Cultural psychology midterm 1`

Cultural psychology

cultural psychology explores the dynamic interactions between individuals and their cultural environments and considers how pеople's cultural contexts shape their thoughts, behaviors, relationships, and health.

big question of cultural psychology

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 diverging experiences

Human universals

• Sociality 

  • Ppl form groups, relationships

  • As a norm, ppl are always socialising 

• Language

  • Every culture ppl have a language

  • Lots of variability but capacity for this is universal

• Mentalizing 

  • Make inferences abt others' mental states

  • Understanding ppl have thoughts

• Basic emotions 

  • Are ppl who disagree

  • Lots of evidence (like anger)

    • Embarrassment isn’t universal

• Face recognition

  • Everyone can do it

Levels of universality

Level of universality that best fits certain psychological processes

• Shows whether a psycho process can be said as universal

NONUNIVERSAL.

EXISTENTIAL UNIVERSAL 

FUNCTIONAL UNIVERSAL. 

ACCESSIBILITY UNIVERSAL 

NONUNIVERSAL

• If we find that a particular psychological process can be said to not exist in all cultures, this reflects an absence of universality

EXISTENTIAL UNIVERSAL 

• Whether the process occurs in the same way across cultures 

• exists in all cultures, although the process is not necessarily used to solve the same problems, nor is it equally accessible across cultures. 

FUNCTIONAL UNIVERSAL. 

• Whether the process is equally accessible to people in all cultures. 

• Exist in all cultures, are used to solve the same problems across cultures, yet are more accessible to people from some cultures than others.

• costly punishment - People in societies around the world punish unfair behavior even when it costs them personally to do so, though the exact amount or severity of the punishment differs based on local social rules

ACCESSIBILITY UNIVERSAL 

• Psychological process is equally accessible in all cultures 

• exists in all cultures, is used to solve the same problems across cultures, and is accessible to the same degree across cultures

Does culture change psych

Sleep changes across cultures

Idea  of oneself changes (describing oneself vs as a whole with others)

Judgement ( high intent vs low intent)

Relative vs absolute length task (how well they do)

learning how to read & write changes your brain

Cultures emerge from the interaction of the various minds of the people that live within them, and cultures, in turn, shape how those minds operate. 

• Like a network, it activates when one is exposed to smth that reminds them, the more it activates, the more prevalent.

  • Ppl are with ppl with same thoughts so they will constantly activate these networks

Relative vs absolute length task

• Relative task is more difficult for Americans (analytic reasoning);

• Absolute task is more difficult for East Asians (holistic reasoning)

  • Higher activation of brain regions associated with attentional control (effort in response to difficulty)

•  Different culturally-conditioned psychological responses

Changes Literate people have

• thicker corpus callosum

• facial recognition processing in the right hemisphere

• Improved verbal memory

• Altered part of the prefrontal cortex that is involved in language production.

What is culture, and why study it

Socially transmitted beliefs, values, preferences, behaviors that influence behavior

• A cohesive group of individuals in a shared context

• Our reliance on culture has important and profound implications for our thoughts and behaviors. 

Scientific reasons are clear: we can’t fully understand human psychology without understanding the plural (though not infinite) cultural possibilities of being human

Practical reasons: more accurate understanding of cultural differences and similarities helps us improve intergroup relations, find effective solutions to collective action problems

Ways of seeing culture

1. Culture is any kind of information acquired from other members of one’s species through social learning that can influence one’s behaviour

   1. Culture is any kind of idea, belief, technology, habit, or practice that is acquired through learning from others

2. Culture is a group of people who are existing within some kind of shared context

   1. Boundaries aren't clear cut (where does one end and another begin)

   2. Cultures change over time

   3. Individuals have variations 

      1. Because of these difficulties in identifying clear demarcation lines between one culture and another, the vast majority of studies in cultural psychology create operationalized definitions of individual cultures using country borders.

