PSYC 307 - Midterm 2

Self, motivation, multiculturalism, halloween, cognition and perception

how can self-concept play a role in our everyday life

• How we perceive ourselves plays a crucial role in how we relate to many things in life

• The self-concept is implicated in: 

  • Directing what social information we should attend to

    • E.g. looking at opportunities for you to improve vs not 

  • How we derive meaning from events

  • What kinds of relationships we have

  • How we experience our emotions

    • Shame vs guilt 

      • Shame: I am a bad person

      • Guilt: I did something bad 

  • How we make moral judgements

  • What we are motivated to work towards - how are we motivated 

independent view of self

• Experienced as largely independent from others

• Important aspects of the self are personal characteristics

  • They would tell you abt their personality traits, values, preferences, etc if you ask them to tell you abt themselves 

• Remains largely constant across roles and situations

  • I am the same person but I move between different roles 

  • When they enter a new situation, they think “how can I change this situation to fit my needs and values” 

• Influencing the situation is the priority

• Direct communication style

  • This is who I am, this is the real me and what I’m expressing to you

  • Fear of being misunderstood

interdependent view of self

• Individual sense of self is importantly interconnected to the selves of others

• Key aspects of the self includes roles, relationships, and memberships 

• Because roles change across situations, the self is also somewhat fluid across situations

  • See yourself differently in different situations

  • Different parts of you comes out in different situations 

• Adjusting to situations is the priority

• Indirect communication style 

  • Fear of offending someone 

  • If a person with an independent self says like “this is who I am”, the interdependent person could e offended lol 

interdependent self and relationships

• Relationships with ingroup members are more self-defining

  • Ingroup relationships direct appropriate behaviours and people have obligations within the relationships 

  • Not easy to get into the in-group

• Solid ingroup-outgroup boundary 

  • Can be negative 

    • Stronger obligation to people in the ingroup and few

    • Harder to leave relationships 

    • Can be taken advantage of 

independent self and relationships

• Several relationships with members in their ingroup but those relationships are not as self-defining 

  • Sees themselves as separate from their social environment 

  • New relationships can be formed and dissolved without a big impact on ones identity 

• Fluid, permeable boundary between ingroup and outgroup

  • More willing to form more connections 

  • Not as important for self-construction

individualism

A cultural pattern in which individual goals and preferences take priority over group goals (matches to independent self-construal)

collectivism

• A cultural pattern in which group goals and preferences take priority over individual goals (matches interdependent self construal) 

where are individualist vs collectivist societies

• Most individualistic: USA -> English speaking countries and Western European nations 

• Least individualistic (most collectivist): Latin America and Asia

Most of the world is collectivist (80% of the population), but the vast majority of psychology research is done in WEIRD countries

what are the most/least collectivist states in the US

• There are some pockets of collectivism everywhere, even in the US 

  • Hawaii has the highest collectivist score (possibly due to its high asian ancestry)

    • Utah and states in the Confederate South after

• LEAST collectivist states 

  • States in the Mountain West, Great Plains, Northeast, and Midwest

how has individualism evolved/what is its history

• Historically, kinship spread throughout Europe where people would marry their cousins and wealthy men would have multiple wives which lead to a large interdependent network that can defend territories and production

• In the middle ages, the Western Church (Roman Catholic Church) started enforcing religious laws which weakened the intensity of kinship and thus obligations and ties towards large clans and families 

  • Suppressed marrying cousins and arranged marriages by making them say “I do” to consent

• This influence then spread across Europe 

  • Some other parts were under the Eastern orthodox church which didnt empasize the same set of rules 

• Researchers found that the longer ones ancestors were under the influence of the Western Church, the more individualistic they were in their thinking 

The US still has the highest individualism rates because it attracted people who saught individual freedom that was not available in their homelands

cultural fit

• The extent to which an individual is aligned with the dominant cultural meanings that surround them 

  • Embracing commonly shared attitudes and practices 

  • Self-concepts are largely in sync with the meanings of their cultures and can go about their day with ease 

