal finding about boys, it may quietly carry those norms with it.

What this lens values in the study

The decolonial lens is not against experiments or against the finding. It can accept that children everywhere learn from models. It values the study as a clear demonstration that behaviour is learned from the social world, which means that harmful patterns, including those left by colonial history, are not fixed in people's nature.

What it would question

• The claim to universality based on one elite Western sample.
• The neglect of non-Western knowledge about learning and imitation.
• The narrow, individual framing of violence, which leaves out colonial and political violence.
• The export of American gender norms as scientific facts.
• Who designs research for India: researchers trained in Western theory, or communities with their own concepts?

Evidence from this tradition

The sampling problem is worst in child psychology, the field the Bobo study belongs to. Mark Nielsen and colleagues (2017) checked every article published from 2006 to 2010 in three leading developmental journals. Of 1,582 articles, only 112 included children from Central and South America, Africa, Asia or the Middle East, regions where most of the world's children live. Jeffrey Arnett titled his 2008 paper on the same problem "The neglected 95%", referring to the share of the world's people who live outside the United States.

Glenn Adams and colleagues (2015) describe what happens next. When the norms of one powerful society are treated as the universal standard, other ways of living look like deviations. They call this epistemic violence, harm done through the way knowledge is made. Indian psychologists made similar arguments earlier. Durganand Sinha (1989) described a first phase of "replicative research" in developing countries, followed by "disillusionment with western concepts and models" and a move towards indigenisation.

Two findings keep this lens honest. First, some forms of imitation do look universal. Nielsen and Tomaselli (2010) found that children from Kalahari Bushman communities in southern Africa copied unnecessary actions just as city children in Australia did, suggesting that close copying of adults is a shared human trait. Second, a historical study by Laskin (2013) shows that early Indian psychologists were not simply copying Europe. They adapted Western psychology to their own national project. The decolonial lens asks us to test universality and to recognise local agency, not to assume that every Western finding is wrong.

A study this lens would design

1. Begin with the community's own questions. Ask parents, teachers and elders in, say, a town in Tamil Nadu what worries them about children and aggression, and how children learn to behave there.
2. Build the study with local researchers, in local languages, using locally meaningful models such as an older sibling, a teacher or a film hero, and familiar objects.
3. Use local concepts. For example, explore how ideas of respect, duty and righteous action shape whether a child sees a model's aggression as wrong, playful or justified.
4. Share the results with the community in a form it can use.
5. Treat the findings as knowledge about that community, and compare carefully with other settings rather than assuming one is the norm.

Try this

An Indian textbook states: 'Bandura (1961) proved that children imitate aggressive models.' A student from a village in Odisha asks why a study from California counts as proof about her younger brothers.

How would you answer her using the decolonial lens, without dismissing the study?

Show the reasoning

You would say she has asked exactly the right question. The study is strong evidence that the children it studied, in one American nursery in 1961, copied aggressive models. Whether it applies to her brothers is an empirical question that the study cannot answer by itself, because her brothers' models, family structure, norms about play-fighting and gender expectations may be very different.

The decolonial lens adds that the word "proved" and the absence of any mention of the sample turn a local result into a universal claim. A better sentence would name the sample and say what is known about other settings. She could also point out that ideas about learning by example exist in Indian traditions, and could shape a study designed in her own community. (This textbook sentence and student are invented examples.)