Quiz 2 Flashcards
How does cultural psychology agree or conflict with indigenous psychology?
o Similarities: Emic perspective (less so than Indigenous) Preference for localized methods (but will use others if local methods are insufficient). Look at culture specifics and reject culture universals. Culture is viewed as being inseparable from the individual. Culture is internal to the person.
o Differences: Researcher that does not have to be a local (i.e., an outsider with an emic perspective). Indigenous uses “formal” psychological theories. In contrast, cultural psychology uses folk theories (ethnotheories I.e. cultural models). Cultural has roots in anthropology.
How does cultural psychology agree or conflict with cross-cultural psychology?
o Similarities:
Researcher is an outsider.
Can compare multiple
groups.
o Differences: Focuses on universals and ignores specifics. Does not use localized methods. Emic/etic perspective. Culture is treated as a variable and not a process (antecedent i.e., external to the person).
How might cultural psychologists working from the cultural anthropology tradition treat universals (using the four levels), indigenous or cross-cultural?
o Cross-cultural: Would focus on accessibility universals. o Indigenous: Would look at non- universals. o Cultural: Would look at non-universals i.e. culture specifics. o Evolution: Would look at functional universals, existential universals and accessibility universals.
Difference between KMP between indigenous and cultural psychology?
When KMP is used by Maori people it is considered indigenous. When someone outside of the Maori culture uses KMP it is cultural psychology.
Universalism vs relativism stances of indigenous, cultural and cross-cultural psychology.
Indigenous takes a relativist stance (culture is internal and subjective and have a preference for culture-specific).
Cultural psychology takes a relativist stance i.e. culture specifics and against universals.
Cross-Cultural psychology takes a moderate universalism stance and focuses on accessibility universals.
what are the two main methods of cultural psychology?
- Ethnography: science or broader term referring to methods that involve an outsider taking an aic perspective. Participant observation is an example of an ethnographic method.
• A systematic method of leaving your own cultural frame to engage in other perspectives. • It requires long-term interactions with a particular group that is unfamiliar to the researcher (i.e., not your cultural group). • The goal is to translate, it’s probably the oddest thing in the universe.
- Participant Observation:
• A technique of field research, used in anthropology and sociology, by which an investigator (participant observer ) studies the life of a group by sharing in its activities.
What are the four forms of observation in cultural psychology?
- Naturalistic
- Laboratory-Based
- Participant
- Non-Participant
what are the (4) benefits of ethnography?
1. Minimal equipment
required:
o Only requires two things,
the ability to observe and a
writing device to record our
observations on.
2. Is participant-driven:
o You learn the context from
people who know it best.
o For example, when
European explorers who die
in environments that
indigenous people thrive in.
It highlights that indigenous
people have unique
knowledge Europeans
could benefit from.
o For example, Burke and
Wills did an expedition
where they were taken in by
native aboriginals. They
feed him on fish, berries and
Nardoo (unless it is washed
correctly it has an enzyme
that inhibits the uptake of
vitamin D. One of them died
from lack of vitamin D and
not starvation (regardless of
what they eat). Lost their
sight, weakness or pain in
joints and the abnormal
walk they develop with
rhythmic falling because
their bodies were not
receiving nutrients to
function. An example, of
how outsiders can lack vital
information about customs
and practices which can
have a very disastrous
effect on us.
o For example, hippos and
tomatoes in Zambia. All of
the projects he set up in
Africa failed. Everything he
touched he killed. Italians
tried to teach Zambians how
to grow Italian fruit and
vegetables. The locals had
no interest in learning it and
only showed up to be paid
for participation.
Researchers were shocked
that the locals did not have
agriculture in such a fertile
land. Instead of asking
them “why do you not grow
her” they thought oh thank
god we are here to teach
you and save you from
starvation. Hippos came
out of the river and ate their
tomatoes, and this was why
they do not grow food
there. He said why did you
not tell us about the
hippos?
Their response, you never
asked!
