Cultural and Cross-Cultural Psychology Flashcards
What is analytical thinking?
> It is when you separate objects from their surroundings and break components into their parts
It is where you use rules and reasoning to predict behaviours
To remember:
> think about breaking analytical into two parts, anal-tickle
> You would use reasoning to predict that behaviour to be quite… weird haha
What is holistic thinking?
> It is looking at the entire scene, rather than just the individual
It is where you predict behaviour based on relationships
It relies on associative thought
To remember:
> holistic involves the whole picture/scene
> what’s the relationship between Holly and her stick (Holi-stic)
What is the recent evidence regarding analytical and holistic thinking?
It suggests that these two fundamental ways of thinking vary across cultures
What is the difference between independent and interdependent cultures?
> In INDEPENDENT cultures, people learn to think of others as independent from each other, and composed of their component parts
In INTERDEPENDENT cultures, people come to to learn to attend to the relations among people
What is field dependence and field independence?
It refers to analytical and holistic thinking when perceiving a scene
> Analytical thinkers will perceive each separate part of the scene. They therefore have field INDEPENDENCE
Holistic thinkers will perceive the scene as a whole. They therefore have field DEPENDENCE
What example was used and how is this usually tested?
> The Rod and Frame task
What cultures are typical of each type of thinking (analytical and holistic)?
Westerners = Analytical Easterners = Holistic (think Holi festival in India)
What is an example of how different cultures use different thinking approaches (analytical and holistic)?
The Wolf and its Context:
> Westerners see the wolf, whereas Easterners attend to the whole context
What is the evidence for this?
> When presented with the original background, East (Japan) vs West (USA) are equal at identifying whether they recognise the previously seen animal.
> When presented with a novel background, West (USA) is MUCH more accurate at identifying the previously recognised animal
Conclusion: Westerners are relatively unaffected by the background of the scene as they see it in its separate parts, unlike the Easterners who see it as an irreducible whole.
What is the difference in facial judgement for Easterners and Westerners?
When asked for a judgement of the social expression:
> Easterner’s judgement of the central face is more influenced by the surrounding faces that for Westerners
What did eye tracking show was the attributing factor for East vs West differences in scene dependence and scene interdependence (Masuda et al., 2008)?
Eye tracking showed that it was not that the Easterners recalled the background information better, but instead that their eyes were attending to different areas and figures
In the facial expression recognition task:
> in the first second, both East and West attended to the central figure
> after the first second, Westerners continue to be largely fixated on the focul target, whereas Easterners look more to the background and environment.
What did studies of famous artwork and a meta-analysis of selfie photos show regarding analytical and holistic thinking?
Artwork:
> Western art had a significantly larger ration of face to the frame than Eatern art work
Selfie Photos:
> Western selfie photos had a significantly larger ratio of face to the frame than Easterners
How does the understanding of analytical and holistic thinking help us to understand other people’s behaviours?
Analytical:
> Explain people’s behaviours by attending to their personal characteristics
> Known as dispositional attribution
Remember:
Sweeeeeeeeeeet disssssspositioooooon is a song by the Western band ‘The Temper Trap’, who would use analytical thinking
Holistic;
> Explain people’s behaviour by attending the context variables
> Known as situational attribution
At the Holi festival in India, you are surrounded by many people and aware of your situation more as you are careless and free.
What did the Fidel Castro (Jones & Harris, 1967) experiement show?
Westerners, even when told that writers had been assigned either a positive or negative view, assumed that the writer of the pro-Castro essay had more positive feelings towards Fidel Castro than the writer of the anti-Castro essay.
What is the fundamental attribution error?
When people place an undue emphasis on the internal characteristics to explain the behaviour of a person, rather than considering the external situational factors
How does classical Greek vs Confucian Chinese though support the analytical vs holistic thinking arguement?
Classical Greek:
> Focused around analytical thought that objects posses certain properties, such as gravity, weight etc
Confucian Chinese:
> Focused on the holisitc thought of harmony, interconnectedness and change
What is self-concept?
> It is how we perceive ourselves
It is how we understand that our identity plays a crucial role in how we think about many things
It is implicated in deciding on what aspects we should attend our focus to
It shapes the meaning we draw from the events
It influences the kind of relationships that we have
It is central to our psychology
How does self-concept relate to independent and interdependent cultures?
What?
> A study of AMERICAN undergraduates and KENYAN group members
How?
> Asked to describe themselves with a number of statements that begin with, “I am ….”
> The ‘kinds’ of statements were then counted and analysed
Results:
> American and Kenyan both had different views of the self
> American = Independent
> Kenyan = Interdependent
> Both had strangers as part of the out group
> Independent had just attributions of the self compiling their self-concept
> Interdependent had aspects of friends, family and group members compiling their self-concept
What are the two arguments for self-enhancement?
There is evidence for both the arguments that
a) the need for positive self-regard is not universal, but is instead rooted significantly in North America, and
b) that people in all cultures have a need to enhance the self
What is honour culture?
It is a subculture in which even small disputes become contests for reputation and social status
What does honour culture attempt to explain?
> The fact that in about half the homicides in America of which the police can find a cause, the triggering incident seems argument or conflict related. In many cases they are ‘trivial’ in manner.
They are not, however, trivial to the participants in them
What study is evidence of honour culture
The Asshole study
What was the format of the Asshole Study Cohen et al. (1996)?
What?
> Subjects from the north and the south of America
> Told to walk down a narrow corridor to drop off a form and then return
> Subject encounters a worker filing whom they can’t pass
> Worker grumpily makes way for the subject, then on the way back calls him an asshole!
What did the Asshole Study Cohen et al. (1996) show?
Results:
> Emotions:
- South: anger (masculinity threat)
- North: amusement
> Stress and aggression hormone activation:
- Corisol and testosterone: higher among insulted Southerners
What are the effects of Honour Culture?
Those affected by honour culture are:
a) extremely nice, welcoming and physically close when NOT insulted, but
b) when challenged or insulted, they are prone to extreme behaviour and tend to not back down
