Week 1: What is culture?

Question 1

How did Edward Burnett Taylor define culture?

Answer 1

Complex whole which includes knowledge, belief, art, morals, law, custom and other capabilities and habits acquired by man as a member of society. So culture seen as many values, and not something which is innate, something which people share

Question 2

How did Hofstede define culture?

Answer 2

Collective programming of the mind that distinguishes the members of one group of people from another

Question 3

How did Heine define culture?

Answer 3

Any kind of information that is acquired from other member’s of one’s species through social learning capable of affecting an individual’s behaviours. Particular group of people living within a shared context and exposed to same cultural information

Question 4

How did Mesoudi define culture?

Answer 4

Socially transmitted information

Question 5

Culture as an iceberg

Answer 5

Focus on beneath the iceberg like knowledge, social values, beliefs and norms, not only the observable behaviour like artifacts, behaviour, habits and traditions, institutions. Latent processes can drive observable behaviour

Question 6

What is not culture?

Answer 6

Not only cultural values, also the physical environment and our actions. Not the same as nation, but can be variations in culture within the nation. Not homogenous and invariant within a group. Culture is not stable over time (survival can involve less tolerant and accepting of different ideas, while self-expression is the opposite, can be traditional which is the value of family while the other side is secular). Can be some change, but not radical and build upon previous culture

Question 7

What is the difference between general psychology and cultural psychology?

Answer 7

General: psychological processes are invariant and universal, differences are superficial and reflect noise, mind is independent from culture (mind is seen as a computer), goal is to understand how the mind is independent of content and context
Cultural: psychological processes are shaped by culture, differences are real and affect deep structure, mind intertwined with culture, goal is to understand how the mind is interdependent with context and content

Question 8

What is the figure line task?

Answer 8

• square with a line, given two tasks: either reproduce it with the same length, or change the relative length of the line in the square
• East Asians: found the absolute task more challenging, Americans: found the relative task more challenging (more activation attentional control areas)
• moralistic: think of the world as a whole and how all elements are related to each other, at university more likely to take elements apart
• shows difference in analytic vs holistic reasoning

Question 9

Muller-Lyer illusion

Answer 9

• American undergraduates are more susceptible to it
• Less Western, industrialized individuals are less likely to be susceptible-> due to carpented angles, so not trained to have this 3D perspective

Question 10

What are the culture specifics?

Answer 10

Even though universally most languages have the same structure, incest seen as a taboo, culturally specific is that languages can be used differently and not use nouns for example, but can be variation in incest taboo.

Question 11

What are the levels of universality?

Answer 11

Non-universal: Cognitive tool not found in all cultures (e.g., abacus)
Existential universal: Cognitive tool found in all cultures that serves different function(s) (e.g., intrinsic motivation in the face of success or failure) Goes down for those in US with failure but goes up in Asia
Functional universal: Cognitive tool found in all cultures that serves the same function(s) but is used to different degrees in different cultures (e.g., costly punishment)
Accessibility universal: Cognitive tool found in all cultures that serves the same function(s) and is accessible to the same degree (e.g., social facilitation)

Question 12

Why study cultural variation?

Answer 12

• use mostly WEIRD sample so very narrow segment, so the evidence base is heavily biased-> important to study how the majority world looks like
  -To understand differences in today’s multicultural societies: in a globalized world it is important not to be culture-blind. When people adopt a multicultural approach and attend to cultural differences, people of different cultural groups get along better and feel more engaged, and how similar we are

Question 13

How to study cultural variation?

Answer 13

• what could be the explanatory variable between culture and behaviour? Could do so by adding cultural values in questionnaires, kind of mediation approach. If cultural values explain culture then -> unpackaged culture

Question 14

What are cultural values?

Answer 14

“Preferences for one state of affairs over another” that distinguish countries (rather than individuals) from each other.Hofstede came up with 6 dimensions which are value profiles of different countries: individualism/collectivism, power distance, uncertainty/avoidance, masculinity/femininity, long-term/short-term, indulgence/restraint. Gelfland: cultural dimension of tightness-looseness

Question 15

Individualism vs collectivism

Answer 15

Individualism stands for a society in which the ties between individuals are loose: a person is expected to look after himself or herself and his or her immediate family only. Collectivism stands for a society in which people from birth onwards are integrated into strong, cohesive in-groups, which continue to protect them throughout their lifetime in exchange for unquestioning loyalty.

