Development Across Cultures

Question 1

what are the three common assumptions in developmental psychology?

Answer 1

1. development has a specific, universal timeline
2. development follows a consistent procedure regardless of external factors
   looks at whether or not development is maturational or stage-like
3. methods used to study development are suitable in different cultures

Question 2

What are the problems of the common assumptions?

Answer 2

the assumptions are all ethnocentric

Question 3

Define ethnocentric

Answer 3

using your own culture or ethnicity as a frame of reference to judge other cultures

Question 4

How does bias effect who does the research (experimenters)?

Answer 4

experimenters ask questions relevant to their own cultural experience

Question 5

How does bias effect who participates in research (participants) ?

Answer 5

• theories generated by western psychologist based on western cultural experiences
• people in other cultures may have completely different cultural experiences
• therefore questions/research not relevant to those ppts

Question 6

How can ethnocentrism cause an issue in research?

Answer 6

• problem is that having research generated by western psychologists based on western cultural experiences, is that the research then confirmed by western ppts
• hypothesis is confirmed as true
• but culture is not considered

Question 7

Outline Bronfenbrenner’s Ecological Model (1974)

Answer 7

• proposed that children are the centre of their ecosystem
• there are different levels to what influences a child’s development

Question 8

What is an issue with studying children (Bronfenbrenner, 1974)

Answer 8

• children are brought into strange situation with strange adults, asked to do strange tasks
• all happens in small amount of time
• only gather minute snapshot of child behaviour
• research gathered is extrapolated and applied to real world
• cause an issue as this may not be representative

Question 9

What does WEIRD stand for?

Answer 9

Western Educated Industrialised Rich and Democratic

Question 10

Outline Nielson (2017) study and what issue it highlights in the field of psychology

Answer 10

• evaluated articles published in top developmental psychology journals (2006-2010)
• reviewed articles for:
  who did the science
  where the person who did the science was based
  who the ppts or samples were

FINDINGS:
- found that 90% of ppts in all of developmental psychology studies came from WEIRD backgrounds
- but WEIRD backgrounds only make up 12% of global population

• highlights a reputation bias in the field

Question 11

What is culture?

Answer 11

an umbrella term that encompasses social behaviour and norms of human society

Question 12

How did Leagre and Nielson (2015) describe what culture is and how it might be learnt or shaped?

Answer 12

• culture = relatively stable overtime
• culture can be variable across communities
  e.g.: weddings

Question 13

What does it mean for culture to be stable overtime?

Answer 13

from generation to generation cultural beliefs, attitudes and behaviours remain the same

Question 14

What does it mean for culture to be cumulative?

Answer 14

this is where skills and social conventions are passed from one generation to the next

Question 15

How do children learn about culture?
(Legare & Harris, 2016)

Answer 15

through features of social learning

Question 16

What are the features of social learning that children use to learn about culture?

Answer 16

• emotion learning
  learning to display emotions in a normative way depending on the society they have grown up in
• natural pedagogy
  receptive to social cues
  direct contact or speech that is receptive to an infant that brings infants attention to action you are performing, this is before infant has said first words
• questioning
  asking why things are done
  natural curiosity as to how and why things are done in specific ways
• high-fidelity imitation
  copying another’s action despite visible evidence that it is causally unnecessary

Question 17

Identify 3 types of imitation

Answer 17

imitation
learning by seeing

mimicry
when person unknowingly imitates behaviour of another person

high-fidelity/overimitation
copying another’s action despite visible evidence that it is causally unnecessary

Question 18

Outline and explain the study demonstrating overimitation in chimpanzees
(Horner & Whiten, 2004)

Answer 18

• presented chimpanzees with two puzzle-boxes (one transparent, other is opaque)
• experimenter displayed series of necessary and unnecessary actions solving puzzle box
• found that chimps would copy everything experimenter did to solve opaque box but solved the transparent box efficiently
• in contrast, children as old as 5, will copy everything in both opaque and translucent conditions
• Horner and White proposed children prioritised learning social convention as more important than learning about physical causality

Question 19

Outline and explain the study demonstrating overimitation in chimpanzees
(Horner & Whiten, 2004)