3. Avoid mistakes of not
knowing the cultural group
by taking lead from those
who know it best.
4. Leads to better questions,
better data, better
participation and better
research overall.What are the (6) challenges of ethnography?
- Being there changes things
(i.e., people act differently
because you are there
watching them).
o Important to remember your
positionality (assigned and
ascribed roles and
perspectives) and reflexivity
(reflecting on how your
positionality introduces bias
to the research). - Takes a long-time:
o Depending on how well you
know the context, it takes a
long time to learn how
things work and obtain an
emic perspective.
o Data collection is built on
relationships, and
relationships take time to
build.
o Major method: “deep
hanging out” is a common
aspect of ethnography
where you simply spend
time with the people in their
cultural context with where
the only goal is to learn. - EVERYTHING is data:
o It can be hard to tell what to
attend to because as a
researcher we are trying not
to pre-judge and leave our
biases at the door.
o Difficult in feeling like you
must always be “on” (i.e.,
always looking for data and
performing certain actions
around respondents).
o Removed from normal
environment and support
networks.
o IMPORTANT to have self-
care practices in place to
mitigate feeling
overwhelmed. - Balance research goals
with personal relationships
(in and out of field research)
o Data gathering based on
relationships: but we need
to manage our expectations
from participants, friends
and family back home, and
demands of research.
o Long-term and stressful:
humans will do as humans
do… think carefully about
starting romance. - Reliability and validity:
o Can be hard to avoid “naval
gazing” getting too caught
up in your own perspective.
o Does it matter whether what
you observe will ever
happen again?
o How do you know your
conclusions are based on
more than your own
opinion? - Personal challenges:
o Getting to know a new
culture can be
overwhelming.
o Feeling foreign, homesick
and sometime physically
sick can take its toll.
o For example, Alice and
wonderland. Enough of this
nonsense I just want to go
home. Nothing looks
familiar. I’ll be glad to be
home. It would be nice if
something made sense for a
change.
If ethnography is so hard, why bother?
o Recreating cultural phenomenon (i.e., festivals or rituals) is unethical, impractical and impossible to recreate in a lab (i.e., the gold standard experimentation we are used to is not applicable and field study methods need to be adopted). o Participants communities cannot access to the lab. o External validity: we want to make sure that the phenomenon is as authentic as possible to who it naturally occurs in the real world.
What is a core method in ethnography?
observation.
positives and negatives of naturalistic observation?
o Positive: o External Validity: the behavior we are collecting data on is the “real” behavior in the “real world”. o Negative: o Lack of precision: there is issues of confounds that cannot be controlled for, researchers access to locations may be limited (physically and positionality impacting our ability to understand another perspective), potential challenges for researcher’s safety (i.e., field research risk if going to unfamiliar terrain or violent area).
positives and negatives of participant observation?
o Positive: o Allows for an outside researcher to begin to adopt an emic perspective, learn the meaning and experience of actions in the event. o Negative: o Issues of access, limitations of participants perspective (i.e., can never truly be emic), their safety (i.e., rituals that involve bodily harm or substance consumption).
positives and negatives of laboratory-based observation?
o Positive:
o Researcher control: the
researcher can set the
parameters of the event
and control for confounds.
o Negative:
o External Validity: behaviors
in a lab are not natural (i.e.,
some events cannot be
recreated in the lab).positives and negatives of non-participant observation?
o Positive: o Access to events that researcher cannot be “in” (i.e., animal groups, children, larger events like festivals or public rituals). o Negative: o Issue of etic perspective, some events are not accessible as a non- participant or etic perspective.
How do we untangle the link between the mind and culture?
with a culture model.
How do we unpack the contents of a culture model?
With the method of Cultural Domain Analysis.
What are the domains and concepts within a culture model?
(A) Domains:
is a category of things that exist in the world (i.e., animals, fruit, musical instruments, books, university courses, movies) that can indicate a groups ontology.
The amount of agreement about what concepts fall within the domain can vary (i.e., the level of cultural consensus).
