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
Why are there cultural differences in IQ? Sternberg’s subtheories: experciental intelligence?
The ability to formulate new ideas and combine unrelated facts
Why are there cultural differences in IQ? Sternberg’s subtheories: componential intelligence?
The ability to think abstractly, process information, and
determine what needs to be done
Why are there cultural differences in IQ? Sternberg’s subtheories: collective intelligence?
The general ability of a group to perform a wide variety of tasks
Genes and ecology?
- 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
What says the bell curve about intelligence?
- 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
The buts with the bell curve?
- 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
Lynn & Verhanen controversies about IQ and culture?
–> 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
Gender and IQ?
- Female participants score higher in verbal fluency, writing and perceptual speed
- Male participants score higher in visual-spatial and mathematical problem solving
The flynn effect?
= describes that our IQ scores (in western industrialized societies) are rising, people are becoming more intelligent
Reasons for the Flynn effect?
Reasons:
1. Better education and test familiarity
2. More stimulating environment
3. Nutrition
Study about link between socioeconomic status and intelligence?
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
How does the environment influence the development of intelligence?
- 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
Culture free tests: raven’s progressive matrices?
= about selecting what the next piece of a sequence would be like
Cognitive vs. cultural complexity tasks, which task has the most cultural differences??
- Attention and short-term memory has small cultural differences
- Working memory has moderate cultural differences
- Fluid reasoning has the biggest cultural differences
Results from a test testing if matching test & group would result in better performance, or that the test is influenced by the g-factor?
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)