Question 16

What is tightness vs looseness?

Answer 16

The tolerance of deviant behaviours and severity of punishment to norm violators. Tight cultures have many strong norms and a low tolerance of deviant behavior, whereas loose cultures have weak social norms and a high tolerance of deviant behavior. Tightness correlates with some interesting ecological facts: population density, access to safe water, food deprivation, that is, conditions that fostered the development of rules. It also has some societal correlates: retention of death penalty, police presence per capita, demonstration attendance. Psychological correlates: cautiousness, dutifulness, high need for structure.

Question 17

How can cultural values be perceived?

Answer 17

• heterogeniety between but also within cultures, see cultural values/dimensions as a continuum rather than exclusive categories
• none of the two ends is better than the other but one end may be more functionally or historically prevalent in a given culture than the other end. A key to understanding cultural variation but also a limitation

Question 18

What are the COSI concerns?

Answer 18

Causation: how do I design my study & what conclusions can I draw?
Operationalization: how do I measure my variables & how do I construct my material?
Sampling: which cultures should I study?
Interpretation: what do my data tell me?
Appear as separate decisions but one has implications for the other and need to be considered as a whole

Question 19

Sampling

Answer 19

Sampling of cultural groups and participants within these groups. Such as testing for universality and testing for cultural variance

Question 20

How to test for universality?

Answer 20

• randomly select as many cultural contexts as possible (ideal but not pragmatic and many studies use convenience sampling)
• select two maximally different cultural contexts in geography, language, philosophy (if no difference strong evidence for universality, but do not know what variable caused the difference)

Question 21

What is the minimal difference approach?

Answer 21

Match two cultural contexts in as many ways as possible so that the only difference left is the cultural value of interest. If collectivism explains the differences between the groups there is some initial evidence that culture shapes interpersonal relations. But the evidence is not definite as we did not manipulate the culture, so we compare university students in EIRD contexts so generalization is limited

Question 22

What is the evaluation of randomly selecting as many cultural contexts as possible?

Answer 22

Ideal but often not the pragmatic option

Question 23

How to test for cultural variation?

Answer 23

• randomly select as many different cultural contexts as possible
• minimal difference approach

Question 23

How to test for universality?

Answer 23

• randomly select as many as possible
• test 2 maximally different cultural contexts

Question 24

How can you make groups equivalent?

Answer 24

• construct equivalence (similarity of construct across cultures)
• methodological equivalence (equality in familiarity with stimulus material and response procedure)
• linguistic equivalence (translation accuracy, retention of connotations)

Question 25

How is happiness different across culture?

Answer 25

North Americans: Derive happiness through personal achievements and maximize positive affect experiences
East Asians: Derive happiness from interpersonal connectedness and balance experiences of positive and negative affect
So cannot always just take minimal difference between groups, as the meanings could differ

Question 26

Why is linguistic equivalence a problem?

Answer 26

Some words are untranslatable like boketto which is a Buddhist tradition (crowded cities could create need to shut down) Solution: back-translation, bilingual investigator/collaborators, avoid short/vague items

Question 27

What are the types of response bias to have create interpretation-free results?

Answer 27

• moderacy and extremity bias (moderacy is when people tend to choose the middle point of the scale, extremity bias is when people tend to choose the extreme ends of the scale)
• acquiescence bias (tendency to agree with an item, can be more likely with a holistic thinking style in East Asia, as behaviour seen as a response to situation then character)
• reference group effect (everyone has different standards to compare themselves)

Question 28

When is moderacy and extremity bias common, what are the solutions?

Answer 28

Moderacy: more prevalence in East Asian than European
Extremity: Hispanic & African more likely
Solutions: Avoid scales with a middle response option, e.g., 1-6 (cons: does not address extremity)
Yes/no format (cons: reduced variance) Standardize scores (cons: alters the data, only useful for comparisons of patterns, e.g., anger vs. shame)

Question 29

Solutions for acquiescence bias?

Answer 29

Use 50% reverse-scored items
Standardize scores (cons: see above) Also: Avoid very general items, specify contexts

Question 30

Solutions for reference-group effect?