  • Can have a greater well-being and less loneliness

    • Feel more certain about things and are better able to function 

cultural misfit

Those whose unique identities and habitual ways of seeing and doing things does not mesh well with the dominant culture that they live in

• Self-concepts are not well-connected with the dominant culture

• Can make life more challenging

how is individualism-collectivism measured at the cultural level

• More individualistic cultures tend to have:

  • Small household size

    • INTR: More likely to live with extended family 

  • Adults living alone

    • Especially older people living alone

      • INTR: Basically socially unacceptable to let your elderly parents to live alone 

  • High divorce rates

    • Divorce is a choice and an exercise of autonomy

  • Unique baby names 

    • INTR: biblical names. Naming kids after family, etc

predictors of individualism in a country

• Economic development

  • The more money you have, the more able you are to leave 

    • You are not forced to depend on others 

    • Can use finances to solve their issues lol 

• Higher education rates

• Length of exposure to Latin church’s family and marriage practices (historical bans on polygamy and cousin marriage) 

are women more IND and men more INT? explain the study result

• Result: Westerners scored high in agency and assertiveness, Easterners scored high on collectivism and relatedness 

  • Women scored higher on relatedness than men

    • No differences for the other three factors -> Women are usually more INT than men in regards to attention to others’ feelings and concerns 

    • Otherwise, no big gender differences on others factors

what are some variables that can impact how people in a country feel about traditional gender views

Within a culture, women and men share similar views about gender equality 

Men usually had more traiditonal gender views than women (probably because gender views benefit men more than women)

• People who practices a particular religion 

  • Countries with high Christianity rates were more liekly to have egalitarian views, while those with high Muslim rates had more traditional ones

• Geographic locations 

  • Northern countries had more egalitarian views 

  • Southern countries had more traditional ones 

• Urbanized countries had more egalitarian views 

• Individualism scores positively correlated with egalitarian views 

• Distal causes (like how long cultural norms persist)

  • Agriculture (countries where they use a hoe vs using a plow) 

    • Using a plow is more efficient but requires muscular strength which is usually done by men

    • Using a hoe is usually done by women and children 

self consistency (high vs low)

How we think and behave in different situations 

• High self-consistency: acting the same all the time 

• Low self-consistency: acting differently depending on whom they are with

The amount societies place on consistent behaviour is evident in the effort people will make to convince themselves of self-consistency 

INT self is more contextually variable than the IND self

• The INT self is more grounded in roles and therefore varies across situations more

american vs japanese participants in 20-statement test in different conditions results (self-consistency study)

• American responses were more positive than Japanese ones 

• American responses look similar across situations 

• Japanese responses varied based on the situation

  • Less self-critical when they were by themselves than with others especially with a professor

cognitive dissonance

 We have a motivation to be consistent, but cognitive dissonance is the distressing feeling we have when we observe ourselves behaving inconsistently or against our own sense of self-consistency

ways to get rid of cognitive dissonance (2)

• Acting more consistently (hard to do) 

• Dissonance reduction: Change attitudes so we no longer appear inconsistent

how is rationalization and cognitive dissonance related

when there is no clear answer, after a decision is made, dissonance might follow because there are features of what was chosen that was inconcistent with their choice -> rationalization; viewing elements positively consistent with their choice as more important than the ones inconsistent with their decision

what does the self consist of

• Subjective self-awareness: The “I” that observes and interacts with the world

  • Concerns are with the outside world, and we are usually unaware of ourselves 

• Objective self-awareness: Looking at ourselves objectively, the same way we perceive the rest of the world

  • The “me” that is observed and interacted with others 

  • Conscious of how we are being seen and evaluated by others

social class and self concept

• Income and Education

  • The wealthier and more educated groups tend to be = more independent than the less wealthy and less educated groups

• Many of the cross-cultural findings discussed in this course

  • Hold for comparisons of SES differences within the west

• University students tend to come from higher social class backgrounds

  • Their self-construal is more independent than that of the general population

cultural mismatch hypothesis

• university cultural norms favour independent self-construal

• Cultural mismatch → lower grades

• Proposes that maybe First Generation Students, who did well in high school, are struggling in uni bc of the cultural mismatch of how they grew up and UNIVERSITY culture