3. A dynamic group of individuals that share a similar context, are exposed to many similar cultural messages and contain a broad range of different individuals who are affected by those cultural messages in various ways

general psychology

assumes that the mind operates according to a set of natural and universal laws that are independent from context or content 

• We tend to assume, like a cpu, we have identical base psychological processes

general vs cultural psychologists

Cultural psychologists think that mind doesn’t operate independently of what it is thinking about

• thinking also involves participation in the context within which one is doing the thinking and interacting with the content one is thinking about. 

•  important to think about what things that are thinking about, what these thoughts(beahviours) affects 

  • Furthermore, the ways that people think about these kinds of 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 actions, thoughts, and feelings are immersed in cultural information, and this information renders these actions, thoughts, and feelings meaningful 

The WEIRD problem

When we looked at global variation in a variety of psychological outcomes, we noticed something weird…

• Some countries and populations kept appearing at the extreme end of the distribution

• Odds of a randomly chosen American undergraduate vs. a randomly chosen non-Westerner participating in a psychology study is 1 in 4000+

• Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, and Democratic Societies

  • these societies are highly unusual in any aspects of their psychology

why are they WEIRD

Psychologically, WEIRD samples are real outliers.

• People from industrialised societies respond differently than those from nonindustrialized societies. 

• People from Western societies demonstrate more pronounced responses than those from non-Western societies 

• Americans show 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

why is it a problem for WEIRD

This is problematic as psychologists have built their theories and empirical base largely from WEIRD samples.

• Underscores the importance of “casting a wide net:” attending to global diversity to better understand human psychology.

Population thinking

Conceptual approach that treats populations as individuals who share important common traits

Culture arises from the cumulative actions of interacting individuals in a shared context

Contrasts with “typologies” and “essentialism:” unchanging, homogenous categories

1. emphasizing the variation among individuals in a population

2. Cultures changes over time

Cumulative culture

initial idea is learned from others, it can then be modified and improved upon by other individuals. 

ratchet effect 

• which can go forward but does not slip backward, cultural information can continue to coalesce without losing the earlier information.

color-blind approach

Ppl are all the same

• people will interact with each other without giving much attention to anyone's ethnic or cultural background

multicultural approach

focusing on and respecting group difference 

• Since groups are too strong to ignore, must embrace differences and respect them

• They often respond quite negatively to efforts by majority group members to ignore what makes them distinctive

ethnocentrism

Judging people from other cultures by the standards of one's own culture 

• culturally normative behavior comes to be seen as natural, and deviations from that natural path often tend to be viewed as less desirable or even immoral

The story of cultural ape

800-900 thousand years

• Domesticated fire 

  • Wouldn’t just encounter fire but figured out how to make fire

  • Can keep fire alive and make more from it 

  • Started cooking food, go to more places(migration), cultural learning/teaching, storytelling emerged from this, protection from predators

Is culture unique to humans

How much our thinking about culture affects the way we look at culture with other species 

Anthropologist - humans are special

biologiest- only defining culture based on the humans isin’t right

Imitative learning - not only human

• Has cultural learning but not as advanced as humans

  • The scale of human cultural learning is so much more 

Symbolic coding - only human

• Having a set of signals, icons, and words that indicate something else most members of that culture recognise.

cultural brain hypothesis

We have unusually big brain, high encephalization quotient 

• It takes 20% of our energy

• Why would evo favour expensive brain instead of speed, strength 

• Evo tradeoff:

  • Physically much weaker 

• Maybe we needed the brain due to the presences of culture

  • Need bigger brain cuz need to learn more 

encephalization quotient

ratio of actual brain vs mass and predicted brain mass based on size

developments we have made

• Big brains, long childhood - Learning from others

  • Baby brain is under developed cuz it needs to learn from cultural environment and develop along with it

• Short colons, small stomachs & teeth - Fire & cooking

• Long legs, arched feet, light bones,hairlessness, sweat glands but no water pouch! - Long distance running (for hunting) along with water containers

• Dexterous hands, opposable thumb - Tool use

• Lactose tolerance (in some groups) - Domestication of milk-producing animals

Learning in humans vs. ape

Contrasted the learning abilities of three primates: chimpanzees, orangutans, and 2.5 year old human children.

