Unpacking Culture Flashcards
Collectivism and Individualism
“Collectivism and individualism are ‘cultural syndromes. They reflect shared attitudes, beliefs, categorizations, norms, roles, and values organized around a central theme, that are found among individuals who speak a particular language, and live in a specific geographic region, during a specific historical period.” (Triandis, Chan, Bhawuk, Iwao, & Sinha, 1995, p. 462).
Subjective Culture
“Collectivism and individualism are ‘cultural syndromes’. They reflect shared attitudes, beliefs, categorizations, norms, roles, and values organized around a central theme, that are found among individuals who speak a particular language, and live in a specific geographic region, during a specific historical period.” (Triandis, Chan, Bhawuk, Iwao, & Sinha, 1995, p. 462). Culture is manifested within the individual – their beliefs, norms, roles and values.
Cultural syndrome
“Collectivism and individualism are ‘cultural syndromes. They reflect shared attitudes, beliefs, categorizations, norms, roles, and values organized around a central theme, that are found among individuals who speak a particular language, and live in a specific geographic region, during a specific historical period.” (Triandis, Chan, Bhawuk, Iwao, & Sinha, 1995, p. 462). Supposedly shared by the same group of people. Should be some central theme that ties these things together. All these attitudes, beliefs are shared – can be problematic and ungeneralisable. Looked at how much of variance and what proportion is actually between countries than within countries. Found only 6-26% country-level variance. What makes these things tie together, common theme? Cultures as systems?
Markus and Kitayama’s theory of self-constructs
Review paper which defines area in 1991 – over 33,000 citations. Best known theory dominant perspective for the way to look at cultural differences -> central idea of western or non-western differ from independent and interdependent self-construals. Western cultures differ from different perspectives of one’s self-concept view of themselves. Self-construct theory -> People in different cultures have strikingly different construals of the self, of others, and of the interdependence of the two. Self in relation to others. -> seen differently in different cultures -> “These construals can influence, and in many cases determine, the very nature of individual experience, including cognition, emotion, and motivation.” -> “People in different cultures have strikingly different construals of the self, of others, and of the interdependence of the two. “These construals can influence, and in many cases determine, the very nature of individual experience, including cognition, emotion, and motivation.” Prevalent way of seeing oneself in western society is an independent self-construal. Self has a fixed boundary, no overlap with other figures. Each have their own internal properties. Argued there are a lot of different ways of being dependent – stable, internal, private, be unique, express self, promote own goals, self-evaluation, reflected appraisal, validate internal attributes. Contrasted the independent self-contrual with the interdependent self-construal (most generalised to Japanese culture). You can see that the self overlaps with other figures and it is permeable, sharing with others, relationships with others, different emphasis. Lots of different ways of being interdependent -> being flexible and variable across situations, external features and attributes, status, roles. Relationships, tasks, fitting in society, normative actions behaviour, promote goals of other people, acknowledge other intentions, define themselves in terms of their relationships with others.
Second claim of self-constructs
Second claim -> These construals can influence, and in many cases determine, the very nature of individual experience, including cognition, emotion, and motivation.” Compared to Americans, South-East Asian participants typically show: more interpersonal knowledge -> more context-specific knowledge of self and other -> more attention to interpersonal context in basic cognition. Ego-focused emotions more focused on the self in independent self-construal > anger, frustration, pride, predicted to be more important in US, Other-focused emotions -> sympathy, feelings of interpersonal communion, shame -> predicted to be more important in Japan. Interdependent self-construal. Cultural differences in self-construal predicted to foster: Self-expression or self-restraint, Individual or collective bases of achievement, Self-enhancement or modesty. Matsumoto (1999) wrote critical analysis of this theory -> he said what was missing was the focus on construals themselves -> national culture values attitudes, behaviours self-construals weren’t really measured.
Twenty statement tests
Early measures of self-construals -> Twenty Statements Test (TST) -> “I am …” x 20. Coding for ‘interdependence’, ‘sociality’, etc. Likert measures of self-construal (e.g., Singelis, 1994), e.g., “I enjoy being unique and different from others in many respects” / “My happiness depends on the happiness of those around me” (interdependent item), 2 orthogonal (uncorrelated) factors: they could be higher or lower or both on independence, interdependence, But no control for acquiescent responding. Tendency to agree on every likert scales. Mediation model created – people may belong to different groups – different cultural orientations – might predict outcome.
Self-construal and embarrassability
Study by Singelis and Sharkey (1995) -> Participants -> 86 Euro-American and 417 Asian-American (Chinese, Filipino, Japanese, Korean) university students -> Questionnaire measures -> Self-construal scale (Singelis, 1994) -> Embarrassability scale (Modigliani, 1968). Found group differences. Asian-americans more susceptible to embarrassment than euro-americans. Significant group differences in independent
and interdependent self-construals. Asian-Americans on average reported less independent and more interdependent self-construals than did Euro-Americans. Independent and interdependent self-construals significantly predicted embarrassability (p < .001, R2 = 19%). After controlling for self-construals, group membership did not predict embarrassability. (p > .05, partial R2 = 0.7%). Intepreted as evidence for mediation: Culture self-construal embarrassability.
