HC 8 cultural psychology Flashcards
Cognition?
Al mental processes we use to transform sensory input into knowledge, including attention, sensation and perception
Culture as cognition?
= 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
Culture and attention: holistic perception?
Attending to the relationship between the object and the context in which it is located
Culture and attention: analytic perception?
Context-independent and analytical perceptual processes that focuses on salient objects, relationships between objects and the context of the
object
Culture and attention?
Depends on wheter you focus on the whole or on the details on what you give your attention.
Culture and perception?
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
Culture and perception: carpented world hypothesis?
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
Culture and perception: foreshortening hypothesis?
We interpret vertical lines as horizontal lines
extending into the distance; vertical lines represent long distances (in open spaces)
Culture and thinking: categorization?
the process by which objects are grouped or classified together based on their perceived similarities
Why categorization?
helps with keeping track of thoughts and observations
culture affects how you categorize things together
Culture and thinking: memory?
- 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
Culture and thinking: math?
- cultures that use a base 10 system make fewer errors than others in counting
Gender stratification & math?
= gaps between genders in math performances depend on opportunities
Culture and thinking: problem solving?
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
Culture and thinking: creativity?
–> 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
Dialectical thinking?
= tendency to accept what seem to be contradictions in thought or belief
–> east Asians prefer this kind of thinking
Positive logical deteminism?
Tendency to see contradictions as mutually
exclusive categories (one or the other, yes or no)
–> American & West-European thinking
Naïve dialecticism?
both can be true, middle ground, things are not clear cut
Counterfactual thinking?
= 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
Dreams?
Children in peaceful areas reported more inner anxiety scenes, children in war areas reported more external scenes of anxiety
Time and culture?
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
How does culture influence pain?
- The cultural construction of pain sensation
- The language associated with pain expression
- The structure of pain’s causes and cures
- Display rules of pain differ among culture
Western approaches to intelligence?
- 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
Why are there cultural differences in IQ? Sternberg’s subtheories: contextual intelligence?
Contextual intelligence: an individual’s ability to adapt to the environment, solving problems in specific situations