Studied by 6 people
4 Course Themes
Everyone belongs to culture(s); we are all cultural animals and everyone is weird
Difference is not deficit
Differences are average not absolutes
Differences can be evaluated
3 Challenges to defining culture
Cultures are always changing
Boundaries aren’t clear cut
the variability among individuals within any culture
Cultural Psychology studies what?
The implications about our thoughts in a diverse environment
Psychological processes are shaped by what?
experiences
What shapes experience?
culture
Experiences ____ psychological processes, but they do not ____
processes; determine
To what extent should ways of thinking look similar around the world because people share a universal brain, and to what extent should they look different because people have divergent experiences?
No clear answer
Culture Definition 1
“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 behaviors.” A.K.A what is learned from others
Culture Definition 2
“A culture is a group of people who are existing within some kind of shared context.”
Example of boundaries being unclear
individuals might be exposed to cultural ideas that emerge from distant locations, such as those from their immigrant parents, experiences they have while traveling, advertisements they see from multinational firms, or ideas they learn from watching a foreign movie.
An example of a rough boundary for culture is…
nationality
What makes these groups arguably qualify as “cultures”?
Members exist within a shared context
Communicate with each other
Have some norms that distinguish them from other groups
Have some common practices and ideas
The more that people who belong to a group share similar norms and communication,
the more the group deserves to be identified as a culture
Cultures are not static entities but
rather dynamic and ever changing
Perhaps the most important challenge in considering cultures as groups of people is the variability among individuals who belong to the same culture:
Each person inherits a distinct temperature (a predisposition toward certain personality traits, abilities, and attitudes).
Each person belongs to a unique collection of various social groups, each with its own distinctive culture
Each person has a unique history of individua; experiences that has shaped their views.
The term “culture” refers to a dynamic group of people who…
share a similar context
are exposed to many similar cultural messages
contain a broad range of different individuals who are affected by those cultural messages in various ways.
An example of different senses of culture in different cultures
Jerry Lewis slapstick comedy is more popular in France than it is in the US
The kinds of readily observable cultural differences in preferences are common ways to think about cultural variation:
People from other cultures are different because they
like other kinds of jokes
prefer unusual food
wear other types of clothing
worship different God(s)
vote for different political candidates
and more
Who is Richard Shweder
an american cultural anthropologist, who is considered to be the father of modern cultural psychology
General Psychology
In Shweder’s view, the overarching perspective of the field of psychology assumes that the mind operates under a set of natural and universal laws that exist independently of a person’s context or the content of that person’s thoughts
The idea of general psychology is covered by what lyrics?
“People are the same wherever you go,” by Paul McCartney and Stevie Wonder
studying universals is…
highly interesting, yet enormously challenging, enterprise that tells us a great deal about human nature
We can learn much about how the mind works by identifying…
the unchanging ways it operates
Example of how people are not the same everywhere
in some languages pronouns can be dropped while in others they cannot, people in some cultures bite their tongue when they are embarrassed whereas people in other cultures do not, some languages don’t have a word for blue, people in some cultures are disgusted at the idea of incest between cousins whereas others, are not, and in some culture people don’t understand the number 5.
The study of human variability is…
a very interesting and challenging enterprise that greatly informs our understanding of human nature and the ways the mind operates
Shweder argues that general psychologist…
tend to be more captivated by arguments about human universality than cultural variability
An assumption that tends to be embraced by cultural psychologists is…
that in many ways the mind does NOT operate independently of what it is thinking about.
General psychology would argue that…
virtually all of human psychology is universally experienced in similar ways.
Cultural psychologists would argue that…
to fully understand the mind, it is important to consider whether one is thinking about food, weapons, sexual partners, or secured rituals
It’s critical to consider whether…
one’s behaviors increases one’s status within the community, violate a law, demonstrate affection to one’s child, or are consistent with religious doctrine.
The ways that people think about cultural behaviors are influenced by…
the very specific and particular ways that cultural knowledge shapes their understanding of those behaviors.
Because humans are cultural beings…
their cations, thoughts, and feelings are immersed in cultural information, and this information renders these actions, thoughts, and feelings to be meaningful. In other words, these actions, thoughts, and feelings come to relate to other things beyond them.
Cultural meanings are entangled with…
the ways the mind operates, and we cannot consider the mind separate from its culture
The Task Box
Result: The “absolute“ line should be more 12mm long. The “relative” line should be 6mm long.
Explanation: people from the western cultures tend to perform better at the absolute task, while people from non-western cultures tend to perform better on the relative task.
The same task elicits different patterns of brain activation across cultures.
The mind is shaped by its experiences,
and cultures differ in the kinds of experiences that they provide
Experience shapes brain example
Taxi Driver Study: cabbies in London face daily challenges of navigating one of busiest and most complex street grids in the world. As they gain experience over the years, they create detailed maps that help them figure out the best way to get from point A to point B. And importantly, their experience in navigating through these mental maps actually changes the structure of the brain.
