Issues and Debates

Question 1

Culture Bias

Answer 1

The tendency to judge people in terms of one’s own cultural assumptions.

Question 2

Universality

Answer 2

Any underlying characteristic of human beings that is capable of being applied to all members of the species despite differences of experience and upbringing.

Question 3

Ethnocentrism

Answer 3

the use of our own ethnic group as a basis for judgement’s about other ethnic groups. Focus our own beliefs, customs and behaviours as ‘normal’, other ethnic groups as ‘strange’.

Question 4

Imposed Etic

Answer 4

an ‘imposed’ etic bias occurs when an observer attempts to generalize observations from one culture to another.

Question 5

Cultural relativism

Answer 5

the theory that beliefs, customs and morality exist in relation to the particular culture from which they originate and are not absolute.

Question 6

Individualistic culture

Answer 6

is a society which is characterised by individualism, which is the prioritization, or emphasis, of the individual over the entire group.

Question 7

free will

Answer 7

the power of acting without the constraint of necessity or fate; the ability to act at ones own discretion.

Question 8

Determinism

Answer 8

The doctrine that all events, including human action, are ultimately determined by causes regarded as external to the will.

Question 9

Hard determinism

Answer 9

a view of free will that determinism is true and is incompatible with free will and that free will does not exist.

Question 10

Soft determinism

Answer 10

is the theory that human behaviours and action are wholly determined by casual events, but human free will does exist when defined as the capacity to act according to ones nature.

Question 11

Biological determinism

Answer 11

refers to the idea that all human behaviour is innate, determined by genes, brain size, or other biological attributes.

Question 12

Environmental determinism

Answer 12

the study of how the physical environment predisposes societies and states towards particular development trajectories.

Question 13

Psychic determinism

Answer 13

theories that all mental processes are not spontaneous but are determined by the unconscious or pre-existing mental complexes.

Question 14

Nature

Answer 14

refers to innate qualities like human nature or genetics.

Question 15

Empiricists

Answer 15

a philosophical belief that states your knowledge of the world is based on your experiences, particularly your sensory experiences.

Question 16

Nurture

Answer 16

refers to care given to children by parents or, more broadly, to environmental influences such as media and marketing.

Question 17

Heredity

Answer 17

the passing on of physical or mental characteristics genetically from one generation to another.

Question 18

Heritability coefficient

Answer 18

is the proportion of this total variation between individuals in a given population due to genetic variation. ranges from 0 to 1.

Question 19

Environment

Answer 19

the surroundings or conditions in which a person, animal, or plant lives or operates.

Question 20

Interactionalist approach

Answer 20

the spreading of liberal democracy throughout thew world in order to bring an end to conflicts.

Question 21

Diatheis- stress model

Answer 21

the attempt to explain a disorder as the result of an interaction between a predispositional vulnerability and a stress caused by life experiences.

Question 22

Epigenetics

Answer 22

the study of changes in organisms caused by modification of gene expression rather than alteration of the genetic code itself.

Question 23

Implications

Answer 23

the action or state of being involved in something or the conclusion that can be drawn from something although it is not explicitly stated.

Question 24

Shared environments

Answer 24

anything that two twins have in common – usually parents, siblings, household, and neighborhood.

Question 25

Constructivism

Answer 25

The essential core of constructivism is that learners actively construct their own knowledge and meaning from their experiences

Question 26

Genotype-environment interaction

Answer 26

is when two different genotypes respond to environmental variation in different ways. A norm of reaction is a graph that shows the relationship between genes and environmental factors when phenotypic differences are continuous.