Chapter 1 & 2 Flashcards
Richard Shweder
- the father of cultural psychology; argued that general psychology assumes mind operates independent of context, but that’s not true -> although some human universals exist, we are also very different depending on environment/context/culture
- Context can actually physically change our brains too (ex. London cabbies develop larger hippocampi due to how much they need to use spatial navigation)
how are psychological differences created by culture?
The more people in a culture are faced with a certain idea (ex. Children should be independent), the more they think about it, creating a network of thoughts, behaviours, feelings, etc., which can become chronically activated, meaning they’re prioritized to come to mind more often than other networks of info -> shapes the way you think
Case study: the Sambia
- Live in Papua New Guinea
- Believe that femaleness is innate, whereas maleness must be cultivated → have cultural practice of “transforming” young boys into men through septum piercing, thrashing with sticks, and performing oral sex on other men (believe that ingesting semen will give them “jerungdu”/power/essence of maleness)
- Sex lives of Sambian men are exclusively homosexual from 7 until marriage, then bisexual until fatherhood (sex with wives but receiving oral sex from boys), then exclusively heterosexual
- Contrast to Western view of sexuality as a form of identity (and a minority identity); for Sambian men, it’s a behaviour you progress through, and is universal
why should we study cultural psych?
- To understand how culture impacts how we think and feel → better understand the human mind
- To gain knowledge within the field of psychology in general
- Gain an increased understanding and appreciation of cultural differences → allows people of different cultural backgrounds to get along better; increased cultural awareness
how are we “products of our own culture”?
- For the most part, out culture remains invisible to us, but everyone else’s culture is apparent
- Our thoughts and behaviours appear natural to us, but may be shocking for people from different cultures
- We are socialized to think that our ways of doing things are good and moral → cultural deviations often seen as less desirable
- Leads to ethnocentrism (judging people from other cultures by the standards of our own culture)
Russian cultural-historical school
- One of the most enduring developments in cultural psych history
- School of thought that argued that people interact with their environments through the tools or human-made ideas that have been passed down to them across history (ex. The wheel, democracy, etc.) → sustains and expresses human thought
why has cultural accumulation been progressing at such a rapid pace?
- Human population continues to grow and people are becoming more interconnected
- Presence of larger numbers of models ensure that there’s always a talented model to copy from (ex. Fishing net study → in groups of 2 people struggled, but in groups of 16 people succeeded), as long as people interact with each other to share ideas
- When populations become isolated, their cultural knowledge can diminish (ex. 18th century Tasmanians cut off; had much simpler technology than their ancestors because of it)
cultural worlds
the notion that humans exist within “worlds” consisting of cultural information that has accumulated over history
humans vs. chimps
- Chimps have big brains, but our EQ is still almost twice theirs
- However, chimps have way more muscle mass than we do → we lost muscle mass to compensate for our large brains
- Our digestive tract is also much smaller than chimps’ to save energy → we were able to do this due to cooking food, which increases energy we can extract from food
How large was the average human group size?
150 people (seems to be most adaptive number that people are “built” for)
Humans vs. apes study: different tasks
- No difference in children and apes in problem-solving tasks (so our brains did not evolve to solve physical problems)
- Difference in social tasks (human children much better at precise copying of models, whereas apes used emulative learning) → shows how well we can learn from others → why we can have cultural accumulation
- Results suggest that the primary difference between humans and primates is our ability to learn from others
