Week 3 - Cross-Cultural Cognition Flashcards
CULTURAL
DIMENSIONS THEORY: Hofstede (2001)
Individualism–collectivism
* How interdependent is a culture?
Uncertainty avoidance
* How do people deal with ambiguity?
Power distance
* How hierarchical is a culture?
Long-term/short-term orientation
* Connection with tradition, also economic orientation
Masculinity/femininity
* How distinct are gender roles? Distribution of classical male/female traits
CULTURAL VARIATION
Cultures = fluid and dynamic, changing
over time
ideas and norms don’t necessarily emerge to
address universal problems…
result from cultural learning
SOURCES OF
CULTURAL VARIATION
-Ecological and geographical differences
- Local ecologies (cultural values and norms)
Proximate causes vs. distal causes
Evoked culture vs. transmitted culture
PROXIMATE AND
DISTAL CAUSES
Proximate causes: Differences that have direct and
immediate effects
Distal causes: Early differences that lead to effects
over long periods of time
EVOKED AND
TRANSMITTED CULTURE
Evoked culture: “biologically encoded”; Specific environments evoke specific
responses from (all) people within that environment,
becoming part of a culture
Transmitted culture: Cultural information passed on or
learned via social transmission or modeling
–> Not always clearly separated!
Transmitted culture is arguably always involved in
maintaining cultural norms, even when evoked cultural
responses are also present
TRANSMISSION OF
CULTURAL INFORMATION:
Biological evolution vs Cultural evolution
Biological evolution: ideas need to be retained and passed on
- Natural selection
- Sexual selection
–> Sometimes conflicting! (e.g., peacocks males and their feather tales are easy to spot, not good for hiding)
Cultural evolution: Similarities with biological evolution
- Ideas can be persistent (high survival rate)
- Ideas can be more prone to being passed around
(reproduced more)
Cultural evolution: differences from biological evolution
- More copying errors in cultural ideas
- Cultural ideas can be transmitted horizontally among
peers, not only vertically across generations (ideas move faster than psychological traits) - Cultural ideas do not have to be adaptive
Information going viral: Memes
Agents of cultural transmission (Dawkins)
–> Shared jokes/context
COMMUNICABLE
IDEAS: In order to be easily shared, information might be especially…
- useful or informative
- elicit emotional response
- simple to communicate
Ideas generally spread within social networks, leading to
clustering of attitudes: ???
Dynamical social impact theory (Norms develop among those who communicate regularly)
PERSISTING IDEAS: persist longer how?
Ideas that have a small number of counterintuitive elements
persist longer
- minimal
- religious narratives / myth/storytelling
CHANGING CULTURES: changing and evolving
in several ways…
- Increasingly interconnected
- Increasingly individualistic
- People increasingly intelligent
CHANGING CULTURES: INCREASES IN
INTERCONNECTEDNESS
- easier & cheaper transports and long-distance communication
- create a global culture
- countered by increased tribalism or modern populism
CHANGING CULTURES: Individualism vs Collectivism
(Cultures often studied on an Individualism/Collectivism (I/S)
dimension (cf Hofstede))
- Individualism = individuals encouraged to consider
themselves as distinct from others and prioritize own personal
goals over collective goals - Collectivism = individuals encouraged to place more
emphasis on goals of one’s collective or in-group
CHANGING CULTURES: INCREASES IN
INDIVIDUALISM
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 (!)
CHANGING CULTURES: INCREASE IN INDIVIDUALISM (in collectivistic society)
Also visible in traditionally collectivistic cultures, e.g. Japan
* Higher divorce rates
* Decreases in family size
* Placing higher value on independence in children
CHANGING CULTURES: INCREASES IN
INTELLIGENCE
Longitudinal data suggests that IQ scores rise between 5 and
25 points per generation
- dependent of intelligence test
- largest increase seen for “ravens matrices test” –> culture free and focused on problem-solving
Proposed reasons for increased intelligence include:
- Improved nutrition
- More ppl receive education (higher degrees)
- Pop-culture, increasingly more complicated (complex plots in movies and tv-shows)
PERSISTENCE OF
CULTURE: Changes are usually slow, and some cultural qualities persist for far longer than their initial usefulness!
- Persistence is an effect of pre-existing structure
- Facilitated by pluralistic ignorance = tendency to collectively
misinterpret the thoughts that underlie other people’s behavior
Pluralistic ignorance (e.g., death-sentence)
pluralistic ignorance = tendency to collectively
misinterpret the thoughts that underlie other people’s behavio
PERCEPTION AND COGNITION
Thought of as mostly universal functions! However, there are cross-cultural differences in the basic phenomena of:
sensation…
perception…
cognition…
sensation: Seeing, hearing, touching, smelling, tasting
perception: Perceptual organisation - How to structure & interpret incoming sensory information
cognition: Memory, attention, task switching, imagery, reasoning, etc
SENSING VS PERCEIVING
Sensation:
* Vision/seeing
* Audition/hearing
* Haptic sense/touching
* Olfactory sense/smelling
* Gustatory sense/tasting
* (more: proprioception, pain/itch, temperature, balance…)
Perception: conscious experience
ENCULTURATION IN PERCEPTION: previous exposure & predictability
Previous exposure: leads to changed processing of new
information –> increased sensitivity
Predictability: if known what to expect, infrequently perceived things become more interesting, but processed less successfully (e.g., faces, weather, colors. tastes, music, etc…)
STATISTICAL LEARNING: (frequent, together, important)
what is Frequent: COMMON vs RARE
what goes Together: NORMAL vs SURPRISE
what is Important: SALIENT aspects of a stimulus are processed more efficiently
BOTTOM-UP & TOP-DOWN
Top-Down Modulation: Internally-driven attention (interpretation of incoming information based on prior knowledge, experiences, and expectations.)
