Week 1: What is culture & How to study it Flashcards
What are 4 challenges when thinking about a group of people as constituting a culture
- The boundaries of what constitutes a culture are not very clearcut; and individuals might be exposed to cultural ideas from different locations
- There are other kinds of groups aside from countries that we might say have cultures
- Cultures change over time
- There is a large variability in individuals who belong to the same culture
Explain the universality perspective on the mind in relation to culture
= the phenomenon that general psychologists tend to conceive the mind as a highly abstract central processing unit (CPU) that operates independently of the context within which it is thinking or of the the content is it thinking of
–> According to this perspective, important cultural variations in ways of thinking cannot exist because cultures merely provide variations in context and content that lie outside the operations of the underlying CPU. If cultural differences do appear in psychological studies, this universalist perspective would suggest that they must reflect the contamination of various sources of noise.
–> In contrast, cultural psychologists believe that thinking is not merely the operation of the universal CPU; thinking also involves participation in the context within which one is doing the thinking and interacting with the content one is thinking about.
Explain the study with the stimulus box
Task: There’s an example picture of a box with a line in it of a certain length, and there are two smaller boxes.
Absolute task = draw the line as in the example, with the line being the same length in the smaller box
Relative task = draw the line as in the example, but with the line being in proportion to the smaller box
Results:
- When European Americans completed the relative task, they showed more activation in brain areas associated with attentional control, indicating that the relative length judgment was more difficult and required more concentration than the absolute length judgment (analytic reasoning)
- In contrast, when the East Asians made the same judgments, they showed more evidence of attentional control when they completed the absolute task compared with the relative one (holistic reasoning)
Explain analytic reasoning vs. holistic reasoning in the context of the relative/absolute task
Holistic reasoning = seeing the world as a whole and trying to understand how elements of the world are related to each other (relative task is easier)
Analytic reasoning = focus is on taking information out of context and analysing it as such (absolute task is easier)
Explain how cultural psychologists tend to explain cultural differences in psychological processes
When people in a culture consider an idea it gets a lot of focus which creates rich networks of thoughts/behaviors/feelings, which are activated every time something reminds them of this idea. If this happens often enough, the networks become activated regularly and come to mind/become prioritized ahead of other ones. Cultures differ in the ideas their members frequently encounter, which creates differences.
Provide the decision tree for determining the level of universality in a psychological process
Q1: Cognitively available? Is a specific cognitive tool available in all cultures?
–> NO = Non-universal (cultural invention)
–> YES = Q2
Q2: Same use? If you do find it in all cultures, does it do the same thing/does it work the same across cultures?
–> NO = Existential universal (variation in function)
–> YES = Q3
Q3: Same accessibility? Is it accessible to the same extent?
–> NO = Functional universalism (variation in accessibility)
–> YES = Accessibility universal (no variation)
Explain the WEIRD acronym and its implications
W = Western
E = Educated
I = Industrialized
R = Rich
D = Democratic
The vast majority of of psychological studies have thus far been limited to explorations of the minds of people from WEIRD societies, more specifically from undergraduate, American psychology students. The typical psychological database represents a very narrow and unusual slice of the world’s population.
Explain the Muller-Lyer illusion and the cultural differences related to this illusion
= when two lines next to each other have two arrowhead-like lines at both ends that are pointing from in to out, this makes the line looks smaller than when they are pointing from out to in, even though the lines are actually the same size.
This illusion does not work (the same) for everyone, the illusion is stronger in some populations than others. This is thought to be the case because people from certain societies/countries are used to the visual illusion that is created when a line has arrowheads pointing in vs out, whereas in other societies these representations may not necessarily exist.
What are 4 general things that available cross-cultural data reveal about many of the key findings in psychology
- People from industrialized societies respond differently than those from small-scale societies.
- People from Western industrialized societies demonstrate more pronounced responses than those from non-Western societies.
- Americans show yet more extreme responses than other Westerners.
- The responses of contemporary American college students are even more different than those of non-college-educated American adults.
Explain the color-blind approach and its implications for cultures
= the assumption that people are the same everywhere
People can very easily adopt an “us vs them” perspective when being told they belong to one group and not to the other, thus attention to differences between groups can lead to discrimination. It follows that if people’s attention is not drawn to the differences between cultures, they will be less likely to create boundaries between themselves and others and get along better.
Explain the multicultural approach and its implications for cultures
= focusing on and respecting group differences
The rationale is that people really do identify strongly with their groups, and that people are more likely to identify with their group if it is smaller than other groups. Also, being discriminated against can lead to members of minority groups being even more committed to their groups. Attempts to downplay group differences may suggest that minority members would be accepted as long as they shed their distinctive cultural identity and act like those in the majority group, and research finds that minority group members tend to favor a multicultural approach more than majority members do.
Compare the two approaches based on the evidence mentioned in Chapter 1
The findings are generally consistent, with groups that emphasize multicultural messages being far better than groups emphasizing color-blind messages.
Summarize the case study on the culture of The Sambia
In their culture, boys are born with very feminine energy and they need to earn their manhood by engaging in oral sex with older men to aqcuire semen. When they get older they get married and they become bisexual, engaging in both sex with their wives and oral sex with younger boys, and later they become heterosexual and just have relations with their wives.
What 2 things are important when making meaningful cultural comparisons
- Learning about the culture under study; reading ethnographies (rich descriptions of cultures), collaborating with someone from the culture you are studying, immersing yourself in a culture to learn its ways
- Contrasting highly different and similar cultures; because of the challenge of methodological equivalence, often only industrialized societies are studied
Explain methodological equivalence
= for researchers to be able to make meaningful comparisons across cultures, participants must understand the questions or situations the same way
–> when the cultures are not comparably familiar with the research setting, achieving methodological equivalence is more challenging and researchers must adapt their procedures so they are understandable in every culture studied