The posterior region of the hippocampus…
facilitates spatial memory in navigation
Several studies have found evidence that physical aspects of the brain change in response to experience,
such as increasing amounts of gray matter when people engage in mindfulness practice or learn how to juggle.
We can see how cultural influences could change their brains,
because cultures provide people with certain sets of experiences on a daily basis.
Although people around the world are all born with relatively the same brains,
with time they come to have different brains by way of their different cultural experiences.
Cultural psychologists tend to explain cultural differences in psychological processes as follows:
when people in one culture are considering a particular cultural idea (e.g., the belief that is good for children to become independent from their parents at a young age), they will focus on it a great deal, creating a rich network of thoughts, behaviors, and feelings.
If people consider their network of information often enough,
the networks should become activated regularly and automatically, such that they come to mind and become prioritized ahead of other ones.
Cultures differ in the ideas their members frequently encounter,
they will also differ in the networks of thoughts, actions, and feelings that are must accessible to the members.
Many cultural psychologists would therefore…
view psychology’s goal of understanding the mind after it has been stripped clear of the noise of context and content to be misguided.
Human thought is sustained by the meaning people pursue,
any effort to bleach out those meanings to more clearly reveal the underlying CPU would only distort and misrepresent what the mind actually is.
Humans are so embedded in their cultural worlds that they are always behaving as cultural actors, and their mental habits are continuously supported by the interpretations they get from they get from culture.
In other words, people are forever bound up in their own system of cultural meanings, and they never start to think instead like a universal human.
Many cultural psychologists would argue that culture cannot be separated from the mind because
culture and mind make each other
Cultures emerge from the interaction of the various minds of the people that live within them, and
cultures shape how those minds operate
Because cultures often do differ dramatically in terms of their practices, institutions, symbols, artifacts, beliefs, and values,
the ways people from different cultures think, act, and feel should also vary substantially
Cultural psychologists expect to find…
significant differences in the psychological processes among people in various cultures.
Cultural differences in psychological processes are often quite controversial and this seems to rest on the contrasting views of the mind in the two perspectives…
general psychology (i.e., the mind operates independently of context and content) and cultural psychology (i.e., the mind is shaped by context and content).
Heine’s belief about cultural differences in the ways of thinking
observed cultural difference reflects a deep difference in the way people from various cultures think
Other’s belief about cultural differences in the ways of thinking
whether it represents a superficial difference of no significance, being the product of some kind of bias in the experimental design
Dramatic example of cultural differences
The sambia
The Sambia Case Study
femaleness = innate essence
maleness = more tenuous
Solution: ingest semen
Also suggests that as biologically grounded as our sexual motives are our sexual motives are, they become shaped by specific cultural beliefs and practices.
American Mark Van Doren’s observation about human nature:
“There are two statements about human beings that are true: that all human beings are alike, and that all are different. On those two facts all human wisdom is founded.”
When we consider culture and psychology, we have two contrasting views.
psychological processes are essentially the same everywhere
psychological processes emerge differently according to the cultural context
demonstrating which view if culture and psychology is better supported by evidence should straightforward,
because all you’d have to do is measure some psychological variables across a number of different cultures.
if the results tend to look the same everywhere, the general psychologist would win
if the results look substantially different, the cultural psychologists would claim victory
An example of “is it culturally universal?”
Marriage. The answer depends on what we mean by marriage. On one hand, if we mean the kind of marriage that is common in Western cultures in which a man and a woman fall in love and agree to share their lives exclusively with each other until either one of them dies or they get divorced, then marriage is not universal, as there are many cultures in which people do not form such relationships.
One eternal source of controversy in discussing human universals is…
whether we present the phenomenon we’re investigating in specific, concrete terms or in more general, abstract terms
The level of abstraction we use influences the success we’ll have in identifying evidence is universality.
At more abstract levels, there is often more evidence for universals
at more abstract levels the phenomena, or processes, under question are often too abstract to be of much use
The appropriate level of universality can often be debated because…
some evidence might point more to one level, whereas other evidence might suggest a different level.
Decision Tree used…
to determine the level of universality in a psychological process
Nonuniversal
The lowest level of universality, which states that a given psychological process does not exist in all cultures and can be considered a cultural invention.
Nonuniversal Example
Abacus reasoning: the psychological processes associated with abacus reasoning can be said to be nonexistent in people who have not been trained.
much of numerical reasoning appears to be a nonuniversal in that some of the psychological processes involved seem to be present only among those who have been raised in cultures that use them
Existential Universal (variation of function)
the second-lowest level of universality, which states that a given psychological process exists in all cultures, although it is not necessarily used to solve the same problems across cultures, nor is it equally accessible across cultures.
Existential Universal (variation of function) Example
Westerners tend to find experiences with success to be motivating and experiences with failure to be demotivating. In contrast, East Asians tend to show the opposite pattern, working harder after failure than after successes.