• Some tasks involved general problem-solving skills about the physical world

• Some tasks involved social learning.

• Physical is around the same but social is better in humans

Learning from others and imitation, we are better 

Humans live in larger groups than other primates.

Humans appear more interested in each other’s activities than do other primates.

Humans engage in more cultural learning than do other primates

why Cultural learning

1) Others have crucial information we want to have

2) We need to learn the social norms of our group because we live in moral communities of cooperators. This is “norm psychology.”

Humans are distinctive in that they engage in so much imitative learning. Being able to learn skills from observing others is a key reason behind the evolution of our big brains.

How we culturally learn

The ability to consider the perspective of others, the ability to communicate using language, and the motivation to share their experiences. 

MENTALIZING AND PERSPECTIVE-TAKING 

LANGUAGE 

SHARING EXPERIENCES AND GOALS 

MENTALIZING AND PERSPECTIVE-TAKING 

• able to take on the perspectives of others by considering their intentions, goals, preferences, and strategies. This interest in the mental states of others 

• imitative learning

  • the learner internalizes something of the model's goals and behavioral strategies 

• Overimiation

  • when children imitate a model, they imitate all of the model's actions, including irrelevant ones

LANGUAGE 

• Language allows ideas to be communicated without having to be visually demonstrated 

SHARING EXPERIENCES AND GOALS 

• humans are motivated to share their experiences and goals with others

Conformist Bias/ conformist transmisssion

people are more likely to imitate the most common behaviors

• The right way of doing things 

• Most useful behaviors should ultimately be copied by the most people

Similarity Bias

People are more likely to imitate those who are similar to them

• Teenage learn independence from peers

• Accent is also by peer

Also, copying another's actions serves to demonstrate your group identity and affiliation

Prestige Bias

people are more likely to imitate prestigious people (as perceived by the culture)

• They want to know who has skills and are respected by others, and they try to imitate what those individuals are doing

• Our ancestors who did this were better equipped to acquire the highly useful cultural knowledge that gave them a survival advantage compared with those who did not. 

• We try to imitate everything cuz we don’t know where the success came from

• looking up” to someone and wanting to be like them. NOT the same thing as dominance — where social influence is driven by fear, coercion & power imbalance

Key Benefit of Imitative Learning

Imitative learning allows for a faithful and high fidelity reproduction of the target behavior.

This makes for good cultural learning.

But cultural learning means we are also capable of tinkering and improving on what we imitate.

This allows for cumulative cultural evolution.

Humans Live in Cultural Worlds

In addition to living in a physical environment, and in a social environment, humans live in a cultural environment. This is the “cultural niche” of human brain evolution.

• Worlds that contain cultural ideas that have accumulated over time 

It is adaptive for humans to rely on cultural ideas to succeed and survive - we have evolved to depend on such information.

Cultural Accumulation Rates

The speed of cultural accumulation has been increasing over historical time.

One possible reason is that cultural accumulation tracks population size, and populations have been increasing.

• With larger populations one should find more opportunities to learn from others

• Large cities and industrial hubs tend to have more cultural innovations.

Places with severe population loss often have loss of technologies cuz shortage of models to copy from

Gene-Culture Coevolution

Our genes and our cultures evolve together. This is probably unique to humans.

• Our genes change (e.g., developing shorter guts and larger brains) in response to culturally acquired information (e.g., learning how to cook). Our brains evolved to excel at learning cultural information and to depend on this information.

• Likewise, our cultures continue to change over time. Larger and more interconnected groups enhance the speed of this cultural evolution.

