What is culture? Flashcards
What is culture?
- Matsumoto and Juang 2023
A unique meaning and information system, shared by a group and transmitted across generations, that allows the group to meet basic needs of suvival, pursue happiness and well-being, and derive meaning from life
Functional definition of culture
Culture is also a pair of glasses that we are constantly looking through - a schema to help us evaluate and organize information
What are people like?
- Every person is to some degree…
- like other people
- like some other people, and
- like no other person
Goals of cross-cultural psychology
Build a body of knowledge about people:
1. transport and test hypotheses and findings to other cultural settings
2. explore other cultures in order to discover cultural and psychological variations
3. Integrate findings into a more universal psychology
–> Improve people’s lives
(psychological research is based on studies among WEIRD samples)
WEIRD samples
Western Educated Industrialized Rich and Democratic sample
- not representative
- most authors and samples are WEIRD
- we need to know whether what we study holds for educated as well as uneducated people, industrialized or non-industrialized contexts
Origin of culture
Environments come with demands for adaption:
- climate
- resources
- population desity
–> for example the difference in rice/wheat farming
Latitudinal Psychology
Harsh climates induce environmental stress, which affects ways of living
- the stressors can be counteracted by greater affluence (like money)
3 theoretical approaches for cultural differences
- Hofstede and Triandis
- Markus and Kitayama
- Gelfand
Hofstede
- most cited general framework to classify cultural patterns on the country level
- examination of work-related values in employees of IBM during 1970s
- 4 classic dimensions –> later 6 (bottom up)
Hofstede’s four classic dimensions
- power distance
- individualism/collectivism
- mascuinity/femininity
- uncertainty/avoidance
Individualism
Pertains to societies in which the ties between individuals are loose: everyone is expected to look after himself and his immediate family
Collectivism
As its opposite pertains to societies in which people from birth onwards are integrated into strong cohesive in-groups, which throughout people’s lifetime continue to protect them in unquestioning loyalty
2 added dimensions to Hofstede’s 4
- happened in 2010
- Long-term/short-term orientation (short-term orientation is stuck in the way it has always been
- Indulgence
Criticism on Hofstede
Low face validity for individualism testing for example: long term orientation en Minkov
- no support for the differences that were predicted by the model
- power distance seems to be a part of indivudualism/collectivism
- uncertainty avoidance is not reliably measured
- masculinity/femininity does not predict criteria that were prespecified
Criticism long term orientation Hofstede
- normative societies score low on long term orientation and therefor stick to old traditions and what they know
- cultures with a high score are pragmatic and prepare for the future in culture
Minkov’s criticism on Hofstede
- analysed the model with new studies
- 4 questions
- power distance seems to be a part of IND and COLL
–> hofstede fails the test and needs serious revisioning
Triandis
- Vertical collectivism
- Horizontal collectivism
- Vertical individualism
- Horizontal collectivism