Internal motivations to do one’s best are present in both cultural groups; however, experiences with success and failures are not equally likely to lead to such motivations across cultures
Functional Universal (variation in accessibility)
The second-highest level of universality, which states that a given psychological process exists in all cultures and is used to solve the same problems across cultures, but is more accessible to people from some cultures than others.
Functional Universal (variation in accessibility) Example
one large-scale investigation explored whether people from a variety of subsistence societies around the world tended to punish those who acted unfairly, even if the punishment was costly for the person who delivered it. Costly punishment was evident in all 15 societies that were investigated, while costly punishment was delivered everywhere, there was variation between each society. The Tsimane of Bolivia, spent up to 28% of their earnings to punish others who were unfair. While the Gusii of Kenya, participants spent more than 90% of their earnings. The costly punishment of others is thus not accessible to the same degree across cultures.
Other examples would be certain kinds of categorization rules, an attraction to similarity, and the rule of negative affect in depression
Accessibility Universal (no variation)
The highest level of universality, which states that a given psychological process exists in all cultures, is used to solve the same problems across cultures, and is accessible to the same degree across cultures
Accessibility Universal (no variation) Example
social facilitation - the tendency for individuals to do better at well-learned tasks and worse at poorly learned ones when in the presence of others - has been shown to occur in both insects and humans. It would be surprising if this tendency varied significantly across cultures, and indeed, there is thus far no evidence for any cultural variability.
WEIRD societies
a shorthand for the kind of societies on which the database of psychological research is largely based. WEIRD stands for Western, educated, industrialized, rich, and democratic.
We know very little about the extent to which many psychological processes are universal because of...
the fact that in many cases we don’t yet have the data that would enable us to test the question of whether or not a process is universal
(in reference to WEIRD) 68%
of participants were American
(in reference to WEIRD) 96%
came from western industrialized countries
(in reference to WEIRD) 70%
of all psychology participants are undergraduate students
A randomly selected American undergraduate is more than 4,000 times more likely to be a research participant in a psychology study than…
is a randomly selected participant outside of the west
The strongest evidence for Shweder’s contention that general psychology does not concern itself with content or context…
is the fact that psychology has adopted a sampling methodology that largely ignores questions about the generalizability of its findings.
It’s not just that the typical psychological database represents a very narrow slice of the world’s population;
it also represents a very unusual slice
Muller-Lyer illusion
A visual illusion in which two lines are equal length appear unequal; a line with ends that angle outward appears longer than a line with ends that angle inwards
For the Muller-Lyer illusion; learning about the cultural variation in this case has helped psychologists understand why some people see this illusion:
it’s not an innate feature of the human brain, but something that is learned through having experiences with corners.
The available cross-cultural data reveal the following
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 response of contemporary American college students are even more different than those of non-college-educated American adults
Participants from WEIRD societies are clearly quite weird in their ways of thinking and
building theories about the human mind exclusively from samples is problematic
Psychology has largely relied on narrow and unrepresentative samples, which…
weakens its ability to address questions about how well findings from any particular study generalize to other human samples
One key goal of cultural psychology is…
to collect results from a broad enough array of cultures to be able to more confidently explore questions about human universals and human diversity.
This is hard because of accessibility barriers to a wide range of cultures
It’s hard to get other cultures results because…
most psychologists don’t receive training in other cultures
dome cultures might not have local psychologist working there who can serve as collaborators
The most common non-western research participants have been from…
East Asia (this is because there are many psychologists there who collaborate with international terms)
Two of the authors thoughts:
There has been a flood of excellent research in cultural psychology over the past few decades
Many key questions about the relationship between culture and psychology have yet to be investigated
There are large gaps in our knowledge waiting to be filled…
regarding how culture influences psychology.
Many of the world’s cultures remain unexplored frontiers in terms of psychological testing
One good reason to learn about cultural psychology is that…
in order to comprehend how the mind operates, it’s important to understand the role cultural experiences play in terms of how people think and feel.
Studying cultural psychology prevents…
having a distorted and incomplete understanding of the human mind
Why you should be learning more about any field:
gaining knowledge in that field is important for developing an understanding about related topics.
With the increase in globalization over the past several decades,
people are coming into contact with others from diverse cultural backgrounds more than ever before
Color-blind Approach
Looking beyond ethnic or cultural background and focusing on common human nature
Issue with the color-blind approach
People are known to adopt an ‘us vs them’ mentality and favor their group over others
Example of the issues with color-blind approach
Wassily Kandinsky fans vs Paul Klee fans (painters) and the Robber Cave experiment (think similar to capture the flag meets lord of the flies)
Attention to differences between groups can lead to discrimination, so
it follows that if people’s attention is NOT drawn to the differences between themselves and others, and they will all get along better
Multicultural Approach
focusing on and respecting the distinctive aspects of different cultural groups
The rationale for multicultural approach is that…
people really do identify strongly with their groups, and most identities are far more meaningful than the kind that can be artificially created in a lab
People are especially likely to identify with their group if…
the group is smaller than others
is at a disadvantage in some way
Note 
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