Items in the domain are seen as important (i.e., are salient) and are often the first thing that comes to mind and the most common.
Domain item salience is also variant across the group (i.e., more salient for some members of the cultural group than others).
(B) Concepts:
Concepts within a domain (category) have a structure.
Items within a category can be compared to one another to determine the level of similarity and differences between each item.
E.g., coconut trees are more like banana trees than they’re to apple trees (in tree domain).
E.g., apples are more similar to plums than they are to bananas (in fruit domain).
Domains within a culture model reflect peoples ___
ontology: belief about reality and what exists in the world (i.e., monism, material realism, critical relativism or dualism idealism and relativism).
Agreement of concepts within a domain are ___
the level of cultural consensus in which concepts come to mind first or are more salient will vary.
Are concepts within a domain discrete or relational?
concepts within a domain all have semantic relationships to one another.
Are concepts within a domain structured?
yes. they’re structured based on the domain (or catergory[s]) to which they belong and can be compared to another for similarities and differences.
Two methods to identify and understand the concepts in a domain?
- Free listing
2. Card sorts
Free listing is used to ___ and works like this:
to identify the concepts within a domain.
This method is useful when the researcher knows what the domain is but not its contents.
Participants are asked to list items in the domain so we can determine:
o Salience: which items are most common and listed first?
o Consensus: how similar are participants lists?
Example: of free listing
research
o What god(s) do and do not
like:
o Participants were 108 I’Taukei Fijians who were asked to list five things that their agents (Christian god, local ancestral gods and police) liked and disliked.
o We end up with lists for each participant and we search through each list for salience and consensus (which items are most common or listed first and how similar the lists are).
Culture Domain Analysis by Card Sort Ranking works by:
o When the concepts (that the researcher thinks are in the domains) are listed on the card (i.e., know both category and content).
o Participants are asked to sort the cards according to a question or prompt (i.e., rank these kinship terms in order across six ways of interacting).
o Closeness
o Asking for help
o Giving help
o Respect
o Joke with
o Give commands to
o Data from free lists:
o Each person places the cards with kin terms on them in rank order (1=most, 26=least).
o Then use latent analysis (i.e., principal component analysis) to identify factors structure or dimensions in the data.
o Identified two dimensions in kinship structure of interpersonal relationships:
o Respect/closeness
o Joking/authority
o This allows us to map kin terms by dimensions and give a numerical picture of kinship norms:
a latent analysis is used in _ method for identifying the content of a domain?
card sort. when we know the category and think we know the content but don;t know the saliency, most important or structure.
what are alternative methods to ethnography and observation that cultural psychologists use?
o Experiments
o Field experiments
o Priming
o Quasi-experiments
Are cultural psychology and evolutionary psychology mutually exclusive?
No, they often overlap. Similarly, the (4) perspectives of culture in psychology are complementary methods.
Two ways cultural psychology is rooted in anthropology:
Cultural psychology is the intersection between cultural and biological anthropology
(A) Cultural Anthropology:
o “Reciprocity and mutual
embeddedness of culture and
psyche”
o Focuses in cultural psychology
is on the way of life” (not
universals).
o Favors qualitative and
descriptive data over
quantitative.
o Unique from anthropology
psychology (i.e., has a wider
tool range to specifically focus
on culture and the mind).
o Shweder (1999)
(B) Biological Anthropology:
o “Humans are a cultural
species”
o Culture is unique and specific
to humans.
o Draws upon cultural evolution,
enculturation, and
developmental processes.
o More likely to favor
quantitative/experimental data
over qualitative.
o Heine and Ruby (2010)
why is cultural psychology an ambiguous term?
*cultural psychology can be an ambiguous term because it has been used to refer to many things (i.e., in western society it refers to any study with culture in it; cross-cultural, indigenous and less often evolutionary psychology).
Cultural Psychology has a problem with universals:
why?