• Those coming from low SES backgrounds = may now be coming to a university culture where HIGH SES backgrounds are common

• Analyzed the messages that universities convey to students

  • Found that universities tend to convey more indepdent messages than interdependent

• A Cultural Mismatch b/w one’s self-construal and the culture you’re in = can be a barrier

• Can help policy makers and administrators to develop ways of supporting students in ways that are culturally appropriate

“inside out” vs “outside-in” perspective

• IND self have more of an inside out perspective because they focus on themself

• INT self have more of an outside in perspective because it is more important to understand how others are viewing them

  • more liekly to remember third person memories

what is the relationship between how people see themselves and how they behave

• They see themselves more subjectively while viewing others more objectively

• INT thinkers are often more accurate in their self views and how they behave (e.g. correctly estimating how many candies they would contribute to a pool)

• When IND thinkers are put in a state of objective self-awareness (e.g. listening to their own voice) they are often more self-critical because they are not used to being in that position

growth mindset

• (incremental theory of self): We can easily change and are expected to change 

  • Implicit belief that a person's abilities and traits are malleable and can be improved 

    • Ones attributes are not fixed and reflects how hard someone has worked on them 

fixed mindset

• (entity theory of self) : Aspects of the self are resistant to change 

  • View their traits as fixed and features of themself 

what are differences between growth and fixed mindsets when responding to difficulties/failures

• Growth mindset: Focus on the efforts and strategies used 

  • Those struggling in school with growth mindsets are more likely to take remedial courses 

• Fixed mindset: Blame intellectual ability and suffer a drop in self-esteem

cultures and growth mindsets

• NA are less likely to hold growth mindsets than those from some Asian cultures 

• Differences are evident when you ask people to think about what leads to certain abilities

big 5 personality traits

• Openness to experience: Creativity and curiosity about the world 

• Conscientiousness: How responsible, dependable, and self-disciplined a person is

• Extraversion: How outgoing, social, or dominant a person is

• Agreeableness: Warm, pleasant, and considerate temperament

• Neuroticism: Emotional instability and unpredictability 

five-factor model

• Proposes that all personality traits reflect a combination of the 5 core traits 

• questionable generalizability due to a majority of the research being WEIRD

niche-diveristy hypothesis

When people live in an environment where there are opportunities for many different skill ests and traits to be cultivated and rewarded, personality comes to take on a larger set of basic underlying factors as people compete with each other for the different roles available

alternate hypothesis to the five-factor model

Taxonomic categorization

• Clustering items according to their perceived similarities 

  • The carrot is the most different because it is a vegetable 

  • Most commonly given by Westerners

Thematic categorization

• Grouping items based on their causal, temporal, or spatial associations 

  • The dog is the most different because carrots and rabbits and a relationship 

  • Common across non-Western cultures

analytic thinking

• Separating objects from the context (decontextualize)

• Breaking down objects to their component parts of features

  • If you see something, you want to see the parts it is made of and break it into those parts

• Using abstract rules to explain and predict an object's behaviour 

• Focusing on objects and their attributes 

• More common in Western cultures

holistic thinking

• Attention to the entire context; objects and context form a single whole

• Attending to the relations among objects

• Predicting an objects behaviour on the basis of similarity relations

• Holistic thinking (HT): Focus on the context as a whole 

  • Associative way of thinking or paying attention to relationships among objects as well as between objects and their surrounding 

  • Objects are understood in how they relate to the rest of the context 

  • Emphasizes knowledge gained through experience than the application of fixed abstract concepts 

  • More common in non-Western cultures

absolute/relative length task and its relation to east asians and americans

• EA show more activation of the left inferior parietal lobe and the right precentral gyrus on the absolute task; Americans showed more activation on the relative task 

  • Both regions of activations are associated with attentional control (effort in response to difficulty)

• Context-dependent tasks are more difficult for Americans (analytic reasoners); context-free tasks are more difficult for EA (holistic reasoners)

