Chapter 12 - Cultural Variation in Experience, Behavior, and Personality

Cultural Psychology

Seeks to understand individual cultures in their own terms and avoids making comparisons

Enculturation

Adopting the culture into which one was born

Acculturation

picking up a new culture

Cross-cultural experiences

any engagement with people or environments from a different cultural background

Etics

the universal components of ideas across cultures ex: conception of duty, marriage (an outsiders approach that uses universal, cross-cultural theories and comparisons)

Emics

components of ideas that are particular to certain cultures. (an insider approach focusing on understanding a specific culture from within its own context)

easy culture

individuals can purse many different goals and at least some of them are relatively simple to attain

tough culture

only a few goals are viewed as valuable, and few ways are available to achieve them

David McClelland

American psychologist who theorized that a central aspect of any culture was the degree to which it emphasizes the need to achieve

Harry Triandis

a pioneer of cross-cultural psychology who proposed the tightness-looseness dimension

Tight Cultures

cultures that tolerate very little deviation from proper behavior

loose cultures

cultures that allow fairly large deviations from cultural norms

Selective Migration

The concept the people’s personalities and psychological needs influence their decision to move and where they choose to settle

Collectivism

the practice or principle of giving a group priority over each individual in it.

Individualism 

the habit or principle of being independent and self-reliant.

self-regard

regard or consideration for oneself; self-respect

Behavioral Consistency

Expected in individualist cultures in which the cause of behavior is assumed to be within the person

Ethnocentrism

observations of other cultures will be influenced by the observer’s own cultural background

cultural relativism

the principle that a person's beliefs, values, and behaviors should be understood within the context of their own culture, rather than judged by the standards of another

Bicultural identity integration (BII)

the presence of two different cultures in the same country or region