Unlike other species, our genes don’t need to evolve new responses to new challenges. We can outsource solutions to new challenges to culture.

scaffolding

breaks a complex task into smaller parts and provides temporary support, then gradually removes that help as the student learns to do the work alone

The dalai lama

• Trying to set rules but china wants control who succeeds

  • Set a new one and then make they propose a new rule

• This happens over and over so is persistence

  • Others, some elections, some hereditary,

  • Random kids choose form toys to see who is the reincarnation

Cultural evo: persistence and change

Cultural persist

• Norm are self-perpetuating

• path -depandency 

  • Like hiking where you start a path and you would want to stay on path and not stray

• Pluralistic ignorance

Cultures changes

• Socio-demographic changes

• Climate fluctuations

• External shocks

• New tech

• Intergroup contact

cultural persistence examples

• West coast potlatch

  • 1000 years

  • Reinforce sharing and bonds

  • Was banned

• Japanese tea ceramony

  • Very similar to old ones 

• UBC storm the wall

Cultures Persist

Some cultural institutions are long-lasting: centralized government, some religious traditions, universities, libraries

Path-dependency: Early conditions can have long-lasting effects, once on a path, cultures tend to stay on it

Pluralistic ignorance can perpetuate elements of a culture even when few people (or no one!) endorses these elements

Norm are self-perpetuating

Norms are self-perpetuating: each new member of the culture adjusts to the existing norms, and thereby reproduces them. (In a 100 years, all new people…)

• Likewise, any new cultural idea has to adapt to the existing cultural ecosystem

autokinetic illusion (similar to time experiment in hs)

When personal, they report large ranges but in groups they report similar ranges.

• Fit in others

• Even after year they still have the group belief

No objective clues

We look to others for the “right” thing to do

That’s “norm psychology” in action

Birth of a cultural group norm

path-depandency

Early conditions can have long-lasting effects, once on a path, cultures tend to stay on it

The Gender Inequality: The Hoe vs. The Plough

• Some society is around the hoe and some is the plough

  • Regions that historically adopted the hoe are more gender equal today, centuries later

• Hoe cultures had more women in agriculture, a stepping stone to broader labor participation later

  • Need more muscle for the plough so less women

• Due to the difference of women in the farm, translates to women in the workforce 

• Great predictor and is a relevant reason today

Pluralistic Ignorance

Collectively people incorrectly judge the thoughts of others based on their actions. Because people often act in ways that are different than what they privately think, others incorrectly judge their thoughts.

• People strive to act in ways to fit in with their incorrect beliefs about what they think others value and can thus perpetuate the culture

Cultures Change examples

Growth of “No Religion” in Canada and the US

Rapid Cultural Change in Dating Norms

Climate effect on culture

Climatic Variability

• When the climate fluctuates, the old ways of doing things are less effective compared with new ways.

• Around the world the climate fluctuates differently by region.

• There is less cultural persistence in places with more variable climates

Climatic Stability

• Value tradition more

• Are more likely to maintain polygamy as a marriage practice

• Are more likely to maintain cousin-marriage as a cultural practice

• Among the First Nations in Canada, are more likely to preserve Indigenous languages

Origins of cultural variations

Parasite prevalence

• Negative correlation btw individualism and pathogen prevalence

• People value individualism less when there are more pathogens in history

  • Need to work together to get past the hurdle

Farming practices (wheat vs rice)

• Historically rice regions had higher holistic thinking and more interdependent selves than wheat regions

• many rice-farming regions created reciprocal labor exchanges, where family and neighbors would help each other with the farming, 

• Also, divorce rates were much lower (= more interdependence) where rice was grown

Subsistence (farming vs herding)

There are other important factors, such as:

• Wealth and wealth distribution

• Environmental harshness

  • Environments that are threatening, with insufficient food, more communicable diseases, and greater vulnerability to disaster, tend to be associated with cultures that have higher levels of prejudice and stricter social norms

Founder effect

The loss of culture when a new population is established by a very small number of individuals from a larger parent population 

• Early Roman Church fathers’ ban on cousin marriage and polygamy 1000 years ago began to break up tribal affiliations in Europe

• Countries with longer exposure to the Western Church developed less intensive kin-based institutions (such as lower cousin marriage and monogamy), and took a more WEIRD and individualistic directon.