Answer 30

Use concrete scenarios
Use concrete response choices to a concrete scenario
Avoid quantifiers (e.g., very)
Use behavioral or physiological measures (not self-reports, see below)

Question 31

Methods to draw causal conclusions?

Answer 31

• survey (economic, easy to sample many participants, equivalence issues can be overcome by patterns of means across groups but not comparing means on a single item, bias-prone, no causal claim is possible)
• field experiment (high ecological validity, extraneous variables cannot be controlled)
• neuroscience methods (biological bases, expensive, small samples, emerging field so unclear differences)
• situation sampling (light on the process of how culture affects people, multi-step research, difficult to know what to leave in situation descriptions and what to remove (cultural specifics)
• cultural products (reflect most prevalent cultural ideals/messages that members of a culture produce, data are already available, needs trained coders so time and resource-intensive, limited scope so supplemented with evidence for effect of exposure
• cultural priming (within-group design of priming studies not affected by equivalence issues, allows causal inferences about the effect of cultural mindset, culture is chronic while mindset is temporary, not all cultural ideas are accessible across cultures)

Question 32

What is cultural priming?

Answer 32

the activation of cultural ideas, which will temporarily affect the way people think and act

Question 33

What are cultural products?

Answer 33

Related to situation sampling as researchers analyze the world around people and the artefacts that people interact with-> low arousal and high arousal affect in children’s books. Involves specifying the hypothesis, focus on most relevant products, code data (coders blind to hypothesis)

Question 34

What is situation sampling?

Answer 34

1. participants from different cultures describe situations of a certain type-> large situation sample
2. participants from both cultures indicate how they respond to situations-> situation effect (do situations lead to different response?) -> participants effect (do participants respond differently than others)

Question 35

What is high vs low power distance?

Answer 35

The extent to which inequality between individuals is accepted in society by less powerful members. Not the extent to which powerful members or expect unequal power distribution. High power distance: accept a hierarchical order in which everybody has a place and which needs no further justification. In Low Power Distance cultures, people strive to equalize the distribution of power and demand justification for inequalities of power. PD correlations with income equality.

Question 36

Uncertainty tolerance vs avoidance

Answer 36

Refers to the extent to which individuals within a society feel threatened by uncertain, unknown, ambiguous, or unstructured situations. The opposite is Uncertainty Tolerance: tolerance for ambiguity, no need for formal rules. People in lower UA cultures take more risks, accept dissent (contradictory views over the same topic), let things happen. People in higher UA cultures try to control future and plan everything, develop rules & rituals to cope with uncertainty, have clear scripts for interaction.
Low UT= Singapore, hight UT= Greece

Question 37

Masculinity vs femininity

Answer 37

Masculinity stands for a society in which social gender roles are clearly distinct: men are supposed to be assertive, focused on material success; women are supposed to be more modest, tender, and concerned with the quality of life. Femininity stands for a society in which social gender roles overlap: both men and women are supposed to be modest, tender, and concerned with the quality of life, and both are supposed to be tough so there is higher gender equality.
High M cultures: women are underrepresented in the parliament and attend lower education, less contact with opposing sex when growing up, same-sex relationships often seen as problematic. Japan and Latin American countries more highly masculine, while Scadinavian countries are more highly feminine.

Question 38

Long term vs short-term orientation

Answer 38

This dimension refers to attitudes towards directing actions on future rewards vs present and past rewards. Long term orientation encourages behaviours such as saving money, learning, relationship building, marriage, and child rearing. It often correlates with optimism, academic success, and health.
LTO: China has present tense, rapidly developing
STO: African countries (they have to survive) & but also some affluent countries (they don’t have to worry too much about the future)

Question 39

Indulgence vs restraint orientation

Answer 39

Indulgence stands for a society that allows relatively free gratification of basic and natural human drives related to enjoying life and having fun. Restraint stands for a society that suppresses gratification of needs and regulates it by means of strict social norms. Indulgence could be more in wealthy and poor countries, while restraint is for countries that are rapidly developing

Question 40

Why are WEIRD populations not generalizable?

Answer 40

• there is lots of variation in humans in visual perception, analytic reasoning, fairness, cooperation, memory and heritability of IQ
• WEIRD population only make up 12% of population
• Western population more likely to make equal offers and reject low offers, unlike Africa and South America
• differences could be due to different adaptations to environments
• biases, patterns, preferences in economic decisions can impact the stock market

Question 41

What are the suggestions for more empirical foundations?