Kitayama’s revised perspective
is that cultural context is mediated with implicit cultural mandate for self-construal. Properties of societies not properties of indivdiuals. Not neccessarily explicit but certain expctatction in society that you will either be independent or interdependent. Differences in self-construal.
A problem -> In most studies using self-report measures of independence and interdependence, “Western” and “Eastern” cultures do not differ as expected. (e.g., Kitayama et al., 2009; review by Cross et al., 2011; meta-analysis by Levine et al., 2003). Some possible explanations: Inadequate sampling? Inadequate measures? Need for implicit measures? Is the theory is wrong?
Sampling individuals
Can nation-level scores be used reliably to characterise particular samples? -> Many studies rely on student samples -> Unrepresentative of nations from which drawn -> Misrepresent some nations more than others -> Representative sampling unrealisti, extremely expensive -> Need for “comparable” samples? -> Measure cultural orientation at individual level, students may think they are more independent-> Problem of “reference-group effects”. Not representative or theory-driven. Opportunistic national comparisons, difficult to collect others in another country -> USA treated as prototypical “individualist” nation -> Japan treated as prototypical “collectivist” nation -> Hofstede rankings for individualism (out of 53) USA: 1st, Japan: 22nd, Guatemala: 53rd. therefore Japan is slightly more individualistic than average. Why are studies only looking at Japan then and not Guatemala? USA and Japan are close in range using the global measure of collectivist/individualism global scale. So why are we just comparing them?
USA vs Japan reconsidered
Takano and Osaka (1999) argued that Japanese culture is not collectivist, probably a stereotype -> Detailed review of empirical studies -> Explained by social psychological processes -> Threat (e.g., WW2) conformity and self-sacrifice -> Western observers make FAE stereotype -> Japanese commentators echo self-stereotype -> Still contentious question -> See update by Takano and Osaka (2018) with commentaries and response. War can increase conformity therefore not rlly generalisable to normal attitudes of Japanese individuals. Too much stereotyping from western psychologists. Dominance of western sources. Many people disagree with Takano and Osaka.
Large-scales studies
Under/over representation of cultural regions. Confusion-influenced (like Japan) overrepresented. WEIRD societies overrepresented. African societies most underrepresented.
Measurement of self-construal
Study 1: Exploratory factor analysis -> 2924 high-school students in 16 nations -> 62 Likert-type items (existing scales, new) -> Ipsatisation to control for acquiescence Study 2: Confirmatory factor analysis -> 7279 adults from 55 cultural groups in 33 nations -> New scale: 38 items → 22 items -> Method factor to control for acquiescence -> Testing for measurement invariance. Found different ways of being independent and interdependent. Can overlap and not distinct categories. Generalised to different countries.
Summary -> self-construal has Highly influential theory, Few researchers willing to question theory, Binary view of cultural differences*, Which level of analysis? Evidence remains problematic, Very little evidence for mediation -> Need for better sampling and measures ->Need for multilevel research. “People in different cultures have strikingly different construals of the self, of others, and of the interdependence of the two” (Markus & Kitayama, 1991, p. 224, italics added) -> But theoretical focus is largely on self -> Is self the key construct? -> One alternative: Thinking about others.
Attribution and cognitive styles
Other construals -> People in Western cultures attribute ambiguous behaviour to dispositions rather than situation, Correspondence bias (fundamental attribution error), Assumed to be universal human nature (Ross, 1977), Bias reduced/absent in East Asian participants, Attribution to situation/context, rather than individual dispositions (Miller, 1984; Morris & Peng, 1994), Not-so-fundamental attribution error!
Possible explanations -> Little cultural difference in dispositionism. Situationism (Choi, Nisbett, & Norenzayan, 1999) -> Perhaps relates to Confucian culture – focus on social positions and cardinal relationships -> Implicit theories of group agency (Menon, Morris, Chiu, & Hong, 1999; also Kashima et al., 2004) -> Greater attribution to agency of group in Hong Kong newspaper articles and participants than in USA.
Cognitive styles -> East Asians: holistic thinking “attending to the entire field and assigning causality to it, making relatively little use of categories and formal logic, and relying on ‘dialectical’ reasoning”. Westerners: analytic thinking. “Paying attention primarily to the object and the categories to which it belongs and using rules, including formal logic, to understand its behaviour” (Nisbett et al., 2001).
Frame switching studies -> Research in bi-cultural Hong Kong context “Two unrelated studies” paradigm. 1. Priming with Western or Chinese images. 2. Measure attributions. Western primes dispositional inferences. Chinese primes situational inference (Hong, Morris, Chiu, & Benet-Martinez, 2000). Many subsequent studies into “culture priming”. Review by Oyserman and Lee (2008)
Culture as situated cognition -> Culture more flexible than previously imagined -> Attributed to activation of implicit theories -> Differences in behaviour depend on accessibility rather than availability of cultural knowledge -> Brings culture under experimental control! -> What are the benefits and drawbacks? Can we all switch between meaning systems? Role of symbols in cultural maintenance?