  • relative length task requires more contextual knowledge

• Identical task -> different culturally-conditioned psychological response

fundamental attribution error

• Ignoring situational information and focusing on dispositional information 

  • Fundamental because it is considered deeply ingrained in us 

  • We assume that someone is doing something because of their underlying disposition and not their situational factors

personality traits and social network size

• Research suggests that people are less likely to rely on broad personality traits in smaller social networks (because they have greater knowledge about the people in their group and thus can predict their behaviour more precisely 

  • When you have a large group, you can generalize information based on the small things you know about a person 

  • People from smaller-scale societies are less likely to reply on abstract personality traits than people living in larger industralized societies 

AT/HT and understanding other people’s behaviour

• Explaining people’s behaviour by attending to their personal characteristics is known as a dispositional attribution 

• Explaining peoples behaviours by attending to contextual variables is known as situational attribution 

• Matters in relationships

E.g. Your partner doing that made you mad, is it a characteristic of theirs or because of the situation

founder effect

arguing that AT is rooted in Greek philosophers and their ideas and HT is rooted in confuscian/taoist chinese thought

how does rice/wheat farming have an effect on AT/HT

• Paddy rice farmers requires some central control and intense coordination with other families to manage water supplies and harvesting

  • Developed more INT thinking

• Wheat farming requires much less interaction and coordination with neighbors

  • developed more IND thinking

AT/HT and attention

• AT: Focuses on seperate parts of a scene (items of interest)

• HT: Spreads the attention more broadly to perceive the world as a whole

  • Allows them to do good at detecting relationships but poorly on things like splitting a scene into its component parts

rod-and-frame test (and its relationship to AT/HT)

METHOD: Rod-and-frame test where you needed to say whether a rod is pointing up. The frame around the rod is rotated independently so to respond correctly you need to ignore the misleading information and focus solely on the rod 

• RESULT: AT do well on this task, HT do bad 

  • Field Independence vs field dependence

field independence

• A type of cognitive style; The tendency to separate objects from their background fields

  • Common in AT, Calvinism (religion), people in industrialized societies (besides those in EA)

field dependence

• Tendency to view objects as bound to their background 

  • Common in HT, extroverted people, farmers who need to coordinate activities with others, atheists, Catholicism or Judaism  

  • American vs Japanese fish study

are people seeing things differently or just processing them differently

• japanese people pay more attention to background context than westerners

• westerners spend more time focused on the central figure than the background characters

category coverage principle

• When making an inference from premises to a conclusion, the more diverse the premise, the better coverage of the category, and the stronger the inference 

  • E.g. thinking disease A would affect more trees because they are two different types of trees

nature study with trees — inductive reasoning about nature (method, result)

1. Itzaj maya adults 

• Deep traditional ecological knoweledge of the Guatemalan rainforest 

2. US Undergrad students

   1. Typical WEIRD participants in psychology studies

   2. Limited real-world interaction with plants/animals

3. US tree experts

   1. Park workers

   2. Biological domain knowledge, but operating in a Western cultural setting

   3. Part of the triangulation because it was related to both groups so that if there is a difference you know from what 

      1. If biological information was important than 1 and 3 would be more alike

      2. If national information was more important than 2 and 3 would be more alike 

• 2 <-> 3, shared national culture

• 1 <-> 3, shared domain knowledge

• Results

  • “Disease A affects River Birch and White Pine. Disease B affects River Birch and Yellow Birch. Which disease is more likely to affect more kinds of trees?”

  • Undergrad students used abstract reasoning (coverage), Itzaj maya and US tree experts used ecological reasoning

    • Knowledge about natural matters is very important 

    • Coverage response is like a backup answer when you do not have the knowledge 

    • Important because if you have more knowledge then you will treat nature with more respect 

AT/HT and accepting contractions

• EA believe that reality is constantly changing (created the principle of contraction because everything is connected and changing)

  • are more likely to believe that the opposite of what happened in the past will happen again (e.g. more likely to sell when a stock is going up)

• Aristotle created the law of non-contraction (that nothing can be both true and false at the same time)

