Development across cultures

Question 1

Define what is meant by ethnocentrism

Answer 1

-Evaluating other cultures according to preconceptions, standards and customs of one’s culture
-Creates bias in who does research and who participates

Question 2

Describe the Ecological model proposed by Brofenbrenner (1974)

Answer 2

-“It can be said that much developmental psychology is the science of the strange behaviour of children in strange situations with strange adults for the briefest possible periods of time”
-Child -> Microsystem -> Mesosystem -> Ecosystem -> Macrosystem -> Chronosystem

Question 3

Describe the research by Nielsen et al. (2017)

Answer 3

-Example of weird sample, weird researcher
-Reviewed 1582 articles published in top developmental psychology journals between 2006-2010

Question 4

How can we define culture?

Answer 4

-Social behaviour and norms of society
-Young children make use of multiple strategies to learn about culture

Question 5

What are the different types of social learning defined by Legare and Harris (2016)

Answer 5

-Emotion learning
-Natural pedagogy
-Questioning
-High fidelity imitation

Question 6

What are the 3 types of imitation?

Answer 6

-Imitation
-Mimicry
-High fidelity/Over imitation

Question 7

What is meant by imitation?

Answer 7

“Learning to do an act from seeing it done” (Thorndike, 1898)

Question 8

What is meant by mimicry?

Answer 8

“Occurs when a person unwittingly imitates the behaviour of another person”
(Lakin and Chartrand, 2003)

Question 9

What is meant by high fidelity imitation/over imitation?

Answer 9

“Copying another’s action despite visible evidence that it is unnecessary”
(Lyons, 2007)

Question 10

Describe the research conducted by Horner and Whiten (2004) looking into over imitation and culture

Answer 10

-A series of necessary and unnecessary actions are demonstrated on transparent and opaque puzzle boxes
-Chimpanzees copy everything on opaque box but solve the puzzle efficiently in the transparent box
-Children copy everything in both opaque boxes and transparent boxes
-Learn social convention can be important

Question 11

What did Whiten et al. (2016) find in regards to developing and maintaining culture?

Answer 11

-Demand characteristics may occur, as children and adults may engage in over imitation

Question 12

What did Krieger et al. (2020) find in regards to developing and maintaining culture?

Answer 12

-Social selectivity may occur, as there is evidence suggesting that children imitate ingroup vs outgroup

Question 13

What did Kenward et al. (2011) find in regards to developing and maintaining culture?

Answer 13

-Maintenance occurs as children protest when a puppet fails to perform unnecessary actions

Question 14

What can global phenomenon cause?

Answer 14

-Over imitation has been demonstrated in children from many countries around the world

Question 15

What is meant by ownership?

Answer 15

-Relating to material possessions can reflect cultural values e.g. extent of wealth, generosity and political ideals
-Ownership concepts develop at the age of 2 such as ‘its mine’
-Gain attachment to objects (Faigenbaum, 2005) and have exclusive control over certain objects (Rochat, 2011)

Question 16

What did Rochat et al. (2014) look into?

Answer 16

-Ownership relating to how culture impacts social development

Question 17

Describe the procedure of the research conducted by Rochat et al., (2014)

Answer 17

-Looked into whether early intuitions around ownership reflect cultural values or are there universal principles which govern ownership reasoning
-176 3-5 year olds from 7 different socio-economic backgrounds
-USA, China, Vanuatu, Brazil
-Private daycare, public daycare, village and street kids
-Rural and urban
-High, middle and low SES
-2 dolls who are friends took a walk together and ended up fighting foir possession over an object
-Different conditions were; first contact, familiarity, creation, rich-poor and neutral
-Children were asked ‘Whose is it?

Question 18

What were the results of Rochat’s study?

Answer 18

-By age 5, children in all cultures consistently attributed ownership in the creation and familiarity conditions
-No consistent pattern in first-contact or rich-poor conditions
-Children from USA and China were more likely to assign ownership to poor puppet
-CULTURE and SOCIO-ECONOMIC STATUS both have an influence on early intuitions around ownership

Question 19

What did Blake et al. (2015) look into?

Answer 19

-Sharing norms relating to how culture impacts social development

Question 20

Describe the procedure of the research conducted by Blake et al. (2015)

Answer 20

-Children play in pairs and one child is an actor
-Sweets are distributed on apparatus and actor chooses to accept or reject the distribution
-Rejecting an offer leads to 0 payoffs for everyone

Question 21

Describe the results of the study conducted by Blake et al. (2015)

Answer 21

-Low levels of rejection for ‘fair’ offers
-As children get older they tend to reject unfair offers when they are disadvantaged by the distribution of resources (not including mexican children)
-In USA, Canada and Uganda, older children reject unfair offers when they are advantaged by the distribution of resources
-Mexican, Chinese and Senegalese children are unlikely to reject unfair offers which advantage them

Question 22

Describe the research conducted by Weltzien et al., (2019)

Answer 22

-7-8 year old Indian children completed a priming interview designed to promote independence or interdependence
-Sharing game where they could choose between one of two resource distributions
-Take two for self
- Divide resources equally between self and another child

Question 23

Describe the results of the study conducted by Weltzien et al., (2019)