W11 cultural considerations in understanding and changing behaviour

Question 1

Core components of culture

Answer 1

• Discrete behavioural norms, values, and beliefs shared by individuals within some definable group that are distinct from those shared by other groups.
• These norms provide ways to realise individual and collective goals, and are often institutionalised in a variety of formal and informal ways.
• There are ways of transmitting norms to new members, so that the cultural patterns persist over very long periods of time

Question 2

Socialisation and enculturation

Answer 2

Socialisation: The process of learning the rules and patterns of behaviour of our culture. Involves deliberate teaching from within a group.

Enculturation: The process of internalising and adopting the ways and manners of one’s culture.

Question 3

Objective culture

Answer 3

artefacts and creations of our cultural group that are visible or tangible

• we are aware of these influences in that we can see how things are done differently in different cultural groups
• > e.g. people dress differently, eat different food, and produce different types of art or music

Question 4

Subjective culture

Answer 4

comprises of values, or the standards that serve as broad guidelines for social living, and basic assumptions or worldviews
- we have a greater level of awareness of values as they impact the way we think, feel, and act, but they are not as visible as objective culture

Question 5

Levels of culture

Answer 5

*look up image

Question 6

Values - individual level

Answer 6

• personal values are cognitive representations of the broad goals that motivate the behavior of individuals.
• personal values are desirable, trans-situational goals that serve as guiding principles in peoples’ lives that are relatively stable attributes of individuals.
• they affect people’s choices and actions over time and across situations.

Question 7

Values - collective level

Answer 7

• cultural values are widely shared, abstract ideas about what is good, right, and desirable.
• they represent the goals that members of the collective are encouraged to pursue, and they serve to justify actions taken in pursuit of these goals

Question 8

Hofstede’s cultural dimensions

Answer 8

*look up image

Question 9

Schwartz’s national values

Answer 9

• embeddedness v autonomy
• hierarchy v egalitarianism
• mastery v harmony

Question 10

Schwartz’s personal values

Answer 10

*look up image

Question 11

Emic approach to culture

Answer 11

Investigate phenomena through the perspective of individuals embedded in particular cultural contexts

Demands a focus on cultural / group level emergence of experience and avoids simply applying using concepts and measures from other contexts

Question 12

Etic approach to culture

Answer 12

Investigate phenomena through the perspective of universal elements of human experience

Demands a system that is equally valid for all cultures and permits the representation of similarities as well as differences

Question 13

Emic and etic approaches

Answer 13

• Researchers often work withimposed eticsmeaning that universals of experience are assumed –often by our measures and as a result of research approaches
• Western psychology itself is a type of emic approach (but this is not often recognised)
• Indigenous psychologies began as a reaction to the increasing supremacy and dominance of Western models, which did not provide adequate models for understanding human behavior in non-Western contexts

Question 14

Emic and etic approaches are not mutually exclusive

Answer 14

• Derived eticsshould gradually replace imposed etics
• These are valid cross-culturally and may result in establishing some general principles of human behaviour
• Equivalence(or invariance) is key in comparative studies, as it deals with the question of whether measures are the same construct across the cultures