Week 1-3 Flashcards
- According to Matsumoto and Juang (2013), what are the two goals of psychology?
- Building a body of knowledge about people: understanding, predicting, and creating theories about behaviour.
- Taking the knowledge and employing it to make the lives of people better.
- Henrich, Heine and Norenzayan (2010) write of WEIRDOs. What are WEIRDOs and why might research on WEIRDOs be limited?
- Western
- Educated
- Industrialised
- Democratic countries
Research on WEIRDOs is limited as they aren’t an accurate representation of the human population as a whole, and are used by psychologists to make broad and false claims about human behaviour.
- How do Matsumoto and Juang (2013) define culture?
“A unique meaning and information system…that allows the group to meet basic needs of survival, pursue happiness and wellbeing, and derive meaning from life.”
- Durkheim likens humans’ immersion in culture to fish in water. What does he mean by this?
Durkheim meant that, like fish in water, we fail to see culture because it is a medium within which we exist.
However, encounters with other cultures make it easier for us to see and think about our own culture.
- Accordingly to Matsumoto and Juang (2013), is culture a uniquely human product? Please explain your answer giving one example.
No. Many characteristics of human cultural life is shared with animals, as animals have a culture, or at least rudimentary customs that they abide by, such as living in groups.
For example, fish swim together in schools.
- According to Dalton (2007), what is Community Psychology?
Community psychology concerns the relationship of individuals with communities and societies, seeking to understand and enhance quality of life through integrating research with action.
- Nelson and Prilleltensky (2005) look at what they see as the “big picture”. Briefly describe the three primary issues behind their “big picture”.
- Oppression: As power inequalities are present between individuals, relationships and societies in the forms of ill health, racism, and social policies.
- Resistance and Liberation: Such as fighting for social change and achieving liberation.
→ An example being Indigenous people gaining citizenship. - Towards wellbeing: Which is a matter of individual, relational, and community health.
- Brian Bishop talks about the tyranny of method. What does he mean?
All methods have their weaknesses, and using only one method can hinder a study’s results. Converging evidence from a range of methods (diversity of methods) can: support the accuracy of results, and provide the best type of support for an argument.
- What is linguistic equivalence? How do we go about addressing this?
Linguistic equivalence is whether a translated test of a construct has a similar meaning to the original test.
This is addressed and achieved through a translation, back-translation process that sees the test translated, back-translated and then compared to the original test. This process continues until an accurate version of the translated test is achieved.
- Why does Shweder (1997) criticise mainstream psychology? Might there be a confound (a variable that the researcher failed to control/eliminate, thus damaging the internal validity of an experiment) if a researcher compared college students in the US and college students in the UK?
Shrewder criticizes mainstream psychology because it claims to be universal, yet samples often only consist of a small portion of society, such as first year university psychology students.
When comparing US and UK college students, the confound variable present is the difference between cultures.
For example, 1 in 4 Americans go to college, whereas 1 in 8 people from the UK do.
- Describe the study by Carraher et al. (1985) as outlined in the lecture.
Investigators found that Brazilian street children who formed street businesses to avoid death at the hands of “death squads” were often barely able, or completely unable, to do school level mathematics, despite their ability to do the math needed to run successful street businesses.
The more abstract and unrelated to the real world context the math was, the more the children struggled.
Thus, these findings suggest that differences in context can have a significant effect of performance.
- What is a culture broker as described by Hall (2010)? Give one example.
A culture broker is a mediator between two or more cultural groups. For example, a language translator.
- Herrnstein & Murray (1994) found that there is was IQ difference between Whites and Jews. What is the difference in points and in what direction?
10 points, with the Jews scoring higher.
- Does the Chitling Test discriminate against Blacks and Whites? Explain your answer.
Yes, to an extent it does.
Essentially, it discriminates against Whites and Blacks and anyone else who has had limited or no exposure to the African-American culture of the 1960s.
- Describe the main findings of the study by Carroll and Casagrande (1958).
Children whose dominant language was Navajo, a language that contains verbs of handling requiring more complex and special linguistic forms regarding shape,…
were significantly more likely to categorize objects by shape than the English children were.
The findings of this study provides early support for the idea that the language we speak influences the way that we think, ie. the Sapir-Worf Hypothesis.
