HC 8 cultural psychology

Question 1

Cognition?

Answer 1

Al mental processes we use to transform sensory input into knowledge, including attention, sensation and perception

Question 2

Culture as cognition?

Answer 2

= culture as a knowledge system
Use priming studies across bicultural individual and investigate how they react depending on a cultural context
–> Culture as a pair of glasses how you see the world

Question 3

Culture and attention: holistic perception?

Answer 3

Attending to the relationship between the object and the context in which it is located

Question 4

Culture and attention: analytic perception?

Answer 4

Context-independent and analytical perceptual processes that focuses on salient objects, relationships between objects and the context of the
object

Question 5

Culture and attention?

Answer 5

Depends on wheter you focus on the whole or on the details on what you give your attention.

Question 6

Culture and perception?

Answer 6

People’s perceptoons of the world and physical reality are not the same
–> Blind spot in the eye which is filled up with micro eye movements called microsaccades

Question 7

Culture and perception: carpented world hypothesis?

Answer 7

people in urbanized, industrialized societies are
used to seeing things that are rectangular in shape and unconsciously come to expect things to have square corners
–> Front-horizontal foreshortening

Question 8

Culture and perception: foreshortening hypothesis?

Answer 8

We interpret vertical lines as horizontal lines
extending into the distance; vertical lines represent long distances (in open spaces)

Question 9

Culture and thinking: categorization?

Answer 9

the process by which objects are grouped or classified together based on their perceived similarities

Question 10

Why categorization?

Answer 10

 helps with keeping track of thoughts and observations
 culture affects how you categorize things together

Question 11

Culture and thinking: memory?

Answer 11

• hindsight bias: people adjusting their memory for something after they find out the true outcome
• illiterate individuals have better memory as they are unable to write things down
• serial position effect: we remember things first and last in a list best
• differences in episodic memory (= recollection of specific events) as European Americans had better episodic memory than Asian Americans
• autobiographical memory

Question 12

Culture and thinking: math?

Answer 12

• cultures that use a base 10 system make fewer errors than others in counting

Question 13

Gender stratification & math?

Answer 13

= gaps between genders in math performances depend on opportunities

Question 14

Culture and thinking: problem solving?

Answer 14

Problem solving is the process by which we attempt to discover ways of achieving
goals that do not seem readily available
–> depends on the context of the problem, if you are familiar with it you can easily
solve it

Question 15

Culture and thinking: creativity?

Answer 15

–> countries high on uncertainty avoidance prefer creative individuals to work
through organizational norms, rules and procedures
–> countries high on power distance prefer creative individuals to gain support from
those in authority before action is taken
–> collectivistic countries prefer creative people to seek cross functional support for their efforts

Question 16

Dialectical thinking?

Answer 16

= tendency to accept what seem to be contradictions in thought or belief
–> east Asians prefer this kind of thinking

Question 17

Positive logical deteminism?

Answer 17

Tendency to see contradictions as mutually
exclusive categories (one or the other, yes or no)
–> American & West-European thinking

Question 18

Naïve dialecticism?

Answer 18

both can be true, middle ground, things are not clear cut

Question 19

Counterfactual thinking?

Answer 19

= hypothetical beliefs about the past that could have occurred in order to avoid or change a negative outcome
–> If I studied harder I would have got a better grade
–> Found in most cultures, the emotion of regret appears to be universal

Question 20

Dreams?

Answer 20

Children in peaceful areas reported more inner anxiety scenes, children in war areas reported more external scenes of anxiety

Question 21

Time and culture?

Answer 21

Some aspects of time are different in each culture, like punctuality and difference in walking
pace depending on temperature, economy and whether the country is collectivistic or
individualistic

Question 22

How does culture influence pain?

Answer 22

1. The cultural construction of pain sensation
2. The language associated with pain expression
3. The structure of pain’s causes and cures
   - Display rules of pain differ among culture

Question 23

Western approaches to intelligence?

