Lecture 28- Cultural Psychology 1

Question 1

Does cultural psychology fit nicely nested within social psychology?

Answer 1

No, in reality it is connected with a lot of different ideas + subfields (lots of overlap)

Question 2

Who does cultural psychology apply to?

Answer 2

Everyone we are all influenced by culture it’s not just those on the outs with ‘distinctive’ culture i.e. being western is still a culture

Question 3

What is the occlusion technique (use context of sport to explain)?

Answer 3

Show a participant a video Nadal serving and then stop it just before he hits the ball and ask expert/novice participant to try and anticipate the location of the serve.

Question 4

If a difference in sporting ability i.e. elite athletes was just based on physical differences not perception what would we expect to find when using the occlusion technique?

Answer 4

• Everyone would receive the same input as would perceive the game/ thing in the same way
• Therefore, shouldn’t be a difference in the experts and novice’s anticipation of where the ball will end up

Question 5

What was actually found in the handball occlusion study (Cocić, Vaci, Prieger, & Bilalić, 2021) ?

Answer 5

Method:
1. Individually, elite and novice participants watch a video of a player
shooting a goal in handball from the goalie’s point of view
2. The video is then stopped at one of three time points.
3. The participant must guess what part of the goal the attacking player is
going to throw the ball

Results:
At first time point both the athlete’s and novices were equally bad at predicting where the ball would go (low accuracy). At second time point however athlete’s were way better than novices. Then at third everyone pretty good (but athlete’s still better). This shows there is a difference in perception/ how they view the game between athlete’s and novices.

Question 6

Why can athletes perceive information better?

Answer 6

Perceiving order allows elite athletes to extract critical information
• Make unconscious predictions about what will happen next
• Novices are looking at the correct area of the opponents body, they just didn’t
have the cognitive database needed to extract information from it

-same info= different thinking

Question 7

Is sport the same as culture?

Answer 7

No: Each sport is determined by explicitly defined goals and boundaries according to a particular set of rules. These rules guide the behaviours of players and they become better when they learn/ follow these ‘rules’. Sports rules “limit” the complexity.

This provides a difference to culture where there is no rule book. We need to experience it for ourselves to understand/ get better.

Question 8

What is the analogy between sport and culture?

Answer 8

They both change how we think, understand and behave in the world around us.

Question 9

What does the study about who you would save in a fire (mother or spouse) by Wu et al. (2016) show? How does these findings differ between different age groups?

Answer 9

• For 19 year olds Taiwanese have clear preference for saving mum, American clear preference for saving spouse
• For older people (with spouses) there is still cultural difference but less pronounced in Taiwanese (i.e. more said they would save their spouse as opposed to before). And it was more extreme for Americans (more people who said they would save their mother swapped to saving their spouse).

Question 10

What is the Wu et al. study an example of?

Answer 10

Cross-cultural methodology: participants differ in how they receive/ perceive the same input according to their culture

Typically Americans/ western cultures are more independent so would value mother less: grow independent from them. Whereas more Asian cultures are interdependent and would value mother more: wouldn’t have strayed so far

Question 11

How is the occlusion technique and cross-cultural techniques different in methodology?

Answer 11

• For occlusion there is a ‘right’ answer

- There is not a right answer for the cross cultural differences

Question 12

What is the definition of culture according to Markus & Conner, 2014)?

Answer 12

The distinctive customs, values, beliefs, knowledge, art, and language of a
society or a community. These learned values and concepts are passed on
from generation to generation, and they are the basis for everyday behaviors
and practices

Question 13

What are the 3 key elements of cultural psychology definition from the APA?

Answer 13

1. An extension of general psychology concerned with psychological processes
   that are inherently organized by culture
2. There is a focus on explaining how human psychological functions (i.e.,
   behaviour, emotions and cognition) are culturally influenced through various
   forms of relations between people and their cultural contexts
3. An interdisciplinary field that relates most closely to cultural, social,
   developmental, and cognitive issues.

Question 14

How are cultural differences produced?

Answer 14

Dominant cultural social practice/norms which reinforce particular depictions of the self e.g. Independence/Interdependence

Question 15

What are the two predictions of the affect valuation theory (Tsai, Knutson & Fung, 2006)?

Answer 15

• First prediction: Ideal affect is shaped by cultural factors
• Second Prediction: Differences in ideal affect will show up in behaviour

Question 16

Draw the table for the dimension of affect as outlined by Tsai, Knutson & Fung (2006)?

Answer 16

Table drawn on slides but basically two dimensions valance and aurosal which can be high or low.

Question 17

Which of the positive affects do Americans tend to prefer as opposed to asians?

Answer 17

-European Americans would be more likely to value high arousal positive affect (e.g. excitement, enthusiasm)

-Hong Kong Chinese and Taiwanese would be more likely to value
low arousal positive affect (e.g. calm, peaceful)

Question 18

What 3 studies were used to back up the fact that European Americans prefer high aurosal positive affect and Asians prefer low aurosal positive affect?

Answer 18

-Study 1= participants simply rated their preferred effect. European
American consistently liked both but Hong Kong Chinese had a clear linear line showing low preference for high aurosal positive states and high preference for low aurosal positive states (above the European American preference)

• Study 2: measured the display of affect through smiles (excited and calm) to see if the preferences actually emerged in behaviour. Use a facial coding system. Found Chinese lower in both types of smile than US and had bigger bar for excited smiles (not aligning with expected trend). The US however did align with expected trend though as had far more excited smiles then calm smiles.
• Study 3: looked at the the top selling stories in the US and Taiwan and used the facial coding system to mark low and high aurosal faces. 3 dimensions were eyes open (high aurosal), eye closed (low aurosal) and calm face (low aurosal). The study showed mixed results where the Americans were higher in both eyes open (by a lot) and eyes closed. The Taiwanese had a lot more calm faces though as would expect by affect preference.

Question 19

Is culture stable? What idea emerges from this?

Answer 19

-Culture is not a stable set of beliefs or values that reside inside people.
Instead, culture is located in the world, in patterns of ideas, practices,
institutions, products, and artifacts
-This creates the cultural cycle

Question 20

Can a single person know all there is to know about a culture?

Answer 20

Culture is learned behaviour so no, one individual cannot possible know all the laws, origin stories, theories or norms at play in their culture

Question 21

What are the four ‘i’s in the cultural cycle and how do they interact?

Answer 21

• Ideas, Institutions, Interactions, Individual
• They all feed off each other: Cultures emerge from the interactions of the various minds of the people that live within them, and elements of the cultures, in turn, shape how those minds operate (Heine, 2020)

Question 22

What is ideas?

Answer 22

Big pervasive cultural ideas

e.g. what is good? what is moral?

Question 23

What are institutions?

Answer 23

Institutions that reflect and promote the culture e.g. legal system, government, the
media

Question 24

What are interactions?

Answer 24

Daily experiences personalizing e.g. work, school

Question 25

What is the individual?

Answer 25

Psychological structures and processes e.g. the self, cognition

Question 26

What phrase is used to describe how the mind cannot be considered separate from culture?

Answer 26

One cannot be a self by one’s self: culture meanings are entangled with the way in which the mind operates