Answer 41

• push for criticizing generalizations, only support with evidence
• credit should be given for diverse pools
• granting agencies should prioritize cross-cultural research
• evaluate how findings apply to other populations
• short term: test universality in a diverse way
• long-term: determine principles that distinguish the variable from universal aspects of psychology

Question 42

What is the meaning of culture according to the book?

Answer 42

• Culture is any kind of information that is acquired from other members of one’s species through social learning that can influence an individual’s behaviours. culture is any kind of idea, belief, technology, habit, or practice that is acquired through learning
  from others.
• A culture is a group of people who are existing within some kind of shared context. People
  within a given culture are exposed to many of the same cultural ideas. Can also refer to a large group in the population
• Final: refers to a dynamic group of people who share a similar context, are exposed to many similar cultural messages, and contain a broad range of different individuals who are affected by those cultural messages in various ways

Question 43

What are issues with describing a group of people with culture?

Answer 43

• the boundaries are not always clear-cut (nationality usually an indicator of culture and other kinds of groups aside from countries that have cultures)
• culture changes over time
• variability of people within the same culture (distinct temperament, different social groups, unique individual experiences)

Question 44

General psychology

Answer 44

Assumes that the mind operates according to natural and universal laws independent from context or content-> mind seen as a highly abstract central processing unit, context seen as unwanted noise like culture

Question 45

Cultural psychology

Answer 45

The mind does not operate independently of what it is thinking about, so not the operation of the CPU. Cultural knowledge can shape understanding of behaviour, so thoughts and feelings are immersed in cultural info-> seen as more meaningful

Question 46

How can cultural differences be explained through psychological processes?

Answer 46

1. focus on cultural idea, so there is more focus on it and a rich network develops of thoughts, behaviours, feelings.
2. This will be activated when there are reminders of the idea
3. the networks will become activate regularly and automatically

Question 47

How does abstraction play a role in evidence?

Answer 47

The more abstract, the more evidence for universals but the phenomena or processes are too abstract to be of use

Question 48

What are the questions of the decision tree?

Answer 48

• cognitively available yes or no
• same use yes or no
• same accessibility yes or no

Question 49

Non universal

Answer 49

Seen as cultural inventions like abacus reasoning in Middle Eat and in Asia, so they think about numbers differently

Question 50

Existential universal

Answer 50

A psychological process exists in all culture but the process is not use to solve the same problems nor is it equally accessible across culture. Such as experiences with success are motivating and experiences with failure demotivating, but opposite shown for East Asians

Question 51

Functional universal

Answer 51

Psychological processes that exist in all cultures used to solve the same problems across cultures but are more accessible to people from some cultures than others. Same function but used differently

Question 52

Accessibility universal

Answer 52

Psychological process exists in all cultures, used to solve the same problems and accessible to the same degree across cultures. Not many examples but social facilitation (better at well-learned tasks and worse at poorly learned ones when there are others)

Question 53

What is important about the Muller-Lyer illusion?

Answer 53

• angles of the lines are similar to the angles seen in carpentered corners-> info about the relative distance, so if not exposed then little info about depth cues
• effects are more exaggerated in American samples

Question 54

What does cross-cultural data reveal?

Answer 54

• people from industrialized societies respond differently than those from small-scale societies
• industrialized societies show more pronounced responses
• Americans show more extreme responses than other Westerners
• modern American college students are different than non-college educated Americans

Question 55

What is important to realize about cultural psychology?

Answer 55

• increase in research in cultural over the past decades
• large gaps in our knowledge about how culture influences psychology

Question 56

Color-blind approach

Answer 56

Hope is that individuals can interact with each other without giving too much attention to cultural background and try to get along.

Question 57

Multicultural approach

Answer 57

People identify strongly with their groups and this is meaningful, respecting these differences-> observing and appreciating differences. Respond negatively when ignoring distinctive aspects. Groups that use the multicultural approach fare better

Question 58

Ethnocentrism

Answer 58

Judging people from other cultures by the standards of our own culture

Question 59

How to learn about another culture?

