Dimensions of culture Flashcards
What is culture?
- Concept originating in anthropology
- Increasing impact on social sciences over course of 20th century
- Kroeber & Kluckhohn (1963) famously listed 161 different definitions!
Anthropological definitions
- includes
- “That complex whole which includes knowledge, belief, art, morals, laws, customs and any other capabilities and habits acquired by man [sic] as a member of society” (Tylor, 1871)
- “The man-made [sic] part of the human environment” (Herskovits, 1948)
— Includes both physical artefacts and social systems
Psychological definitions
- “The totality of equivalent and complementary learned meanings maintained by a human population, or by identifiable segments of a population, and transmitted from one generation to the next (Rohner, 1984) (The culture belongs to a group of people and gets transmitted)
- “The collective programming of the mind that distinguishes the members of one group […] of people from another (Hofstede, 2001)
(alongs to groups of people and is linked to how we distinguish groups of people from each other)
Social systems (cultural groups)
- definitions
- what can you have cultural groups at?
- social systems…
- cultures…
- what do cultures make/ allow for?
- “The behaviour of multiple individuals within a culturally-organized population, including their patterns of interaction and networks of social relationships” (Rohner, 1984)
- Can have cultural groups at different levels - might include nations, organisations, families, etc.
- Social systems ‘have’ cultures
- Cultures do not ‘have’ social systems
- Cultures make behaviour comprehensible and allows people to make sense of the world and each other
(Different groups of people can have shared means which they communicate with each other and transmit over generations. Those meanings can differentiate groups from each other.)
Cross-cultural, cultural and indigenous approaches:
some potential pitfalls
- Theorising based on stereotypes
– NB power differentials
– Importance of exploring (willing to learn what pp’s and data tells you) - Methodological issues
– Working in multiple languages
– Comparability of constructs
– Response styles (e.g., acquiescence) (in how they use the scale)
– Cultures are not individuals
Emic and etic perspectives
(See Berry, 1989)
Emic approaches
- grounded in specific cultural context - no claim to generality or attempt to compare
Etic approaches
- aspire to universality or at least comparability (that transcend cultures which apply to everyone) - imposed etic vs. derived etic
imposed- researchers from one culture use their own cultural components to try understand everyone
derived- start with etic approaches and then try to find comparative concepts and make comparisons
Cross-cultural psychology
- How and why do psychological processes differ across cultures?
- origins in?
- Question: How and why do psychological processes differ across cultures?
– Influence of cultural context on individuals
– Often focuses on cross-national comparison
– Relativism → higher-order universality - Origins in social/organisational psychology
– Mainly surveys, some experiments
Cultural psychology
- How do cultures ‘work’?
- ______ → ______
- Question: How do cultures ‘work’?
– Psychological study of cultural processes
– Relationship between individual and society
– Often ‘within-culture’ focus - Social anthropology → social cognition
– Qualitative studies in single cultures → experiments in two or more cultures
Indigenous psychologies
How can psychology become more globally representative?
movement within psychology which is focusing on overcoming power dynamics
Question: How can psychology become more globally representative?
- Overcoming power dynamics by empowering diverse local perspectives (~decolonisation)
- Indigenous methods
- Initially avoid cultural comparisons
- “Psychology” = Western indigenous psychology
- Can lead to cross-indigenous approach
Comparative culturology
- How do societies differ in their cultural characteristics?
- ______ → ______
studying the cultural component we inhibit
- Question: How do societies differ in their cultural characteristics?
– Often confused with cross-cultural psychology
– Focus on describing cultural norms of societies, not individuals’ psychological functioning
– Societies provide the cultural contexts for individuals’ psychological functioning - Business studies → political science
– Large multinational surveys
Hofstede’s project and the beginnings of comparative culturology:
Early cross-cultural studies:
- failures to …
- problem in…
- need…
- attempts…
- Failures to replicate US findings:
– Conformity (shown in rest of world > US & Europe)
– Social loafing (people work less hard when they’re in a group) (US effects reversed in Pacific Asia) - Problem is how to explain these differences
– Showing differences between nations is just description, but social science demands explanation! - Need a theory of how cultures differ
- Attempts to construct cultural ‘map of the world’
Hofstede’s project
- IBM (HERMES) employee surveys
– Originally conducted 1967 and 1973
– 116,000 respondents in 72 countries
– Questions about job satisfaction, perceptions of work situations, personal goals and beliefs
– Wide variety of response formats - Hofstede conducted secondary analysis to look for dimensions of cultural variation
Cultures and individuals
“Cultures are not king-size individuals [. . .] and their internal logic cannot be understood in the terms used for the personality dynamics of individuals” (Hofstede, 2001, p. 17).
He did not assume that the differences he found between societies would also have comparative differences between individuals.
The ecological fallacy
We should interpret something in a group level as applying to individuals of vice versa
- Ecological level of analysis
- Robinson’s (1950) paradox:
– US states: %immigrants and %literacy (r =.526)
– Individuals: immigrant status and literacy (r = -.118) - Different explanations at each level of analysis
– Ecological fallacy is falsely extrapolating group-level findings to individual level of explanation
– Reverse ecological fallacy is wrongly attributing properties of individuals to cultures - (Robinson noticed that correlations can be different across different levels of analysis
- states that have higher immigration have higher literacy
- But in the individual level within these states you don’t find this correlation and you actually find a negative correlation)
Survey response styles
- Methodological problem
– People in different cultures use response scales in different ways
– Variation in acquiescence – in some cultures people tend to agree more with everything - Hofstede’s solution
– Country mean agreement with all items
– Subtract and/or control in analyses
Hofstede’s analysis
- Analysis at ecological level
- Sufficient data for CC analysis of 40 countries
- Each item → weighted country mean
- Combination of averages within different occupational groups within IBM (marketing and service depts.)
- Corrected for acquiescence where possible
- Theoretically guided data exploration led to ‘discovery’ of 4 dimensions of CC variation. The fist two were hypothesised in advance. The second two were early exploratory.