Bottom-Up Processing: Externally-driven attention (retrieval of sensory information from our external environment)
Higher-order information, (bottom-up & Top-down)
= prior knowledge and experience, help to interpret patterns going beyond basic stimulus properties
Different cultures lead to different ‘auditory environments’
Different rhythms (regular or irregular) & beats –> Rhythmic biases
AUDITORY ENVIRONMENT: LANGUAGE
- Syllable-timed: e.g., French & Spanish
- Stress-timed: e.g., Dutch & English
- Mora-timed: e.g., Japanese
NORMAL PAIRWISE VARIABILITY INDEX: NPVI
nPVI: calculates the durational variability of successive vocalic duration
The higher the nPVI value, the larger the contrast of successive duration
(English composers are “better” than French)
PERCEPTION AND THINKING STYLES
- Analytic thinking (greek)
- Holistic thinking (chinese)
Analytic and holistic thinking appear to be culturally variant,
potentially based on philosophical traditions (Cf. Greek vs Chinese)
Analytic thinking involves (individualistic society)
- Focus on objects and attributes
- Objects perceived as independent from contexts
- Taxonomic categorization
- More prevalent in individualistic societies
Holistic thinking involves (collectivistic society)
- Attending to the relations among objects
- Predicting an object’s behavior on the basis of those relationships
- Thematic categorization
- More prevalent in collectivistic societies
ART: HORIZONS AND CONTEXT
Western art: horizontal view, one vocal point
Eastern art: “bird view” , more relations
PORTRAITS: West vs East
Typical western portrait (left): bigger faces, less background
Typical Eastern portrait (right): more context
CITY-SCAPES
When comparing the view from specific locations in American and Japanese towns, Japanese views are generally
more complex
–> Perceptual environments can induce specific patterns of
attention!
Thus Japanese notice “change-blindness” changes better
ANALYTIC & HOLISTIC APPROACHES
Relationships between figure and ground (field), focal and contextual information
Field dependence: linking/integrating an object into its context,
difficulty to see separate elements
Holistic thinkers perceive a scene as an integrated whole
* More field dependence
Analytic thinkers are able to separate objects from each other
* Field independence
FIELD DEPENDENCE IN THE LAB (the rod-and-frame task)
The line is:
A—perfectly vertical
B—a couple of degrees off vertical
The line is:
A—perfectly vertical
B—a couple of degrees off vertical
Right answer –> B
FIELD DEPENDENCE IN THE LAB: Attending to foreground and background (fish)
American vs Japanese
(fish + original background; fish + no background; fish + novel background)
Americans: unaffected by background manipulation
Japanese: more errors with new background (not affected by
absent background)
FOCAL ATTENTION: Attention operationalized as gaze direction: eye-tracking data
the more time the bigger difference in cultural groups but not within the group itself. Time matters for attention processing, but not in the long run.
UNDERSTANDING BEHAVIOR OF OTHERS: Analytic thinkers
more likely to make dispositional attributions even when contextual/environmental constraints are made explicit, e.g., more related to the person then the context
UNDERSTANDING BEHAVIOR OF OTHERS: Holistic thinkers
Holistic thinkers are more likely to pay attention to
contextual information and make situational attributions.
e.g., more related to the context then the person
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
- attitudes to the self: Holistic thinkers give more contradictory self-descriptions
- future expectations: Analytic thinkers assume linear progressions, holistic thinkers expect change
OTHER INFLUENCES ON THINKING: TALKING
- Vocalizing thoughts helps Westerners but not Easterners
–> Speech forces focus which facilitates analytic thinking but
interferes with holistic thinking
LANGUAGE & THOUGHT: All spoken communication contains both implicit (i.e. nonverbal) and explicit information.
High context cultures (East-Asian) = people highly connected with each other, much shared information guides behavior, less explicit information is needed for communication
–> harder time ignoring implicit information
Low context cultures (Western) = less shared information, more explicit information is necessary for communication
LANGUAGE & THOUGHT: Linguistic relativity
Strong version = language determines thought:
without access to the right words, people cannot have certain
kinds of thoughts
Weak version = language influences thought:
having access to certain words influences the kinds of
thoughts that one has
EFFECTS OF LANGUAGE ON PERCEPTION AND COGNITION
- Color perception
- Odor perception
- Temporal perception
- Spatial perception
- Perception of agency
- Numerical cognition & math