  • Westerners are more likely to see changes in world more linearly

implicit and explicit communication and how it differs between cultures

• Use of metaphors in speech 

  • Metaphors are effective in communicating emotions and conveying powerful feelings 

  • Strongly valued in latino cultures 

• Non-verbal cues

  • Important for effective communication (that's why online communication can be difficult)

• Cultures vary on the degree to which they rely on explicit verbal information and nonverbal cues

  • high context vs low context cultures

high-context culture

• people are deeply involved with one another and share information that guides their behaviour 

  • Appropriate behaviour is understood so there is no ended for explicit communication

  • Great deal of information in common -> less explicit when speaking

  • E.g. EA societies

  • Key information can be conveyed non-verbally 

low-context cultures

• Less involvement among individuals -> less shared information to guide behaviour 

  • Have to communicate in more detail 

  • E.g. NA societies (or English-speaking cultures in general)

Whorfian hypothesis of linguistic relativity

Proposes that the language we speak influences how we think

how does language influence thinking

• Language directs thinking 

  • Notice different aspects of the world

    • E.g. if you have a lot of words that discriminate in one domain, you would pay more attention to them

      • E.g. if there are many words explaining different types of sadness, you’d feel more different types of sadness compared to if there was only one word for it 

  • Construct different mental representations

    • Using metaphors to understand the world 

  • Make different judgements, which could favour different courses of action

language and colour perception

• Cultures differ in the way (a) they carve the colour continuum (different boundaries) and (b) the colour of available colours 

  • industrialized societies have a lot of different words to describe colours because we have things that often are the same but differ solely on the colour

study comparing english, berinmo, and himba speakers in colour identification

• Participants were shown triads of color chips and were asked to identify which two chips were more similar 

• The chips were equidistant in terms of hue, however, two of the chips crossed a boundary between two different colour terms

• People’s judgements for color were compared when the two chips crossed a colour boundary in their own language, or in another culture’s language 

• RESULTS

  • People perceive colours based on whether the colour of the chips crossed the boundaries of the colour terms in their own language than in the other language 

  • Evidence of linguistic variability

  • English speakers did best on the green-blue boundary

  • Berinmo speakers did best on the nol-wor boundary

  • Himba speakers did the best on the dumbu-burou boundary

how does perception of agency relate to AT/HT

• English usually attributes behaviour directly to someone taking an action (e.g. “This person tore this item” instead of “this item tore”)

  • Ironically the first statement makes the person seem responsible. When people want to avoid blame they use the passive description without an agent 

• Spanish mainly uses passive expressions

study with dutch and guugu timithirr speakers on spatial thinking

• In one study, Dutch speaking and Guugu Timithirr speaking Australian Aboriginal participants were shown some objects. Then they went to a different room and were asked to recreate the scene

  • The Guugu Timithirr language does not have L/R, only cardinal direction

  • In one condition they faced the same cardinal direction in the second room. In the other condition, they faced a different direction in the second room. The question was how they arranged the objects in the second room

  • Guugu Ymithirr speakers recreated the room based on cardinal directions. Dutch speakers went with R/L

spatial thinking and how people think

• Another way that language vary is that some have egocentric spatial terms, right vs left

• Many languages lack terms for these. People describe location in terms of cardinal direction (north, south, easy, west) 

  • Compared with English/western culture where we use L/R more in daily life

numerical cognition and thinking

• Several aspects (like math) seem to be universal but there is still variation in peoples comprehension of numbers 

• Using a base-10 number system vs base-20 or base-60

  • Romans not understanding the concept of 0 

  • Yupno people in Papua New Guinea representing numbers up to 33 by counting their body parts 

• Largely cultural and not innate 

  • Several cultures in the Amazon and Australian Aboriginal groups have impoverished number systems which only contain 1, 2, and “many” 

    • Without specific numbers, some cultural groups are unable to understand associated concepts such as estimating

  • Can also think about numbers differently 

    • Industrialized societies understand that numbers are linear (gap between 17 and 18 is the same as between 2 and 3)

    • Mundurucu adults (indigenous Amazonian group with few number words) thinks of numbers logarithmically 