Answer 59

• read existing texts and ethnographies (rich descriptions of a culture)
• find a collaborator of the culture you are studying
• immersing yourself in the culture and learning firsthand (but can be time-consuming and costly)

Question 60

What is a key advantage of general psychologists?

Answer 60

They are studying people from their own culture, so they are more likely to think in a very similar way to themselves, while cultural psychologists usually have different experiences and would not be able to generalize

Question 61

What are the problems when students are over-emphasized in the research?

Answer 61

• issues with generalizability
• problems with power (capacity to detect an effect)
• culture is the independent variable, if two similar cultures are compared then there would be less variance
• the more variance the greater the likelihood the effect will be detected in the dependent variable

Question 62

What is the issue of the translation of questionnaire items?

Answer 62

• solution can be keeping all materials in the original language
• but some participants can have poorer English, and those with good English are unlikely to be representative
• language can greatly affect the ways one is thinking in bilingual participants
• no linguistic equivalents

Question 63

What is back-translation?

Answer 63

One professional translates from English into Indonesian, another translation from Indonesian to English. Compare the original to the translated version and discuss the differences and how to alter them. Can result in unnatural or hard to understand translations

Question 64

What is standardization of scores?

Answer 64

• participants scores are averaged, individual items are assessed from how much they deviate from the participant’s typical way of responding
• expressed as z scores which deviate from the participant’s average
• standardizing assumes that the average level of response is identical across cultures, but can be acceptable when looking at patterns of responses across broad measures, but cannot conclude based on comparing culture in only a few constructs

Question 65

What are the deprivation effects?

Answer 65

The idea that if there is less safety and security, that this becomes more important as a value. No way to correct it other than to see whether self-report results converge with results from other sources regarding values

Question 66

When can self-report measures compare average scores?

Answer 66

Not across cultures but can be useful in identifying individual differences within a culture-> similar biases and reference groups

Question 67

What are the two types of manipulation?

Answer 67

• between-groups manipulation (in which different groups of participants receive different levels of the independent variable, with random assignment)
• within- groups manipulation (participant receives more than one level and no random assignment)
• experimental method changes btw cultures comparison from comparing the magnitude of means across cultures to to comparing the patterns of means across cultures

Question 68

What are the neuroscience methods?

Answer 68

• fmRI (measures brain’s blood oxygen levels)
• EEG (brain activity is measured via electrodes placed on the scalp)

Question 69

Why would a study not successfully replicate?

Answer 69

• original finding not reliable
• the replication effort had problems
• a finding may be reliably obtained in some cultures but not in all cultures

Question 70

What is situation sampling?

Answer 70

• participants from at least 2 cultures are asked to describe several situations they have experienced
• different groups are given a list of situations generated and asked to imagine how they would have felt in those situations
• can explore differences in how they respond to situations (cultural experiences can become habitualized)
• enables the researcher to see the cultural origin

Question 71

How does thinking vary across cultures?

Answer 71

Independent aspects of the self are more characteristic of Americans than Chinese, while interdependent aspects of the self more characteristic of Chinese. When activating the independent and interdependent primes, thinking is more similar to people of that culture.

Question 72

What is the challenge of unpackaging?

Answer 72

A cultural difference does not tell us which cultural experience sustains it, so unpackaging is identifying the underlying variable that gives rise to cultural differences. Important to demonstrate the observed differences in the value resulting in a different behaviour. Suggests that we identified a variable partly responsible for explaining the cultural difference.

Question 73

What is involved in using multiple methods?

Answer 73

• when using diverse methods and finding convergent results then a stronger case is made
• Occam’s razor (simplest solution to a problem tens to be the right one)

Question 74

Honour case study (just for interest)

Answer 74

Those from the South were more likely to be violent due to uncomfortable weather which can make those more uncomfortable, more poverty. The European settlers in the South were herders from Scotch-Irish lands, while the European settlers in the North were farmers. Linked to culture of honour (striving to protect the reputation through aggression). There was greater argument-related murders in the South, more likely to use violence to protect family, but not in general. The testosterone increased more after being insulted for the Southerners, Northeners more likely to find it funny. When they were not insulted, gave more more way for the confederate than after being insulted, no differences for Northeners.

Question 75

What is agent-based modelling?

Answer 75

Testing a hypothesis by creating simulations with virtual agents programmed to act autonomously in a game