Evoked culture

adoption of cultural practices that are a direct response to some environmental conditions

• biologically based repertoire of behaviors that are accessible to them, and these behaviors are engaged for appropriate situations

Transmitted culture

adoption of cultural practices through cultural learning (by imitating or observation)

• people come to certain cultural practices through social learning, or by modeling the behavior of others who live near them.

Proximate causes

those that have a direct and immediate relationship with their effects 

• Spaniands won cuz haave horses, better tech, dieases immunity, agriculture

Distal causes

Initial differences that lead to effects over long time periods, often through indirect relation

• New tech come from years of development/immunity comes from interaction with animal

Natural selection

1. Individual variability exists among members of a species on certain traits (e.g., some antelopes can run faster than other antelopes). 

2. Those traits are associated with different reproductive rates (faster antelopes are better able to outrun predators than slower antelopes and are thus more likely to produce surviving offspring). 

3. Those traits have a hereditary basis (the offspring of faster antelopes tend to be faster than the offspring of slower antelopes)

Bio vs. cultural

1. genes are copied faithfully from one generation to the next; copying errors (mutations) are very rare and emerge randomly, by chance. In contrast, copying errors are much more common for cultural ideas, and these "errors" are often intentional innovations that are planned, rather than random accidents. 

2. genes are only passed vertically from parents to offspring is enormously slow and gradual process across many, many generations. cultural idea can pass horizontally from one person to anyone else-it can be transmitted to many people in an instant 

3. cultural ideas do not have to be adaptive in order to become common, unlike evolutionary processes with genes

Ideas spread more if they are more…

• Communicable

  • Ideas that convey useful information are widely shared and communicated in  groups.

  • “Communicable” ideas also have a transmission advantage in groups

• Emotional

  • Ideas that elicit a strong emotional reaction are more likely to be communicated.

  • Emotional contagion is a potent cause of the spread of certain ideas

  • Study investigated how much the emotional intensity of a story predicted whether people would relay that story to others

    • The researchers created 12 stories and made three different versions of each story, that varied in emotional intensity

    • Participants were more likely to pass along stories that elicited strong emotions

  • Outrage Culture: 

    • Moral- Emotional Messages Spread More on Social Networks

      • 563,000 US Tweets

      • Three polarizing issues(gun, same-sex marriage, climate change), 20% per word increase

    • Moral-Emotional Messages Increase Ideological Polarization

      • Liberal and conservative 

• Counter-intuitive (but only a little)

  • People are more likely to prefer, remember, and discuss narratives that contain a minimal number of counterintuitive statements

    • Compared whether the contents of the successful Grimm tales differed from the unsuccessful ones.

    • Counted how many counterintuitive elements were present in each tale

    • Folk tales with around 2-3 counterintuitive items have had the most lasting cultural success.

• Negatively biased

  • There is far more bad news than good news ratio up to 17 to 1

  • Studies show magazines with bad news on cover sell more

  • Studies of news headlines show: negative word = click-through +2.3% positive word = - 1%

Dynamic social impact theory

states that individuals influence each other through interacting with others in their social networks, ultimately leading to clusters of like-minded people who are separated by geography-cultures, in other words 

• Norms develop among those who communicate with each other regularly

Cultures are Becoming More Interconnected But More Individualistic

Practices: Living alone, divorce, unique baby names

Values: self-expression, friends over family, self-focus

• Wealth

• Education

• Urbanization

• Decline of Religion

The Flynn Effect

Average IQ has gone up 17 points in past 50 years

Most Improvement is on Raven’s Matrices

The gains appear to be most concentrated in analytic and problem-solving skills.

• Complex story: massive improvements in

  • Nutrition

  • health care

  • literacy & education

Percentage of Canadians and Americans with at least a Bachelor’s Degree has gone up

• A rising professional class added incentives for people to receive more education.

People are exposed to more information as they deal with an increasingly complex world.

• In some ways, popular culture is becoming more complex too, which should further lead people to develop their intellectual skills.

The Challenge of “Unpacking” Culture

 Causes of cultural differences are complex. Usually there are multiple causes that contribute to these differences

• Culture is a “package” that has many ingredients in it, so how do we identify which of these ingredients are potent?

why greater violence in the south?

