Pre-recorded lecture 2 and material

How is cultural learning in humans facilitated?

By a theory of mind and language

What is the difference between imitative and emulative learning?

• Imitative learning = a type of social learning in which the learner internalizes aspects of the model’s goals and behavioral strategies. It is less efficient, but more precise than emulative learning, but is useful when being taught something, allowing for cultural knowledge to be passed on. Found in children.

• Emulative learning = a type of social learning focused on the environmental events involved with a model’s behavior.

  • It is less precise, but more efficient than imitative learning, and often found in chimps.

Ratchet effect

the process by which cultural information becomes more complex and often more

useful over time.

How does population size and interconnectedness influence cultural accumulation?

The more population size and interconnection increases, the more cultural accumulation is maintained and increased because the higher the likelihood of having and encountering a successful model to copy and build on.

What is an encephalization quotient, what is humans’, and what implications of does this have for the rest of our bodies?

Encephalization quotient is the ratio of the brain weight of an animal to the brain weight predicted for a comparable animal of the same body size. Humans is 4.6, meaning our brains are 4.6 times larger than mammals of the same or similar size.

The implications for this are that we have less muscle strength and also shorter guts than would be expected of us, because our brain consumes so much of our energy.

How does cooking make our shorter guts and thus bigger brains possible?

It takes over a part of the digestion process outside of the body

What is the social brain hypothesis and how is it an evolutionary advantage to have a larger brain?

The social brain hypothesis is a theory that proposes that cognitive demands inherent in social living led to the evolution of large primate brains: those that were most successful at handling the cognitive demands that come with complex social communities were more likely to attract mates, secure resources, and protect themselves and their offspring.

What is the neocortex ratio?

the volume of the neocortex (area where social computational processes take place) relative to the volume of the rest of the brain.

How does the neocortex ratio differ for different species?

Comparisons of the

neocortex ratio across primates shows that those living in larger social groups tended to have larger

neocortex ratios.

Tested: Children and primates had to precisely follow instructions

The children copied more precisely, this was a social learning task

What things do cultures across the world differ in?

Practices, social structures, diets, economic systems,

technologies, religious beliefs, and psychology.

What are differences between proximal and distal causes of cultural differences?

• Proximal: have a direct and immediate relationship with their effects.

• Distal: initial differences that lead to effects over longer periods, often through indirect relations.

How can the place where people live influence cultural values?

Harsher environments and scarcer resources result in more masculinity values.

What is the difference between evoked and transmitted culture?

Evoked culture is the notion that all people have certain biologically based behavioral repertoires that are accessible to them, which are engaged when appropriate situational conditions arise. (e.g. preference of physically attractive partners, but more where parasites are present)

Transmitted culture is the notion that people learn about particular cultural practices through social learning or by modeling the behavior of others who live near them.

Why can most cultural differences be explained by transmitted culture?

• Travel with people: it can travel with people when they move to new environments.

• Involvement in cultural norms: it is always involved in maintaining and spreading cultural norms even when evoked culture is also present.

How does culture evolve (similar to natural selection)?

= the process by which some cultural ideas are more likely to attract followers than others, thereby

becoming more common in a population (just as in natural selection). However, these ideas are not tied

to genes so they can be passed to more people than just offspring and they do not have to be adaptive.

What categories of information spread more easily and thus become cultural norms ?

Communicability is easy to remember and

summarize, it is socially desirable

and/or it is personally relevant

it is more likely to be talked about

Usefulness is relevant and useful

sharing useful information shows

cooperation, which increases the

likelihood of being helped in the future

Emotionality evokes a shared emotional reaction

among people

sharing emotional ideas connects people with others

Unexpectedness is minimally counterintuitive

they are more likely to be remembered

Minimally counterintuitive

ideas that violate our expectations enough to be considered surprising and unusual, but not too bizarre (still largely intuitive).

Dynamic social impact theory

a theory that states that individuals influence each other through interacting, ultimately leading to cultures: norms develop between those that communicate regularly.

In what three ways have cultures been changing recently?

Globalization (cultures becoming more homogeneous at a global level) and glocalization (cultures becoming more heterogenous at a local level)

IQ: IQ scores have been continuously increasing

Individualism: There has been a trend towards individualism. Increasing financial and time pressures, suburbanization, electronic entertainment or increased social economic status are contributing to this.