      • Suggests that we only think of numbers linearly when we are exposed to that culturally

AT/HT and talking/thinking outloud + its potential consequences

• AT thinkers benefit from thinking outloud because they already see things as broken down into steps

• HT thinkers do not because it interfears with their usual thinking style which includes tending to multiple aspects at once

  • Asian students are less likely to speak up

    • Can be viewed as a cause for concern 

    • Participation is a big part of grade -> affect their success in school 

  • Assertiveness can also have an effect on who is chosen for promotion to leadership positions 

    • Bamboo ceiling: EA are underrepresented in leadership positions in the US

acculturation

the process of adapting to, learning, or borrowing traits from

another culture different from one’s own original culture

unique challenges to studying acculturation

• longitudinal research — difficult and costly

• cross-sectional — incomplete picture

• generalizability issues

• literature is contradictory, less coherent, and empirically grounded

• reaching consistent conclusions because people move countries for different reasons

  • can also move to different environments (e.g. place that is similar to their country of origin, place that discrimiantes against their country of origin, etc)

• people have different personalities which can affect their acculturation experiences

psychological adjustment needed when moving to a new culture

• Acquring a new language

• Learning new interperonsal and social behaviours

• Getting used to new norms and values

• Becoming part of a minority group

• Adjusting one’s self-concept

The longer immigrants spend in a new culture = more similar their emotional experiences become to those of other people living in the host culture

• The more people adapt to a new culture = more they acquire the host culture’s norms for relating to others

psychological distress is possible due to adjustments that need to be made

migrant, sojourner, immigrant

Migrant: a person who moves from a heritage culture (the og culture) to a host culture (new culture), either temporarily or permanently

Sojourner: a person who moves to a new culture and intends to stay only temporarily

Immigrant: a person who moves to a new culture and intends to stay permanently

crisis stage of moving to a new country

• Most visitors begin to have increasingly negative views about host culture

• Over next 6-18 months typically experience the most negative feelings toward the host culture

• Culture Shock: the feeling of being anxious, helpless, irritable, andgenerally disoriented and homesick due to moving to a new culture

• Physical health may suffer

• Thrill of having new experiences 📉 = these experiences become tiring and difficult instead

• Recent migrants may realize their language skills aren’t yet good enough for them to fully function

• People they initially met who were interested in them because they were “exoctic” = no longer as interested

• home sickness and missing favourite foods

stages of moving to a new country

honeymoon → culture shock → adjustment

adjustment stage of moving to a new country

• After spending several months in the Crisis Stage = most of the participants started to adjust

• Began to enjoy experiences more

• Language abilities improved

• Got better at establishing friendships with the locals

• Got used to things in the host culture (ex., TV Programs and food)

• Started to think more and more like the locals

🪷Adjustment Stage🪷

Tends to last several years

With time = people become increasingly competent at functioning in the host culture

reverse culture shock

Sojourners can go through the same adjustment after they return home

Initially = people are happy to see families and friends, can eat fave foods

Reverse Culture Shock: they can find themselves puzzling over why they don’t quite feel at home anymore, and feeling somewhat alienated from those around them

Can be unexpectedly disturbing = people start to question core aspects of their self-cocnept

Don’t even realize you have changed as a person until you return home

Reverse Culture Shock tho = can give way to an adjustment period

They gradually acclimate themselves to their familiar lifestyle they once knew

how can features of a host country help ease migrants accomodation (america vs japan)

America

Country of immigrants, oen of the most ethnically diverse nations in world

People have moved here and adjusted accordingly

Japan...

