Cultural Psychology

Question 1

WEIRD

Answer 1

• Henrich et al., 2010
• Western, Educate, Industrialised, Rich, Democratic societies

Question 2

Culture

Answer 2

• A set of attitudes, behaviours, and symbols shared by a large group of people and usually communicated from one generation to the next. (Shiraev & Levy, 2016)
• Elements of culture:
  
  • Material/Objective Culture – objects, artefacts, products of human activity: buildings, tools, cloths
  • Subjective Culture – knowledge, norms, values etc.

Question 3

History of culture

Answer 3

• Enlightenment versus Romanticism
• Empiricism versus Interpretivism
• Wilhelm Wundt Völkerpsychologie (1900-1920)
• Collapse of belief in human rationality brings back interest in culture
• 1971 - Society for Cross-Cultural Research (SCCR)
• 1972 - International Association of Cross-Cultural Psychology

Question 4

Enlightenment vs romanticism

Answer 4

• Enlightenment: a European intellectual movement during the late 17th and 18th centuries that emphasized reason and individualism, rather than tradition. This movement was heavily influenced by philosophers such as Descartes, Locke, and Newton.
• Romanticism: characterized by its emphasis on emotion and individualism as well as glorification of all the past and nature, preferring the medieval rather than the classical.

Question 5

Empiricism vs Interpretivism

Answer 5

• Empiricism: all knowledge is derived from a sensory experience. It developed in the 17th and 18th centuries (stimulated by the rise of experimental science) and it was expounded in particular by John Locke, George Berkeley, and David Hume.
• Interpretivism: belief that reality is socially constructed and fluid. What we know is always negotiated within cultures, social settings, and relationships with other people.

Question 6

Völkerpsychologie

Answer 6

• Wilhelm Wundt (1900-1920)
• Psychological experiments were too limited in researching the human behaviour.
• He created a branch of psychology which would work best for the use of historical and comparative methods instead of experiments alone.
• This was a type of psychology which dealt with the communal and cultural products of human nature which includes religions, languages, and mythologies.

Question 7

Cultural psychology

Answer 7

“Study of all the things members of different communities think (know, want, feel, and value) and do by virtue of being the kinds of beings who are the beneficiaries, guardians, and active perpetuators of a particular culture.” (Shweder et al., 1998)

Question 8

Cross-cultural psychology

Answer 8

• Critical and comparative study of cultural effects on human psychology (Shiraev & Levy, 2016)
• Cross-cultural psychology allows to verify whether psychological mechanisms are culture specific or universal.

Question 9

Culture specific phenomena

Answer 9

• Visual illusions (Segall, Campbell, & Herskovits, 1966)
• Spatial orientation (Brown & Levinson 1993)
• Self-views (Heine & Hamamura, 2007)
• Value of personal choice (Iyengar & Lepper, 1999)
• Motivation to conform (Bond & Smith, 1996)

Question 10

Visual illusions

Answer 10

• Segall, Campbell, & Herskovits, 1966
• People learn to perceive. However, our perceptions are determined by perceptual inference habits.
• The basic process of perception is the same but the contents of the perception differ and these differ only because they reflect different perceptual inference habits.

Question 11

Spatial orientation

Answer 11

• Brown & Levinson, 1993
• Tzeltal speakers (Mayan language) describe objects according to their disposition in space and avoid egocentric locative descriptions.
• Three primary modes of reference:
  
  • Ostension - ‘the man over there’
  • Spatial description – ‘the man who lives next door’
  • Intrinsic description – ‘the man who has hunchback’

Question 12

Self-views and self-enhancement

Answer 12

• Heine & Hamamura, 2007
• A meta-analysis of published cross-cultural studies of self-enhancement reveals pervasive and pronounced differences between East Asians and Westerners.
• East Asians did self-enhance in the methods that involved comparing themselves to average but were self-critical in other methods. Overall, the evidence converges to show that East Asians do not self-enhance.

Question 13

Value of personal choice

Answer 13

• Iyengar & Lepper, 1999
• In 2 studies, personal choice generally enhanced motivation more for American independent selves than for Asian interdependent selves.
• Anglo American children showed less intrinsic motivation when choices were made for them by others than when they made their own choices (whether the others were authority figures or peers).
• However, Asian American children proved most intrinsically motivated when choices were made for them by trusted authority figures or peers.

