culture and gender issues

Question 1

define culture

Answer 1

• culture can be seen as shared meanings within a society

Question 2

explain how culture is an issue in research regarding obedience

Answer 2

• Blass (2012) reviewed studies done in the USA and from other countries and arrived at an average percentage of obedience in the USA of 60% and 66% in other countries
• there was a large variation of obedience levels found in the studies but the average figures were similar and similar to Milgrams findings
• Blass concludes that the similarity in findings in the different cultures showed that people have a powerful tendency to obey authority and this may be one of the universals of social behavior
• It could be that having people in an agentic state in a society is a useful survival trait; if everyone was autonomous it would be hard to have order and without order, a society would not function

Question 3

explain how culture is an issue in research regarding prejudice

Answer 3

• It is suggested that attitudes such as right-wing authoritarianism and social dominance orientation are stable across cultures so are possibly universal
• Cohrs found data in Germany, Adorno in the USA, and Duckitt and Sibley in Australia, and ALL found evidence of authoritarian attitude linking to prejudice
• Pettigrew looked at whether factors that affect prejudice differed in other counties such as the Netherlands, UK, France, and West Germany and found that there were universals relating to what affects prejudice

Question 4

explain how culture is an issue in regards to research of memory

Answer 4

• memory is not a tape recorder; it relies on schemas that we have learned through interacting with our environment as suggested by reconstructive memory
• the way memory is reconstructed using schemas is thought to be the case across all cultures so is universal in itself
• which means culture might affect what our memories are but the way memory works is not affected by culture
• Sebastian and Hernandez-Gil thought that culture affected memory when they suggested English speakers had one digit more in their memory span than Spanish speakers
• the researchers though that this was because of the syllables in the words for numbers in the Spanish language, so this could be said to be about culture

Question 5

explain how culture is an issue in regards to research about learning norms and beliefs

Answer 5

• learning theories can explain the importance of culture in learning e.g. social learning which suggests people copy what they see, including what others do
• thus society can pass down norms and beliefs and culture can be seen to affect behavior, as well as attitudes
• social learning theory can help to explain differences between cultures because children would be observing different behaviours, attitudes and reactions and would imitate them
• operant conditioning can help to explain the differences too if different responses are rewarded in different cultures and if we agree that we repeat behaviour that is rewarded

Question 6

explain how culture is an issue in regard to research about learning norms and beliefs

Answer 6

• learning theories can explain the importance of culture in learning e.g. social learning which suggests people copy what they see, including what others do
• thus society can pass down norms and beliefs and culture can be seen to affect behavior, as well as attitudes
• social learning theory can help to explain differences between cultures because children would be observing different behaviours, attitudes and reactions and would imitate them
• operant conditioning can help to explain the differences too if different responses are rewarded in different cultures and if we agree that we repeat behaviour that is rewarded

Question 7

define gender

Answer 7

gender includes a society’s gender behaviour traditions and norms, gender-related to behaviour or characteristics that are associated with a certain biological sex

Question 8

how do gender issues affect research in learning theories

Answer 8

• Bandura’s experiments using the Bobo doll found gender differences in imitative aggression and other types of aggression
• For example, boys were more likely to copy a male model and boys showed more physical aggression than girls
• these findings suggest that gender is an important variable when it comes to carrying out studies and it should be controlled accordingly

Question 9

how do gender issues affect research in social psychology

Answer 9

• Kilgam and Mann studied obedience, both when participants were ordering pain to be administered to someone else and when they had to do it
• used university students
• they found gender differences in obedience: when actually giving the shocks, obedience was 40% for males and 16% for females
• when ordering someone else to administer the shocks they found 68% obedience for males and 40% for female participants
• concluded that males are more obedient than females on average, so there may be gender differences

Question 10

how do gender issues affect research in biological psychology

Answer 10

• Brendgen looked at identical and non-identical twins, focusing on their physical and social aggression
• they found in general that physical aggression has a genetic basis but social aggression does not
• Brendgen looked at gender and physical and social aggression and found no gender differences
• Neither did they find that the relative contributions of genes and the environment differed according to gender
• so no differences between boys and girls when they looked at genetic and environmental contributions relating to physical and social aggression