A counry that is relatively ethnically homogenous = >98% are Japanese

Trying to adjust as a migrant would be more challenging

Will always stand out in the end, no matter how hard you try

• One study that tracked acculturation of a few migrants to Japan = didn’t replicate U-shape A pessimistic L-shaped emerged

  • Honeymoon? = ✅

  • Crisis? = ✅

  • Adjustment? = ❌

People who move to societies with tighter norms = more diff. time acculturating

Migrants struggle to learn new sets of cultural norms

There are more severe cosnequences for violating norms = Tightness-Looseness mentioned

common areas to experience culture shock

• language

• food

• time (perspective and the way people are socialized to relate to time)

  • E.g. some times being clock time or event time

    • Clock time = set start and end time, event time = going with the rhythm of the event

who adjusts better to moving

• younger people (less set in the way of thier heritage culture)

• cognitive factors (greater cultural intelligence and empathy)

• Better implicit pattern recognition abilities (learn norms quicker)

• Aware of how they are learning about host culture (pick up norms easily)

language and acculturation

• language ability = biggest success indicator

  • confidence in thier mastery = affects how they identify with the culture

  • similiarities between lanauge and culture

• the easier it is to learn the language of the host culture the better they will acculturate

test of english as a foreign langauge

Assessing how easily people learn the language of the host culture = average country scores

International students who want to study at a school in an English-speaking country = must take this to be admitted

Country scores on the TOEFL are influenced by many factors

• Country’s Gross National Product

• % of students in the country who take the exam

The participants’ own mother tongue = varying scores emerge

• Languages similar to English? (ex., German or Dutch) = perform better than other European Languages that are more distant (ex., French and Spanish)

• Indo-European langauges = tend to perform better compared to HIGHLY distant langauges (ex., Swahili or Japanese)

aspects that will influence how easily someone acculturates to a new culture

• cultural distance (how different is thier host culture and origin culture)

• cultural fit (the extent an indvidual is aligned with the dominant cultural meanings around them)

aspects of cultural fit

• personality traits

  • Agreeable/conscientious = adapt more easily

  • extraversion = helps acculturation

    • more likely to engage and socialize

• independent self-concept = easier to acculturate to the US or other IND countries

• similar emotional wellbeing patterns to host country

  • e.g. japan doesn’t show much emotions so if you are the same then you’ll fit in better

issues that can impact ones acculturation experience

• whether people try to participate in the larger society of their host culture

  • positive attiude? trying to fit in?

• whether people try to maintain thier own heritage culture and identity as members of that culture

  • positive attitude towards heritage culture? seeking ways to preserve heritage culture traditions?

acculturation strategies

• integration (high attitude to host and heritage culture) - most common

• seperation (low attitude to host culture, high to heritage)

• assimilation (high attitude to host, low to heritage)

• marginalization (low to both) - least common

integration strategy (acculturation)

an acculturation strategy that involves efforts to fit in and fully participate in the host culture, while at the same time striving to maintain the traditions of the heritage culture

Seeking the best of both worlds

+ve Heritage and +ve Host

Absence of prejudice and discrimination

Involvement in two cultural communities = two support groups!

Clear ethnic identity

Encourages a flexible personality

People with personalities that function better under stress and facilitate social interactions = more likely than others to adopt integration strategies

marginalization strategy (acculturation)

involves little or no effort to participate in the host culture or to maintain the traditions of the heritage culture

• Relatively rare and is theoretically puzzling

• Who do peopel identify wiht if not either the heritage OR the host culture?

• Some have proposed this shouldn’t be an acculturation strategy

• -ve Heritage and -ve Host

Rejection of dominant society

Loss of one’s original culture

Weakened social support

assimilation strategy (acculturation)

involves efforts to fit in and fully participate in the host culture, while making little or no effort to maintain the traditions of the heritage culture

A desire to leave behind the ancestral past in order to fit in with the new culture

-ve Heritage and +ve Host

Potential cost = loss of one’s heritage culture and accompnaying social support networks

Sense of disconnection with the past

separation strategy (acculturation)

involves efforts to maintain the traditions of the heritage culture, while making little or no effort to particiapte in the host culture

People who don’t want to acculturate to the host culture

+ve Heritage and -ve Host

Leading to the individuals themselves being rejected by the host culture when they REJECT the host culture themselves

You reject us? We reject you! 🫵🏻

factors that can influence what acculturation strategy someone will use

• will not strive to fit into host culture if there is prejudice towards their own cultural group

