Culture Flashcards
What is culture?
Culture is any kind of information that is acquired from other members of one’s species through social learning that can influence an individual’s behaviours. A culture is a group of people who are existing within some kind of shared context. It includes ideas, beliefs, habits, and practices
What are some themes in cultural psychology?
Psychological processes are shaped by experiences, universal brains and cultural experiences
What is a central debate within cultural psychology?
Is the mind independent from or intertwined with culture?
What are some General Psychology assumptions?
The mind operates on a set of natural and universal laws, context and content are not considered, the abstract central processing unity (CPU)
Why is the psychological database ‘WEIRD’?
Data typically comes from Western, educated, industrialized, rich, democratic populations
Why should we study cultural psychology?
Increase understanding, general psychology is narrow-focused, there is an increase in globalization, “everyone is the same everywhere” is limiting, normalize group differences (multicultural approach)
What are the approaches to cultural psychology?
Symbolic, individualistic, activity
What is the Symbolic approach?
The predominant approach to cultural psychology defines culture as shared symbols, concepts, meanings, and linguistic terms. These are socially constructed in the sense of being produced by individuals in concert. Cultural symbols are regarded as organizing psychological phenomena. They do so by labelling and categorizing information and directing responses in particular ways
What is a weakness of the Symbolic approach?
Overlooks practical activities, artifacts, and conditions, minimizes individual differences in concepts and processes
What is the Activity approach?
Activity theorists argue that psychological phenomena are formed as people engage in socially organized activity. Practical, socially organized activity is the primary cultural influence on psychology
What is a weakness of the Activity approach?
Activity and tools are conceived as devoid of social content, unclear about how activity organizes psychological processes
What is the Individualistic approach?
This approach champions individual creativity in selectively assimilating culture. Advocates of this approach reject the idea that culture has the power to organize psychological functions. Instead, culture is regarded as an external context which the individual utilizes and reconstructs as he sees fit. This individualistic approach (as I shall call it) defines culture as the outcome of a negotiated interaction between an individual and social institutions-conditions. In their negotiations, interpretations, selections, and modifications of institutions-conditions, individuals “co-construct” culture. Each individual constructs a personal culture out of his own experience
What is a weakness of the Individualistic approach?
Overlooks organized social action necessary to alter cultural and psychological phenomena
What is ethnocentrism?
Judging people from other cultures by the standards of your own culture
What are psychological universals and levels of analysis?
Non-universals (cultural inventions), Existential universal, Functional universal, Accessibility universal