Answer 23

• Unidimensional approach: one general intelligence factor –> Spearman’s g
• Multidimensional approach: analytical, creative, practical, emotional, social, and sexual intelligence
  –> see intelligence as having school success, but this may not be the same all over the world. Across the world different terms are seen as intelligent

Question 24

Why are there cultural differences in IQ? Sternberg’s subtheories: contextual intelligence?

Answer 24

Contextual intelligence: an individual’s ability to adapt to the environment, solving problems in specific situations

Question 25

Why are there cultural differences in IQ? Sternberg’s subtheories: experciental intelligence?

Answer 25

The ability to formulate new ideas and combine unrelated facts

Question 26

Why are there cultural differences in IQ? Sternberg’s subtheories: componential intelligence?

Answer 26

The ability to think abstractly, process information, and
determine what needs to be done

Question 27

Why are there cultural differences in IQ? Sternberg’s subtheories: collective intelligence?

Answer 27

The general ability of a group to perform a wide variety of tasks

Question 28

Genes and ecology?

Answer 28

• Intellectual abilities are inborn
• Supported by correlation test scores of identical twins raised separately (r = .90)
• Certain conditions affect cognitive development (iodine deficiency)
  –> genetic component in how intelligent individual people are

Question 29

What says the bell curve about intelligence?

Answer 29

• Says that IQ is unchangeable and determines success in life
  –> poverty explained by low intelligence
• More intelligent people often have a higher status and clas

Question 30

The buts with the bell curve?

Answer 30

• The opportunities you have and your education have great effect on your
  intelligence, the potential you have confounds with performance
• Interventions are underestimated
• Ethnicity is confounded with social, educational, and economic factors

Question 31

Lynn & Verhanen controversies about IQ and culture?

Answer 31

–> took bell curve on a global level (looked ad international IQ-levels)
–> conclusions that Western societies have people with higher IQ and thus better
societies is very controversial
–> problems occur because taking a western test and applying it in Africa does not
work

Question 32

Gender and IQ?

Answer 32

• Female participants score higher in verbal fluency, writing and perceptual speed
• Male participants score higher in visual-spatial and mathematical problem solving

Question 33

The flynn effect?

Answer 33

= describes that our IQ scores (in western industrialized societies) are rising, people are becoming more intelligent

Question 34

Reasons for the Flynn effect?

Answer 34

Reasons:
1. Better education and test familiarity
2. More stimulating environment
3. Nutrition

Question 35

Study about link between socioeconomic status and intelligence?

Answer 35

Study: genetic influences (that influence intelligence) are fully realized under advantageous
socioeconomic status conditions
- US: genetics is related with socioeconomic status –> less opportunities for everyone to get the education they would desire
- Western Europe/Australia: no relationship or reversed  more opportunities for everyone to get the education they want, independent of socioeconomic status

Question 36

How does the environment influence the development of intelligence?

Answer 36

• Availability of and access to resources
• Educational opportunities and quality
• Curriculum discussed
  –> focus on math (like in Asia) people will use it more and get better at it
  –> difference between street and school knowledge
• Beliefs, attitudes (stereotypes, low-effort syndrome), practices
• Family climate: if academic performance is seen as important

Question 37

Culture free tests: raven’s progressive matrices?

Answer 37

= about selecting what the next piece of a sequence would be like

Question 38

Cognitive vs. cultural complexity tasks, which task has the most cultural differences??

Answer 38

• Attention and short-term memory has small cultural differences
• Working memory has moderate cultural differences
• Fluid reasoning has the biggest cultural differences

Question 39

Results from a test testing if matching test & group would result in better performance, or that the test is influenced by the g-factor?

Answer 39

short term memory, working memory, and figural fluid reasoning: scores depend on what is
familiar to you, what is your culture, you score better on the test
–> support for the first hypothesis (matching test and group would result in better
performance)