  • persure separation or marginalization

• lower SES or indigenous cultural groups → separation or marginalization

  • host culture doesnt meet thier needs or desires

extent host culture values diversity and cultural differences predicts prejudice

identity denial

The questioning of people’s cultural identity because they aren’t recognized as matching the prototype of the cultural group to which they belong

• E.g. asking where are you really from

sterotype threat

The fear of behaving in a way that will inadvertently confirm a negative stereotype about one’s group

• generalizes to all groups with negative sterotypes (women, POC, elderly, etc)

things that can happen when you are in a state of sterotype threat

Stress

Blood pressure may also increase

Working memory capacity may decrease

Start showing evidence that the stereotype is on their mind

• Because they are more likely to be thinking of words like dumb, loser, and black (in terms of African Americans)

can directly influence test performance

make acculturation process difficult for minorities

psychological benefits of being in a distinct group

Minority group members may experience psotive feelings from bondingwith others from their ethnic gorup

Provide a sense of pride for overcoming obstacles

Feelings of bicultural competence 📈

People with a clear, well-defined cultural identity = more likely ot havea strong sense of loyalty

Group membership becomes an important source of self-esteem and meaning in lives

sterotype threat and its impact on first nations people

Stereotypes can sometimes elicit harm even if the stereotypes aren’t so obviously -ve

Non-Indigenous people = tend to have limited/distorted understanding of Indigenous people

• School and Media = incorrectly portray these communities

  • i.e. these people are “from the past” = no longer authentic/real

• Native Americans = feel that Americans believe that not much “real” Native Americans are left

• Feel that these Non-Indigenous peoples don’t care about their experiences, too

• Caracturized individuals = served as mascots for college/professional teams

  • innacurate, dehumanizing indigenous people

• colonization and destroying indigenous cultures

  • residential schools, indigenous people disproportionately facing housing/food insecurity and being overrepresented in the foster care and criminal systems

blending (way multicultural people deal with thier experiences)

the tendency for bicultural people to show psychological characteristics in between those of their two cultures

• if people blend cultures then they would have psychological responses that are intermediate of monocultural people

  • E.g. thinking in between as an American or Asian, increase in self-esteem amongst EA people who moved to canada

frame switching (way multicultural people deal with thier experiences)

referring to multicultural people, alternating between different cultural selves

• People don’t lose their heritage culture self once they have mastered their host culture self

• Can develop divergent selves = can be selectively activated by diff. cultural contexts

occurs amongst people with high bicultural identity integration and biculturals who were born in NA (compared to immigrants)

code-switching

this kind of cultural frame-switching, an essential skill for inner-city children to learn if they’re to survive and succeed in these two diverse cultural contexts

bicultural identity integration

the extent to which a bicultural person’s two cultural identities are compatible or in opposition to e/o

• high: integrating aspects of both cultures into everyday life

• low: two cultural identities in opposition

primes for frame-switching

• language

• context/situation

• thoughts

third culture kids

People who travel with their expatriate parents and spend large parts of their formative years living in places outside their heritage culture

• Expatriate: a person who lives and works temporarily or permanently in a country other than their native country

• First culture: Parent heritage

• Second culture: current host country

• Third culture: Culture of expatriate community that they are exposed to

hard to study because their experiences vary a lot from each other

how do people become third culture kids

• parents employment (military, diplomatic services, business ventures, missionary work, global organizations)

• becoming increasingly common

cultural identities of people who belonged to multiple cultures

• dont feel a strong connection to any of the cultures

  • feels a sense of culture homelessness

  • feeling like a minoirty wherever they go

• can feel anxiety from being expected to return to their parents’ home country which is a home that doesn’t feel like home

• struggle to fit in (feelings of loneliness and distress)

• often do not feel cultural shock because they don’t stay in one place long enough

• struggling to fit in with non TCK

• proud of thier global identity rather than a cultural identity

multiculturalism and creativity

• allows you to see from new and different perspectives

  • think of outside-the-box solutions

  • effect is larger when you have greater cultural distance

  • psychological richness (the feeling that life is filled with interesting and perspective changing experiences)

    • more trusting

    • more belief in moral relativity

curvilinear relationship