PSY 459 Midterm 1

How to define culture

• many definitions

• information acquired through social learning capable of affecting one’s behavior (Heine)

• use words like idea, knowledge, belief, value, skill, and attitude to describe information that is acquired (Richardson/Boyd)

• psychological patterns shared by a group, measurable via attitudes, values, beliefs

• transmittable generationally

• existing in same context

How to distinguish culture from society, nation, concepts of race/ethnicity

• some definitions of culture similar

• society, similar to nation

  • large group of individuals who:

    • frequently interact with each other, are part of a common unit, recognize rules and boundaries

• race/ethnicity

  • not synonymous with culture

  • race is a social construct

  • differences have little scientific use

• culture

  • ideas, worldviews, beliefs, attitudes,values, norms, rules,
    standards that are shared and given from one generation to the next

Things animals do that are arguably cultural

• behavior traditions

• Survival practices

  • chimps in different areas use different “fishing rods” to fish for termites, “twig-fishers” and “bark-fishers”

  • different groups of chimps have different behaviors

• essentially:

  • Animals learn behaviors from their parents that help with survival (not dying, finding food)

• BUT: takes longer than humans and not as salient

What differentiates social learning in humans from that in animals

• learned social regulations of individual behavior in human societies

  • enforced social norms

• humans universally develop systems of symbolic reinforcement of those regulations and show elaborate forms of display to signal adherence to a specific rule system

• role of language

• theory of mind

• imitation vs emulation

Apparent causes of uniquely human brain development

• Dunbar

• neocortex ratio: volume of neocortex relative to volume of rest of the brain

  • neocortex: outermost layer of the brain that governs higher functions, such as sensory perception, motor control, and conscious thought

• larger social group= larger neocortex ratio

• social learning found to be strong force in evolution of larger brain

• human brains need a lot of energy

Theory of mind/mentalizing

• theory of mind- ability to understand that others have minds, intentions, perspectives different than one’s own

  • ability found in humans but not in most other species

• chimps: chimps trained by humans show some signs of theory of mind

  • some species show some ToM, but skills not comparable to humans

• develops steadily through toddlerhod

Cumulative cultural learning/ ratchet effect

• over time, people gradually make modifications and improvements to some original tools/ideas

• requires:

  • reliable/faithful social transmission

  • imitative learning, sophisticated language

• not possible with emulative learning

Emulation vs imitation

• imitation- learner internalizes goals and behavior strategies of model

  • over imitate models by copying everything they do

  • focus on fulfilling goal of the model

• emulation- learner tries to figure out individually how an object can affect environment

  • focus on how to manipulate object, not change environment

  • done by apes/humans

  • does not require ToM

Similarities/differences between biological and cultural evolution

• similarities

  • some cultural ideas persist longer than others (higher survival rates)

  • some cultural ideas are more prone to being passed along to others/ reproduced more

• differences

  • cultural ideas can be transmitted horizontally across peers

    • biological evolution limited to vertical transmission from parents to offspring

Evoked culture in contrast to transmitted culture

• Evoked culture- certain environmental conditions tend to evoke certain responses from people

  • harsh environments, scarce resources

  • desert bandits (USA, Middle East)

  • Street Codes

  • Truk (deep sea fishing)—→ more rugged manhood vs Tahiti (lagoon fishing)—→ more androgynous sex roles

• Transmitted culture-cultural idea that is learned via social transmission/modeling

  • parents teaching their children cultural practices

    • ie: gender roles, traditions

What is ‘revitalization’ and and what are a few examples of revitalization movements

• process that tends to initiate whenever there is a crisis (of meaning, well-being, survival) in a culture

  • culture- contact situations are common triggers

    • brought on by culture-contact, acculturation situation

• effort to construct a more satisfying society, reorganizing elements

• implies homeostasis of society: must be maintained

• arises due to old cultural system being unsatisfactory

• examples:

  • Native American: Peyotism, Sun Dance

  • Shakers

  • cargo cults of PNG

• no revitalization —→ death of culture

Indicators of increasing individualism in societies around the world

• lower social capital

  • social capital- connections among individuals --
    social networks and the norms of reciprocity and
    trustworthiness that arise from them

• increase in unique baby names

• increase in use of individual over collective pronouns

• decrease in average household size, more divorce

What kind of intelligence has been increasing (and what kind has been decreasing) in many populations

• increasing- fluid intelligence: working intelligence

  • higher IQ scores

  • operating with abstractions

  • possibly due to greater complexity of plots in dramas, cartoons over time

• decreasing: distinguishing norms???

  • pluralistic ignorance- collectively accepting a privately rejected norm

Why/how cross-cultural studies should emphasize cultures differing a lot, not a little

• we learn more from strongly than slightly contrasting culture, so we should maximize cultural difference in research design

• if we want to demonstrate universality, then we should sample cultures that are very different

• determing cultures that are very different requires

  • many populations and many variables

What it means to ‘unpackage’ culture

• identifying underlying variables that create cultural differences

• necessary to understand what actually creates cultural differences amid many cultural practices

• 3 steps

  • 1. finding a theoretically viable variable that can explain a
    cultural difference

  • 2. Confirm cultural difference in proposed underlying
    variable

  • 3. Show that underlying variable is related to cultural
    difference in question

What is a WEIRD sample and how they can skew psychology’s database

• WEIRD: Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, Democratic

  • majority of samples in psych are WEIRD

  • usually not even representative of Westerners (students often sampled)

• make findings, especially cultural findings, less generalizeable

• not only using a WEIRD sample can help us see how cognitive principles differ by culture (Müller-Lyer illusion)

Methodological equivalence and how you go about acheiving it

3 methods to ensure researcher understands local cultural norms/practices in conducting culture-comparison studies

Response biases and how to correct for them

• acquiescence

• reference group effect

• other ones in textbook

Key findings in culture of honor/southern honor research

Evidence for sensitive period in language

phoneme perception

Evidence for sensitive period in cultural learning

Important ways in which mothers’ interactions with infants differ across cultures

How cultures differ in family sleeping arrangement norms

What predicts magnitude of adolescent rebellion in a family

What predicts magnitude of gender egalitarianism in a family

Relation of ploughs to gender egalitarianism

Indicators of collectivism based on state/nation level statistics

• don’t use textbook

• Vandello/Cohen

Differences between American/non-Western populations in how self is described, and in relative consistence of self-descriptions across contexts

independent vs interdependent identity

Incremental vs entity theory of self and how this is related to cultures

Difference between self/personality and how to define personality

• don’t use textbook

five factor and two factor structures for personality and which is more universal

• don’t use textbook

Whether personality differences between cultures are large or small

• don’t use textbook

Basic ideas of distributive models of culture

• don’t use textbook

What is the best way of defining ‘culture’?

What aspects of human life are most ‘cultural’ and what aspects are least cultural?

When does ‘culture’ mean the same thing as ‘nation’ or ‘society’ or ‘or ethnicity’ or ‘a particular group of individuals’?

What is the best way to discover and/or measure the cultural aspects of human behavior?

What research methods help prevent or correct for cultural bias in psychology research?

What are the ways in which change most often occurs in a cultural system?

How do societies maintain their cultural system, and what do individuals do that contributes to that?

Which aspects of culture are learned especially early in child development?

How is the nature of ‘the self’ most different when one compares cultures?

What are universals with regard to the self (what is true of the self in all cultures)?

What are examples of a culture (or cultural system) having a particular personality characteristic that it molds and socializes individuals to develop, in distinction from many other cultures that emphasize other characteristics? (If there are no good examples, explain why such examples are hard to find.)

What evidence supports the idea that all cultures have the same basic array of personality characteristics,
with cultural differences not being large?

How is culture in humans most different from culture as it is found represented other species?