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Week 3 Flashcards

1
Q

Cultural variation

A

Cultures are fluid and dynamic, in most cases changing over time, but cultural ideas and norms dont necessarily emerge to address universal problems.
Rather result of cultural learning

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2
Q

Sources of cultural variation

A

Ecological and geographical differences are important -> far reaching consequences (vb. availability of food sources, ease of living, independence among groups

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3
Q

Local ecologies

A

Influence cultural values and norms and can lead to cultural variation in different ways

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4
Q

Proximate causes

A

Differences that have direct and immediate effects

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5
Q

Distal causes

A

Early differences that lead to effects over long periods of time

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6
Q

Evoked culture

A

Specific environments evoke specific responses from all people within that environment becoming part of a culture

Vb. environmental specific biologically encoded behaviour

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7
Q

Transmitted culture

A

Cultural information passed on or learned via social transmission or modeling

Vb. not always environment- specific learned behaviour

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8
Q

Evoked and transmitted culture

A

Niet always clear separated

Transmitted is arguably always involved in maintaining cultural norms even when evoked cultural responses are also present

Evoked culture based on ecological needs alone cannot explain cultural variation

Transmitted culture represents situation specific and group specific knowledge

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9
Q

TRANSMISSION OF CULTURAL INFORMATION

A
  1. Ideas need to be retained
  2. Ideas need to be passed on
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10
Q

Main mechanisms of transmitting cultural information

A

Parallel with biological evolution
• Natural selection
• Increasing proportions of traits that confer a survival advantage
• Sexual selection
• Increasing proportion of traits
that confer reproductive advantages
• Sometimes conflicting!

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11
Q

Cultural evolution

A

Similarities with biological evolution
• Ideas can be persistent (high survival rate)
• Ideas can be more prone to being passed around
(reproduced more)

Differences
• More copying errors in cultural ideas
• Cultural ideas can be transmitted horizontally among
peers, not only vertically across generations
• Cultural ideas do not have to be adaptive
What makes ideas interesting and sticky?

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12
Q

Memes

A

Agents of cultural transmission (Dawkins)
=>Shared jokes/context

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13
Q

Communicable ideas

A

In order to be easily shared, information might be especially useful or informative, elicit an emotional response, and are simple to communicate.
=> vb. life hacks, risk of rumors.
=> strong emotions and not too complex

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14
Q

Clustering of attitudes

A

Ideas generally spread within social networks, leading to clustering of attitudes: Dynamical social impact theory
• An account for the origin of culture:
Norms develop among those who communicate regularly

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15
Q

Persisting ideas

A

have a small number of counterintuitive elements persist longer
• Minimal, but noticeable violations of expectation
• Characteristics of many religious narratives as well as myth/storytelling
• Supported by research into ‘catchiness’ of fairy tales

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16
Q

Changing cultures

A

In recent decades, cultures have been changing and evolving in several ways.
• Increasingly interconnected
• Increasingly individualistic
• People increasingly intelligent

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17
Q

Increase in interconnectedness

A

• Easier & cheaper transportation and long-distance communication allow more connections between cultures
=> This interconnectedness has created a global culture
• Many large companies operate internationally
=> This globalization has been countered by increased tribalism or modern populism
• An urge to return to traditional cultures
• Sense of cultural identity within smaller in-groups

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18
Q

Increases in individualism

A

Visible when comparing younger and older Americans, proposed reasons include
• More pressures of time and money
• Increased suburbanization
• More electronic entertainment
• Higher socioeconomic status
• More secular
• Decrease in rates of infectious diseases (!)

Also visible in traditionally collectivistic cultures, e.g. Japan
• Higher divorce rates
• Decreases in family size
• Placing higher value on independence in children

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19
Q

Individualism

A

individuals encouraged to consider themselves as distinct from others and prioritize own personal goals over collective goals

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20
Q

Collectivism

A

individuals encouraged to place more emphasis on goals of one’s collective or in-group

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21
Q

Increase in intelligence

A

Largest increase seen for Raven’s matrices test, intended to be ‘culture-free’, focused on problem solving.

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22
Q

Proposed reasons for > intelligence

A

• Improved nutrition
• More people receiving education than before
•Higher degrees needed for jobs in increasingly complex world
• Pop culture has been increasingly more complicated
• More complicated plots in movies and TVshows;highly complex video games

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23
Q

Persistence of culture

A

Changes are usually slow, and some cultural qualities persist for far longer than their initial usefulness!
Persistence is an effect of pre-existing structure
• Evolution of culture departs from, and is based on, some initial cultural state. • Such initial cultural states will limit the manner in which future cultural
variation takes shape.

24
Q

Pluralistic ignorance

A

Tendency to collectively misinterpret the thoughts that underlie other people’s behavior
• When everyone (incorrectly) assumes everyone else is in favor of some cultural norm, they comply with the norm, thus perpetuating the culture.

