307 MT1 Content

Cultural Psychology

interactions between individuals and their environments, considers how culture contextually shapes a person

Culture

• any kind of information that is acquired from another person through social learning that can influence an individuals behaviour

• a group of people who are existing in a shared context

Challenges for Culture Psychology

• fluid boundaries (hard to distinguish)

• changes over time (not static entity)

• variability within a culture (membership does not determine the individual)

4 Universal Psychological Processes of Culture

1. non universal

2. existential universal

3. functional universal

4. accessibility universal

Non Universal

• lowest level of universality

• a process that does not exist in all cultures and is deemed a cultural invention

Existential Universal

• second lowest level of universality

• process that exists in all cultures but is not used in the same way or equally accessible cross-culturally

Functional Universal

• second highest level of universality

• process that exists in all cultures and is used to solve the same problem but is not equally accessible to all cultures

Accessibility Universal

• highest level of universality

• process used and accessed to the same degree cross-culturally

Ethnocentricism

evaluating people from other cultures by comparing them to the standards of one’s own culture

3 Biases Humans Face

1. prestige bias

2. similarity bias

3. conformist transmission

Prestige Bias

• tendency to imitate/learn from prestigious people or those who have the respect/attention of others

• evolutionary adaptation suggests that ancestors were given survival advantage by learning from the “right” people

Similarity Bias

• tendency to selectively imitate/learn from people who are similar to ourselves

• evolutionary adaptation suggests that learning from those similar will mean it is more applicable to ourselves and promote group identity/affiliation

Conformist Transmission

• tendency to learn behaviours that are performed by a greater number of people

• evolutionary adaptation suggests that the most useful habits are practiced by the majority

• common approach when a person is in a group setting, has a lack of confidence in their abilities, and multiple options to select

3 Cognitive Factors for Cultural Learning

1. mentalizing and perspective taking

2. language

3. sharing experiences and goals

Mentalizing and Perspective Taking

a person takes interest in the mental state (intentions/goals/strategies) from who they learn from (theory of mind)

Language

allows ideas to be communicated without having to be visually demonstrated and enables people to convey complex thoughts by facilitating coordinated behaviours among individuals living in groups

Sharing Goals and Experiences

• people want to explain their experiences/what they want to achieve with others and attempt to coordinate these experiences with others

• allows humans to engage in collaborative learning and instructive learning which improves scaffolding

Scaffolding

ability to simplify a task into the relevant steps for the learned action

Ratchet Effect

• process where cultural information becomes more complex/useful over time, initial ideas can be modified for improvement

• evolution adaptation suggests human mind is sharper in its capacity to learn/organize new cultural information

Cultural Worlds

worlds that contain cultural ideas that have accumulated over time

Gene-Culture Evolution

interaction of genetics and culture, genetic evolution enhances cultural learning that lead to culture habits shaping the evolution of genes

Cultural Brain Hypothesis

humans evolved capacity that enables us to interact/share information with others and organize/utilize the collective information to survive/thrive in different environments