Another issue concerns the levels of abstraction at which one describes universals. To say that all people eat, sleep, and procreate or that all cultures have such institutions as religions, families, and governance systems is to state what Lonner (Note 1) has termed “yawning truisms,” which add little to our understanding. However, as some have suggested, one can proceed beyond the yawning truism level to examine the actual functioning of institutions and the behavioral dynamics of a particular social process within a theoretical framework, and thereby enhance the
potential for learning about a process. To put the complexity of this issue in context, Lonner (in press) proposed a taxonomy of psychological universals that includes: (a) simple universals, for example, the universality of human sexuality; (b) variform universals, or simple universals that need to be viewed in a culturally relativistic way (somewhat like my approach to privacy); (c) functional universals, or interrelated behaviors that can have the same social consequences and that can be contrasted across cultures; (d) diachronic universals, such as basic processes of cognition and learning that are stable over time; (e) ethologically oriented universals, or behaviors with a biological link; (f) systematic behavioral universals, or theoretical and philosophical models (e.g., Freudian theory) that specify stages, forms, dynamics, and
etiology of behavior in a systematic sense; and (9) cocktail party universals, or a priori, nonempirical, philosophical statements about human qualities.