Since the early 18th century, a number of observers have commented on the greater violence in the US South than the North.

• This has been evident in a greater frequency of feuds, duels, homicides, lynchings, sniper attacks, violent pastimes, and greater support for corporal punishment, gun ownership, and war.

• 7th US Prez Andrew Jackson, a Southerner, fought a duel with Charles Dickinson over a financial dispute and killed him. Such duels were common in the South

Some theories

• US South had a longer history of slavery.

• US South is hotter than the North.

• US South is poorer than the North.

• Nisbett and Cohen’s account: The South was settled largely by herders, whereas the North was largely settled by farmers. This led to the development of a “Culture of Honor” in the US South

  • The Mediterranean region as a whole supports elements of honor culture

  • Southern Italy & Sicily have their own culture of honor

• More homicides but less theft

• Culture of honor stopping ppl from theft?

Culture of honor

• Herders live a precarious existence as their wealth is portable. Others can easily steal your herds.

• Herding is usually done on marginal lands which are sparsely populated, and are not well-policed by the state

• To protect their herds, people develop a “don’t mess with me” reputation as someone who would respond to threats with violence.

• History of herding + marginal lands + weak institutions = culture of honor

• more frequent civil and non-civil conflicts

• are more likely to be involved in conflicts motivated by retaliation

• show a greater emphasis on revenge-taking in surveys

Archival Evidence for culture of honor

Explored how various kinds of indices of violence varied across regions of the US.

The South doesn’t differ from the North in just any kind of violence. The difference is most pronounced for argument-related murders, where one’s honor is at stake.

• The regional differences are more pronounced in less urban areas. In urban areas there is less influence from traditional herding cultures

• The murder rate is higher in the area where herding is more commonly practiced than it is in the areas where farming is practiced.

They found that 

• This data challenges a temperature account of the regional differences, as both the urban and rural areas should have similar climates.

  • If anything, the farming areas are hotter (and considerably more humid) than the herding areas, yet the violence rates are higher in the herding areas

• People in the farming areas make slightly more than those in the herding areas.

  • This difference in wealth is much smaller than the difference in violence rates between the two areas, so this argues against the poverty account.

• Slavery had been far more common in farming regions than in herding regions, yet the violence rate is higher in the herding regions

Survey Evidence

Participants in various regions of the US were called at home by a survey company and posed questions to them about how people should respond in certain situations when their honor was threatened.

• They ranged in severity from imagining that someone had insulted a man named Fred, to imagining that someone had sexually assaulted Fred’s daughter

• The Southerners were more likely than Northerners to view violence as an appropriate solution to the threats to Fred’s honor.

• Most extreme difference for the scenario where Fred’s daughter was assaulted. 47% of Southerners but only 28% of Northerners felt that Fred would be “extremely justified” to shoot the man who had violated his daughter

Experimental Evidence

These studies contrasted white male students at the University of Michigan who had either grown up in the North or in the South.

• Half of them were assigned to an “insult” condition where a confederate insulted them.

• The other half were in the control condition where everything was identical except for the insult.

• After participants had been insulted they were instructed to go to another lab room. On the way, they encountered another confederate who was in a direct collision course with them.

• The dependent measure was the point at which participants yielded to the oncoming confederate.

They found

• In the absence of the insult, Southerners yielded way at a greater distance than Northerners.

• The Northerners were relatively unaffected by the insult.

• Southerners responded to the insult by challenging the second confederate.

Field Study Evidence

Researchers sent letters requesting job applications to large national companies with

branches in the US North and South.

• The letters mentioned that the applicant was a convicted felon. In a control condition he describes how he had been convicted of stealing a car. In an “honor letter” condition he describes how he had been convicted of manslaughter for killing a man in defense of his honor.

• Key dependent measure was the tone of the letter that was received in response from the potential employer.

They found

• For those companies receiving the control letter, there were no regional differences in terms of how warm the response from the employer was.

• In contrast, for those companies receiving the honor letter, Southern employers were significantly warmer in their response compared with Northern employers.

