Culture Flashcards
There is no consensus on a definition, but many similarities:
Rohner 1984
highly variable systems of meaning that are learnt and shared by people from one generation to the next in an identifiable population
Berry et al., 2011
Cross-cultural psychology is the study of relationships between cultural context and human behaviour
Why is Culture Important?
- Human behaviour does not exist in a cultural vacuum.
- Culture provides a context for understanding human development and behaviour.
- Existing research has challenged the universality of some prior findings.
WEIRD Samples!
Henrich, Heine & Norenzayan (2010)
- 96% of samples in psychology come from countries representing only 12% of the world’s population!
- A randomly selected American UG is 4,000x more likely to be a participant than a randomly selected person from a country outside the West!
- Psychologists make claims about the generalisability of human behaviour based on WEIRD samples:
- Western
- Educated
- Industrialized
- Rich
- Democratic
Henrich et al. (2010)
- researchers assume there is little variation across populations and that standard subjects are representative of the species.
- BUT… WEIRD samples are frequent outliers across a wide range of psychological domains!
WEIRD Samples!
- Fairness in economic decision making – 1 example from Henrich et al. (2010):
- Ultimatum Game (UG)
Characterising Cultures by Values
Hofstede (1980)
questionnaire to 117,000 managers of multinational companies in 40 countries.
Factor analysis revealed:
- Power Distance
- Uncertainty Avoidance
- Masculinity-Femininity
- Individualism-Collectivism = most widely used dimension
- Time Perspective*
Characterising Cultures by Values
•Hofstede (1980) –
- GB is individualistic and concerned with material success
- Denmark is individualistic and caring/egalitarian
- Hong Kong is accepting of power hierarchies and collectivistic
Characterising People within Cultures
•IND-COL dimension can be measured at the individual level:
•Markus & Kitayama’s (1991) self-construal theory:
- Independent self-construal (IndSC): person’s identity is seen as a product of stable internal traits and is separate and unique from others.
- Interdependent self-construal (InterSC): person’s identity is intertwined with others and defined by those relationships.
Characterising People within Cultures
Markus & Kitayama’s (1991)
Characterising People within Cultures
•BUT…
Women in Western societies are more likely than men to define themselves in terms of their relationships!
Relational self-construal (RelSC)
- individual difference in the extent to which people define themselves in reference to close personal relationships (e.g., spouse/close friend).
- NOT about group membership or social roles.
Cross, Hardin & Gercek-Swing (2011)
The Measurement of Self-Construal
- Questionnaires – Self-Construal Scale (Singelis, 1994) is the most commonly used.
- 12 items on IndSC & 12 items on InterSC
- Likert scale – 1 (strongly disagree) to 7 (strongly agree)
The Measurement of Self-Construal
•Twenty Statements Task – (Kuhn & McPartland, 1954):
- Participants complete 20 sentence stems that start with “I am…”
- Statements are coded into IndSC, InterSC and RelSC.
- The number of statements in each category then serves as a measure of self-construal.
The Measurement of Self-Construal
•Priming Self-Construal – many different priming tasks.
•Trafimow, Triandis & Goto (1991) asked people to think of what makes them different from their friends and family (IndSC prime) or what makes them similar to their friends and family (InterSC prime).
- It assumes that people in all cultures have both the IndSC and InterSC.
- It allows cause-effect relationships to be investigated.
Cross-Cultural Differences in Attention
- Masuda & Nisbett (2001): a link between self-construal & attention to visual scenes.
- East Asian individuals process holistically – perception of objects is bound to the social context.
- Westerners process the focal object.
- Assumed to stem from differences in Ancient Greek vs. Ancient Chinese societies.
Cross-Cultural Differences in Attention
•Experiment 1: Masuda & Nisbett (2001, p.924)
- Participants saw 45 original objects & 45 novel objects.
- The background was manipulated: (a) original (b) none (c) novel
- Participants indicated whether they had seen the object (Yes/No).
- DV: number correctly recalled.