What are three propositions for why IQ has been increasing (Flynn effect)?

• Nutrition: adequate nutrition is necessary for a fully functioning mind.

o However: evidence for improved nutrition does not parallel higher IQ scores.

• Education: the amount of education needed to get a good job is increasing.

o However: IQ scores are also rising among those who do not improve their educational level.

• Pop culture: pop culture (video games) has become progressively more complex and challenging.

o However: it could also be that pop culture has become more complex because humans

became more intelligent and thus, could make more complex things.

What are two reasons for cultural persistence?

Building on previous structures. Innovations within cultures build on previous cultural structures: existing cultural habits influence and constrain the evolution of new cultural habits. Initial cultural conditions have a disproportionate influence on cultural evolution.

Pluralistic ignorance: The tendency for people to collectively misinterpret the thoughts that underlie other people’s behavior. There is a difference between what people publicly say, and what they actually think.

Through pluralistic ignorance, cultural behaviors can come to persist even when a majority of people do not privately endorse the behavior themselves. (e.g. alcohol prohibition)

The human brain is programmed for cultural learning, what is an indication of this?

There are sensitive periods for learning language and culture, after which it becomes more difficult to do so

What is some evidence for a sensitive period of language aquisition?

1. Phoneme discrimination

= the ability to discriminate among different sounds. At birth, infants have the ability to discriminate among all the phonemes that humans are able to produce. Within the first year they begin to lose this ability and instead gain increased ability to discriminate phonemes from their own language.

2. Accents

After the sensitive period for acquiring language it is much more difficult to master a language. In immigrant families, older people often preserve a thick accent, while younger children do not.

3. Brain

Early in life the language center of the brain is quite flexible at attuning itself to various kinds of linguistic input. After the sensitive period starts to close, those regions can no longer restructure themselves to accommodate the new language: a new area has to be occupied.

4. Feral children

Children who were raised without language input during their sensitive period have considerable

difficulty in acquiring language (mastering grammar, syntax). However, these are single instances for

which there has not been experimental control to draw firm conclusions.

What is the brain activation like of bilinguals who learned the language during the sensitive period vs those who didn’t?

Bilinguals that learned a second language later in life show activation in different brain regions when

hearing one language than when hearing the other language. Those that learned both languages

earlier in life showed activation in the same part of the brain, regardless of the language they heard.

→ Once the sensitive period is over, the brain cannot be remodeled.

Acculturation

The process of cultural change when one interacts with another culture = second culture learning.

Immigrants who move to a new culture after the sensitive window has closed have a difficult time adjusting to their new culture and identify less with it.

How is measuring learning a new culture harder than measuring learning a new language?

Languages are different in concrete ways, while cultures are often not, and it is difficult to determine whether someone has mastered a culture (while this is ‘easy’ for language).

How do cultures differ in the early developmental experiences they give their children and what are the underlying values of this?

(1) Personal space

The early physical experiences of infants, such as the amount of bodily and face-to-face contact

between the mother and the infant, differ between cultures. The amount of personal space a child gets

could influence the development of individuality (recognition of oneself in the mirror).

(2) Co-sleeping

= children sharing the same bed with their caretakers. Overlapping with personal space experiences, cultures also differ in whether the child sleeps alone or with the parents. In many cultures, co-sleeping is quite common, while European-descent North American children often get their own room.

Parenting decisions (co-sleeping) and the ways that others in the culture respond to them, reflect the

underlying values of a culture. While Asian, African, and Latin American parents worry about the

separation between the parents and the child, European and North American parents feared for a lack

of privacy for them and their child.

What different parenting styles are there and how do they differ in characteristics?

What are the outcomes of different parenting styles across cultures?

Parenting styles produce different outcomes across cultures. Authoritative parenting leads to the most

desirable outcomes in Western cultures, but authoritarian parenting has some positive outcomes in

other cultures (increased family cohesion and improved grades). However, too authoritarian parenting

styles relate to maladjustment and less happiness in children across cultures.

What are measurement issues regarding parenting styles?

• Developmental stages: there are different parenting styles depending on the stage of

development of the child.

In many Asian cultures, infants and toddlers are shown a great deal of indulgence and few

demands placed on them until they reach school age and parents become much stricter.

• Expression of responsiveness: cultures differ in the ways that warmth and responsiveness are

communicated by parents:

o What looks like cold behavior in the West may be perceived as concern or interest in the East.