Question 14

Motivation to conform

Answer 14

• Bond & Smith, 1996
• A meta-analysis of conformity studies using an Asch-type line judgment task (1952, 1956) was conducted to investigate whether the level of conformity has changed over time and whether it is related cross-culturally to individualism–collectivism.
• The literature search produced 133 studies drawn from 17 countries.
• Collectivist countries tended to show higher levels of conformity than individualist countries. Conformity research must attend more to cultural variables and to their role in the processes involved in social influence.

Question 15

Cultural universals

Answer 15

• A cultural universal is something that is common to humans worldwide:
  
  • Perceiving colour (Kay & Regier, 2006)
  • Analog numeracy (Gordon, 2005): Analog: something physical with continuous change
  • Emotional expression (Ekman, 1999)
  • Psychological essentialism (Waxman et al., 2007)
  • Mate-preferences (Buss, 1989)
  • Personality structure (McCrae et al., 2005)

Question 16

Perceiving colour

Answer 16

• Key & Regier, 2006
• There are universal constraints on colour naming, but at the same time, differences in colour naming across languages cause differences in colour cognition and/or perception.

Question 17

Emotional expression

Answer 17

• Ekman, 1999
• From this perspective, all negative and positive emotions differ in their appraisals, antecedent events, probable behavioural responses, physiology, and other characteristics.
• The term “basic” has also been used to describe elements that combine to form more complex emotions. There are a number of characteristics which are useful in distinguishing one emotion from another and distinguishing emotions from other affective phenomenon, such as moods or emotional traits.
• The basic emotions position captures what is unique about emotion, and what emotions have in common which distinguish them from other affective phenomena.

Question 18

Mate-preferences

Answer 18

• Buss, 1989
• Several standard sex differences replicated across cultures, including women’s greater valuation of social status and men’s greater valuation of physical attractiveness.

Question 19

Personality structure

Answer 19

• McCrae et al., 2005
• To test hypotheses about the universality of personality traits, college students in 50 cultures identified an adult or college-aged man or woman whom they knew well and rated the 11,985 targets using the 3rd-person version of the Revised NEO Personality Inventory.
• Results showed that the normative American self-report structure was clearly replicated in most cultures and was recognizable in all.
• These data support the hypothesis that features of personality traits are common to all human groups.

Question 20

Individualism-collectivism

Answer 20

• Individualism
  
  • Rights of the individuals come before their duties
  • Care for oneself and their family
  • Emphasis placed on autonomy and self-actualization
  • Others are more similar to me, than I am to others.
• Collectivism:
  
  • Duties of the individuals come before their rights
  • Care for group harmony
  • Emphasis placed on group belongingness and group related duties
  • I am more similar to others than they are to me.

Question 21

Independent vs interdependent self

Answer 21

• Independent:
  
  • Unique qualities of the individuals
  • Independence
  • Self-sufficiency
  • Personal success
  • Personal freedom
  • Personal agency
• Interdependent
  
  • Individual as a member of a group
  • Interdependence
  • Group co-ordination
  • Group cohesiveness
  • Emotional self-control
  • Responsibility

Question 22

Community vs association

Answer 22

Two basic forms of organizing social life (Tönnies, 1887):

• Community (Gemeinschaft) - members posses and use common goods, they feel similar pleasures and annoyances, they have mutual enemies and friends
• Association (Gesellschaft) – people live side by side, but they are not so strongly connected

Question 23

Agentic vs communal qualities

Answer 23

• Individualistic cultures → agentic qualities
  
  • Attention is paid to traits which affect the trait-holder – similar to what is important to the Independent Self
  • Ambition, intelligence
  • Lack thereof
• Collectivistic cultures → communal qualities
  
  • Attention is paid to traits which affect the environment of the trait-holder – similar to what is important to the Interdependent Self
  • Loyalty, morality
  • Lack of thereof

Question 24

Cultural tightness & looseness

Answer 24

• Measures stringeness of cultural norms

Question 25

6 dimensions of culture

Answer 25

• Hofstede, 1980
• Power distance
• Individualism – Collectivism
• Masculinity – Femininity
• Uncertainty avoidance
• Long – Short term orientation
• Indulgence – Restraint

Question 26

Dynamic model of culture

Answer 26

• Schwartz, 2013

Question 27

Value dimensions

Answer 27

• Inglehart, 1977
• Traditional versus Secular Rational: in reference to religion, authority, and family
• Survival versus Self-expression: economic/physical security versus global concern and tolerance