25
Sensation
input through the senses • Vision/seeing • Audition/hearing • Haptic sense/touching • Olfactory sense/smelling • Gustatory sense/tasting • (more: proprioception, pain/itch, temperature, balance...)
26
Perception
the conscious percept or experience
27
Enculturation in perception
Ø Previous exposure leads to changed processing of new information: e.g. increased sensitivity Ø Predictability: if you know what to expect, infrequently perceived things become more interesting, but processed less successfully This applies to... • Faces • Weather • Colors • Tastes • Music • Etc etc etc
28
Statistical learning
• What is frequent? => Common vs rare • What goes together? => Normal vs surprising • What is important? => Salient aspects of a stimulus are processed more efficiently
29
Cognitive processes (BO&TD)
interact with basic sensory mechanisms to produce a conscious percept
30
Bottom up and top down
Higher-order information, such as prior knowledge and experience, can lead to perception of patterns that go beyond basic stimulus properties
31
New categories in sound
Different cultures lead to different ‘auditory environments’ Music: scale notes make up common melodies, but tone is continuous! Musical scales: • Western 12-tone scale • Indonesian gamelan scales: Pelog • Arabic scales: Saba
32
Rhythm
Irregular time signatures are common in the music from the Balkan, Greece and Turkey
33
Developing structure in perception
Infants are developing rhythmic categories: Rhythmic biases are enculturated! The rhythm of composed music varies for languages, even without lyrics
34
NORMAL PAIRWISE VARIABILITY INDEX: NPVI
nPVI: calculates the durational variability of successive vocalic duration • How variable is rhythm in speech? The higher the nPVI value, the larger the contrast of successive duration
35
Perception and thinking styles
Analytic and holistic thinking appear to be culturally variant, potentially based on philosophical traditions (Cf. Greek vs Chinese)
36
Analytic thinking
Analytic thinking involves: • Focus on objects and attributes • Objects perceived as independent from contexts • Taxonomic categorization • More prevalent in individualistic societies
37
Holistic thinking
Holistic thinking involves: • Attending to the relations among objects • Predicting an object’s behavior on the basis of those relationships • Thematic categorization • More prevalent in collectivistic societies
38
Art
Different horizons and contexts
39
Portraits
Typical western portrait: bigger faces, less background Typical Eastern portrait: more context
40
City scapes
When comparing the view from specific locations in American and Japanese towns, Japanese views are generally more complex
41
Exposure to city scapes
After exposure to these images, both Japanese and US viewers increase their ability to detect changes in visual scenes
42
Field dependence
= linking/integrating an object into its context, difficulty to see separate elements Relationships between figure and ground (field), focal and contextual information. Holistic thinkers perceive a scene as an integrated whole • More field dependence Analytic thinkers are able to separate objects from each other • Field independence
43
Field dependence in lab
The rod and frame task: Both passive and active testing replicated the effect If given control to operate the machine, Americans became more confident as compared to Chinese! Fish task: Americans: unaffected by background manipulation Japanese: more errors with new background (not affected by absent background)
44
Focal attention
Attention operationalized as gaze direction: eye-tracking data American > Japanese
45
Analytic understanding of behaviours of others
Analytic thinkers are more likely to make dispositional attributions even when contextual/environmental constraints are made explicit.
46
Holistic understanding of behaviours of others
thinkers are more likely to pay attention to contextual information and make situational attributions.
47
General understanding of behaviours of others
Tendencies develop with age: differences between Indian & American adults *much* larger than for children =>Indian adults show reversed attribution error!
48
Accepting contradiction
Analytic thinking: traceable to Greek philosophical tradition, heavy on formal logic • Does not accept contradictions: A=B or A=Not B Holistic thinking: traceable to Chinese philosophical tradition (Confucianism), focus on continual change • Everything is interconnected, moving between opposites
49
Attitudes to the self (H vs. A)
• Holistic thinkers give more contradictory self-descriptions
50
Future expectations (H vs. A)
• Analytic thinkers assume linear progressions, holistic thinkers expect change
51
Influence on thinking
Talking Vocalizing thoughts helps Westerners but not Easterners Interpretation: Speech forces focus which facilitates analytic thinking but interferes with holistic thinking
52
High context cultures (language and thoughts)
people highly connected with each other, much shared information guides behavior, less explicit information is needed for communication => East Asian cultures People in high-context cultures have a harder time ignoring implicit information than people in low context cultures.
53
Low context cultures (Language and thoughts)
less shared information, more explicit information is necessary for communication
54
Linguistic relativity
Whorfian hypothesis: • Strong version = language determines thought: without access to the right words, people cannot have certain kinds of thoughts => Largely rejected • Weak version = language influences thought: having access to certain words influences the kinds of thoughts that one has • Much controversy surrounding this claim
55
Effects of language on perception and cognition
• Color perception • Odor perception • Temporal perception • Spatial perception • Perception of agency • Numerical cognition & math

CCP (8 decks)

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