• Role of training (jiao xun): the authoritarian category excludes the role of training, which is a core

part of Chinese parenting and an essential form of nurturing for Chinese parents.

Noun bias

the tendency in young children to have a vocabulary with more nouns relative to the number of verbs and other relational words.

Why do cultures differ in the amount of noun bias they have?

• Nature of language: in some languages, nouns tend to come in rather salient locations (more noun bias; English), while in others this is the case for verbs (less noun bias; Japanese); moreover, in some languages (pro)nouns can even be dropped (less noun bias; Japanese).

• Communication about objects: children learn to communicate about objects differently.

o Western: tend to perceive the world in analytic terms, seeing objects as discrete and separate.

o Eastern: tend to perceive the world in holistic terms, stressing the relations between objects.

What key developmental transitions are there in some cultures in childhood?

(1) Terrible Twos = a developmental transition characterized by obstinacy and stubbornness that is seen as a period in which a young toddler begins to establish his/her individuality. This period is most pronounced in Western toddlers and not that pronounced in cultures were the focus is less on independence and more on interdependence (Japan).

(2) Adolescence = a developmental transition often characterized by symptoms of rebellion and antisocial behavior in the West. It is a universal developmental phase, but rebellion and antisocial behavior are more prevalent in individualistic societies because there are more life choices available, which results in delayed commitment (an extended period of adolescence) and thereby increased stress and confusion.

In what two ways education shape our thinking in ways that aren’t explicitly taught?

Taxonomic categorization= the ability to categorize items together based on what they have in common. It is reflective of one’s ability to reason analytically, instead of holistically (example: From these items, which one does not belong?: saw, hammer, log, hatchet. The correct answer based on taxonomic categorization would be the log, but people without education (using holistic reasoning) could provide all sorts of answers, such as: “The hammer, because the saw and the hatchet could be used to cut the wood and the hammer cannot.”)

Logical reasoning = the ability to apply a rule on the basis of logical principles rather than on personal experience. It is reflective of abstract thinking rather than concrete thinking. One is presented the following syllogism:

Based on logical reasoning the answers should be white, but people without education could say something along the lines of “You should ask people who live there and have seen them”.

How can whether you grow rice vs wheat determine your levels of individualism vs collectivism?

Rice theory: rice-growing requires more functional interdependence than wheat-growing, which makes rice-growing cultures more collectivistic.

Shibboleths

Certain markers that make it possible to distinguish foreigners or those who do not belong to a

particular class or group of people. “Scheveningen” (Dutch word) is unpronounceable for Germans.

Levels of acculturation (Minoura)

Minoura proposed 3 levels of acculturation:

• Cognitive: knowledge of cultural norms and practices.

• Behavioral: mastering behavior and practicing the cultural norms.

• Affective: showing appropriate emotional reactions when a cultural norm is violated.

A sensitive period of 9/10 years was found: only the children that moved before age 9 reached the last type of acculturation.

Developmental Niche theory

= a theoretical framework for understanding and analyzing how culture shapes a child’s development.

It assumes that there are multiple factors that are involved in the development of children:

What are the multiple factors assumed to be involved in the development of children according to the developmental niche theory

• Physical & social settings: affordances that the physical space provides (nutrition, climate).

• Customs & practices of child rearing: inherited and adapted ways of nurturing, entertaining,

educating, and protecting the child.

• Caretaker’s psychology: parental ethnotheories (what is the meaning of childhood?).

§ Ethnotheories = beliefs and values about child development and parenting.

Menopause

A universal developmental transition for which symptoms differ across cultures. There is cultural variation in the interpretation as positive (hot flashes, depressed mood) or negative (loss of femininity, health concerns).

What was shown in the study where cultures high and low on collectivism and tightness were shown stories of someone violating or adhering to the norm and had to indicate how much power they perceived that person to have.

Low collectivistic cultures showed a positive relationship between norm violation and power perception, while high collectivistic cultures showed a negative relationship.

→ Cultural values influence the relationship between

norm violation and power perception.

What was shown in the study where cultures varying on the value of tightness were shown a group of people and had to indicate who they thought were in charge of the group.

The greater the cultural tightness, the more likely one was to think of the leader being in the back of the group rather than in the front.

→ Cultural values influence the relationship between culture and leadership imagery.