Strength of Convergent Evidence from Multiple Methods

• Any single study or single method is limited in what you can conclude. Each method has limitations and there are alternative explanations.

• This is especially an issue for cross-cultural studies as there are many additional factors that can affect the results.

• If the same pattern emerges across multiple methods it becomes far more difficult to explain it as due to alternative accounts.

• A single account, such as Southerners have a culture of honor, is more parsimonious than the multiple accounts that are based on the sum of the weaknesses from all of the individual studies.

Making Meaningful Cultural Comparisons

LEARNING ABOUT CULTURES UNDER STUDY. 

• read existing texts and ethnographies. 

• find a collaborator from the culture you are studying who is interested in pursuing the same research with you. 

ADJUSTING FOR DIFFERENT CULTURES

• methodological equivalence - participants must understand the questions or situations the same way YOU do

ECOLOGICAL FALLACY. 

• It is a problem with trying to draw conclusions from one level of analysis (e.g., relations among individuals) with data that are collected from a different level of analysis 

TRANSLATION OF QUESTIONNAIRE ITEMS 

• Keeping all materials in the original language, such as English, and studying only people who are bilingual in English and their native language. 

  • the participants will likely have poorer English skills than the translator 

  • whether the participants with good English skills are representative of their culture (influenced?)

  • that the language in which one is thinking can greatly affect the ways one is thinking

• back-translation - translate, translate back, talk abt differences

RESPONSE BIASES 

• careless responding - not reading the items closely, or may be answering randomly

• socially desirable responding - When you respond in a way that aligns with how the interviewer wanted

• Moderacy or extremity bias: Vary in terms of how likely they are to express their agreement in a moderate fashion, or in an extreme fashion,

• Acquiescence bias- tendency to agree with most statements 

REFERENCE GROUP EFFECTS. 

• we view ourselves compared to most other people around us 

• we are interested in assessing cultures by a single standard 

• avoid subjective measures that might have different standards in the groups being compared

methodological equivalence

• participants must understand the questions or situations the same way YOU do

Culture-level analysis

Analyze cultural messages from various sources that are culturally important, ex:

media stories, laws, children’s books, songs, etc. 

• NO data is collected from individuals

Situation Sampling

Step 1: Get descriptions of typical cultural situations in cultures A & B

Step 2: Give these descriptions to different samples from cultures A & B and get their reactions

Example: Study of US and Japanese students imagining being in each others’ worlds, and how that increases or decreases their self-esteem

1. the researcher can explore whether there are differences in the way people from different cultures respond to the situations

2. The situation sampling method enables the researcher to explore whether the situations are responded to differently by participants in step 2.

Cultural Priming

Works by making certain ideas more accessible to participants; if those ideas are associated with cultural meanings, researchers can investigate what happens when people start to think about them 

• When cultural ideas are activated that are common in another culture, people start thinking in ways that are more similar to the thinking of people from that culture

• Karma and God Cultural Priming

  • give money to others? yes or no depending on whether reminded of god/karma

Categorical Contrasts (Cultural Dimensions)

Tight vs. Loose Culture

• Tight cultures strictly enforce social norms and have little tolerance for deviance

• Loose cultures have weaker social norms and are more permissive

Relational-mobility refers to the degree that people feel that they have opportunities to form new relationships or to leave existing relationships 

Geert Hofsted and five key cultural dimensions of individualism/collectivism

• Power distance - how much hierarchy is valued

• Uncertainty avoidance - how comfortable with uncertainty

• masculinity - how encouraged competition and pursuit of wealth is

• long-term/short-term time orientation -  forward-looking values vs past traditions

Selecting Cultures to Study

Selecting cultures for research is to choose samples based on a theoretical variable you are investigating. 

You can

• look for cultures that vary on a specific theoretical dimension of interest, such as collectivism. 

• Select two cultures that vary greatly on as many theoretically relevant dimensions as possible,

agent-based modeling

way of testing a hypothesis by creating simulations with virtual agents who are programmed to act autonomously in a computerised game