They assume that the researcher’s way of doing things is the “normal way” which can lead us to draw false or inaccurate conclusions (weird and wasp biases, need to engage in reflexivity about our own biases). You need to know the culture first (outsider takes the time to gain an emic perspective and then the study can proceed). Biggest differences between Indigenous and cultural psychology with cross- cultural psychology is the rejection of universals (prevalent in positivist science).
E.g., may be comparing apples to oranges (equivalence issues). For example, Scweder (1997) showcased a study by Scandinavian researchers looking at “universal” family meals in Indian culture. In Indian culture, families do not eat together like people do in Scandinavia. They convinced Indians to sit together and have a family meal without understanding that they were violating local taboo rules to appease the researchers. Thus, the observational data they collected was meaningless because it did not reflect natural Indian behavior at all.
(4) Levels of Universals:
- Accessibility
- Functional
- Existential
- Non-Universal
Accessibility Universal:
o Universal psychological mechanism which does not vary across cultures, it exists everywhere, all the time, is equally salient and serves the same function.
o Requirements:
Exists in all cultures.
Is used to solve the same problem across cultures (i.e., psychological mechanism serves the same function).
Is accessible to the same degree across cultures (i.e., salience of psychological mechanism does not vary across cultures).
o For example:
Small number counting and basic addition or subtraction.
This experiment asks people to identify if there are more blue or yellow dots.
For the top row where the dots are grouped by color it is a universal skill to be able to look at them and intuitively know what color has more (i.e., don’t need to count).
For example, Wynn (1992) this is a skill evident in five-month-old babies with a differential looking task to show surprise. They were shown a puppet show where they were shown mickey mouse puppet which went behind a screen then either one or two more showed up the second time. Babies were surprised when they were shown two instead of one like normal and looked significantly longer. Showing babies have an intuitive sense of counting.
For example, Pica et al., (2004) with an indigenous Amazonian tribe which has very few words for numbers and count 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 on one hand and up to 10 on the other and refer to thing as few but not many or very many. There findings demonstrate that cultures without formal cultural mathematical systems or language for numbers larger than five, yet they could still intuitively tell which color had more spots.
Functional Universal:
o Requirements:
Exists across all cultures.
Is used to solve the same problems across cultures.
Is more accessible to people from some cultures than others (i.e., more salient in some cultures than others).
o For example: Costly Punishment.
o Costly punishment refers to the psychological phenomenon where people are willing to incur a personal cost in order to punish people for not being fair or cooperative.
o It has been shown to be present in 15 societies including both large-scale western and small-scale non-western countries.
o However, it varies across cultures the extent to which people were willing to pay to punish uncooperative group members.
o For instance, costly punishment is less prominent in western cultures where individuals are used to being more anonymous and having third party institutions enact punishment on your behalf (i.e., police and government). Thus, westerners are less likely to feel a need to intervene themselves. However, smaller-scale societies which are more face to face and have social structure built on relationships of reciprocity that do not have third party enforces feel much more obligated to intervene themselves.
o The threshold for which people feel the need to intervene and engage in costly punishment varied across countries (i.e., salience was different, but function and presence was the same in every culture).
Existential Universal (more specific):
o Requirements:
Exists across all cultures.
Is not necessarily used to solve the same problem across cultures.
Is not necessarily equally as accessible to people of all cultures (i.e., may be more salient in one culture than others).
o All we know for sure is that it exists across all cultures.
o For example, social group formation and identity:
People all have an individual identity and collective identity but the extent to which they’re interconnected varies across cultures.
Collectivist cultures have an interdependent self-concept (i.e., more closely interwoven).
Individualistic cultures have a much more discrete and separate self and collective self-concept.
This means that group identity is more salient in some cultures than others and they will serve different functions as well.
Non-Universal (culture-specific):
o Requirements:
Does not exist in all cultures.
Can be considered a cultural innovation (culture-specific or unique).
o For example, Chinese abacus:
Chinese abacus is a culture specific way to teach mathematics in middle east and Asia.