Answer 19

• presented chimpanzees with two puzzle-boxes (one transparent, other is opaque)
• experimenter displayed series of necessary and unnecessary actions solving puzzle box
• found that chimps would copy everything experimenter did to solve opaque box but solved the transparent box efficiently
• in contrast, children as old as 5, will copy everything in both opaque and translucent conditions
• Horner and White proposed children prioritised learning social convention as more important than learning about physical causality

Question 20

Give 3 examples of how culture impacts social development

Answer 20

• ownership reasoning
• norms around sharing
• sharing and family structure

Question 21

Give 3 examples of how culture impacts social development

Answer 21

• ownership reasoning
• norms around sharing
• sharing and family structure

Question 22

Explain how culture around ownership reasoning impacts social development

Answer 22

• how the material possessions can reflect cultural values
• extent of wealth
• the generosity of culture we live in
• the political ideals
• concept of ownership develops around 2 years old
• shown through the phrase ‘it’s mine!’

Question 23

Outline Rochat et al (2014) study that looks into ownership and whether this reflects cultural values

Answer 23

• conducted a study to look at early beliefs about ownership and whether these reflected cultural values
• studies large sample of children
• sample from 7 different socio-cultural environments
• USA, China, Vanuatu, Brazil
• looked at children in private daycare, public daycare, village kids, street kids
• looked at high, middle and low socioeconomic status
• children sat down with experimenter from local environment
• told story about dolls who were friends
• dolls go on walk
• come across objects and fight over possession
• experiment had range of conditions to change different aspects of story

CONDITIONS:
- first contact
one of the dolls touched object first
- familiarity
one of the dolls had longer to spend with object
- creation condition
one of the dolls created objects
- rich-poor condition
two dolls found item but one was rich and the other doll was poor
- neutral condition
two dolls just found object

children then asked, ‘whose is the object?’

FINDINGS:
- by age 5 children in all cultures consistently said ownership should go to creation and familiarity conditions
- there was no consistent pattern in first-contact or rich-poor conditions.
- children from USA and China more likely to assign ownership to poor puppet

• conclude that the culture and SES both influence early beliefs about ownership

Question 24

Explain how culture around ‘norms around sharing’ impacts social development
(Blake et al, 2015) sweet study

Answer 24

• children were put into pairs
• one child was ‘actor’
• sweets distributed on apparatus
• actor gets to choose whether to accept the number of sweets allocated to them
• some conditions actor got 1 sweet and other child got 4 sweets, other condition actor got 4 sweets and other child got 1 sweet
• if actor accepted offer, children got the sweets allocated
• if actor rejected offer, no one got any sweets
• Blake et al asked the questions: does child reject unfair offers that disadvantage themselves and does children reject offer if it disadvantages other?

FINDINGS:
- across all cultures studies there was low level of rejection for ‘fair offers’
(when there was an equal distribution of sweets for actor and other child, children accepted this offer)

• as children got older, tendency to reject unfair offers
• younger children reject less and older children reject more (when there is an unfairness to distribution)
• in USA, Canada and Uganda = older children reject unfair offers when they are given more sweets (this way nobody gets sweets)
• in Mexico, Peru, China, Senegal = children more likely to accept the unfair offer where they get more sweets than other child

shows that there are cultural variations in the sensitivity to these fairness norms

Question 25

Explain how culture around ‘sharing and family structure’ impacts social development but outlining Weltzien et al (2019) study

Answer 25

• looked at what drives the differences in sharing resources

METHOD:
- studied 7-8 year old Indian children
- had children complete a priming interview
- interview designed to promote independence or interdependence
- children then completed sharing game
- children could choose between one of two resource distributions
- one resource distribution involved taking two for self
- one resource involved fair distribution

FINDINGS:
- as a whole, children behaved selfishly
- when children were primed to think about themselves, behaved more selfishly
- when children were primed to think about their relationships and codependency children from extended families had tendency towards more prosocial behaviour

Family levels = more important than country variable in terms of how family structure influences social development

• socio-cultural factors that exist within that country might have more of a predictive power on behaviour