This has led to a culture specific way of conceptualizing mathematics that makes them better and doing calculations in their head (i.e., impacts on their cognition).
View’s math in base numbers of 5 rather than 10 in western societies.
They favor distinction between odd vs. even numbers.
They make numerical errors not seen in non-abacus users.
Key Idea of Cultural Psychology:
• Way of life as focus of research • How practices and mental states reinforce each other • Does NOT treat culture as a data point • Does NOT treat culture as means for getting at ‘human nature’
How to Decode the Cycle between mind and culture?
Build a cultural model.
What is a model, the goal of a cultural model, main concern and used for?
- Model: a means of describing relationships within a (psychological) phenomenon.
- Goal: understand and describe rather than declare a statement of “truth”.
- The main concern is about homing in on a part of the process which is relevant to what you’re looking at.
- Its descriptive model designed to aid your understanding of something rather than being completely perfect, just good enough.
- i.e., a map doesn’t need to be accurate in ratio to be useful, an overly specific map is not useable. Simplify it to better understand it.
Cultural Models consists of ___ and ___
. To be a “cultural” modle it must be…
- Cultural models are mental representations shared by members of a culture. These mental representations function both to make sense of and interpret sensory input and also to produce and shape purposive and communicative behaviours. Cultural models are used to read signalled intentions, attitudes, emotions, and social context, including the social status of those one is encountering.
- These concepts have structure - have central & distal elements; include content & usage info.
- Assumes that he locus of culture is in the mind of individuals.
- Another assumption of mental models is that they consist of core and periphery parts.
- To be considered “cultural,” mental models also need to be socially transmitted and carry some socially coercive force.
Two Types of Cultural Models:
(A) Theory Building sense:
(B) Anthropological sense:
Cultural Model in the Anthropological sense:
• Assumption that culture exists in people’s minds (i.e., internal).
• People operate in daily affairs by referencing concepts (cognitive representations) that are shared across the group and built/transmitted through culture.
• For example, frames, schemas and scripts shared within a cultural group.
• For example, cultural models from cognitive anthropology:
o Uses three main types of data: ethnographic, linguistic and cognitive (i.e., consensus analysis data).
• Culture occurs mostly outside of our conscious awareness. It can be explicitly taught or implicitly learnt through their environment. Thus, making them hard to identify and measure.
Two Main Types of Cognitive Anthropological (Culture Models):
- Foundational:
• Simple, based on broad domains of being (e.g., space, time, relationship) that can be applied to most situations.
• i.e., how social interactions works. - Molar:
• Complex, more specific in scope.
• i.e., more detailed and context specific.
cultural models are the ______.
cultural models are the units of investigation of culture.
example of anthropological cultural model (the foundational kind)
Example: Foundational Folk Theories
• intuitive/tacit theories about basic categories of being (i.e., other people’s minds).
• E.g., theory of mind.
• Fijian cultures understand that people have their own thoughts but believe that one can never truly know what someone else is thinking and that thoughts are private affairs. Therefore, they feel that observable actions are more important than their intent (i.e., accidents are worse than failed attempts).
• Westerners view the mind originates in the brain and is the source of all action. They believe that thoughts drive behavior. Thus, intentions are viewed as more punishable than actions (i.e., failed attempt is worse than an accident).
example of anthropological cultural model (the mola kind)
Example: Molar (more specific) Ethnotheories:
• Typically, used on theories of parenting.
• Intuitive/tactic theory that underlies the values and practices of a culture.
• Study via analysis and comparison of practices.
• Not usually apparent to the people within a culture.
• For example, where do we learn to raise children?
o Most people implicitly remember events or practices from their own childhood.
o Explicitly ask for advice from experts.
o Experience with raising younger siblings.
o Can be a touchy subject when we look at cross-cultural or interventions and behaviors are labelled as “good” or “bad”.
o i.e., whether it’s more important to touch (collectivist) your child or look them in the face (individualistic).
Does cultural psychology treat culture as a means of getting at human nature?
No
