Sociocultural approach notes

Social identity theory

  • How someone evaluates themselves in relation to groups

  • A person’s sense of who they are is based on their membership in social groups, creating in-groups and out-groups

  • By identifying with a group, prejudice, and discrimination might form against out-groups

  • Social categorization: Identifying which groups we belong to and which we don’t

  • Social identification: Adopting the norms and characteristics of the group

  • Social comparison: Comparing yourself to other groups (them vs us)

  • Positive distinctiveness: Seeking self-esteem by comparing in-group with out-group (Fein and Spencer)

Social Cognitive theory

  • People learn both positive and negative behaviors through observation of people in their environment

  • Conformity: Change of behavior due to imagined or real social pressure (due to the tendency to compare ourselves with others in order to validate ourselves)

Conformity due to:

  1. Informational social influence: Need for certainty. Social comparison to figure out how to behave

  2. Normative social influence: Need for social acceptance and approval

Dangerous conformity

Pluralistic ignorance: A form of informational social influence when we don’t react to something because others aren’t.

Social learning types

Modeling: Learning through observation of other people, leading to imitation (like baby learning or picking up Karriana language)

Vicarious reinforcement: Seeing others get a punishment or reward for behaviour

Conditions:

  1. Attention

  2. Retention

  3. Motivation: Wanting to recreate

  4. Potential: Recreating

Cultural groups and cultural dimensions

Emic approach: Inside perspective

  • Involving yourself in culture you’re studying for higher ecological validity and understanding of study

Etic approach: Outside perspective

Universalism: Applies to all cultures

Relativism: Applies to specific cultures only

Surface culture vs. deep culture

Cultural dimension: Values of members of a society living within a culture

  • Individualism vs. Collectivism

Individualism: Achievement, uniqueness, independence

Collectivism: Social harmony, tradition, interdependence (Berry et.al)

Enculturation

  • Enculturation: Process of adopting or internalizing the schemas of your culture and gender, etc.

  • Cultural norms: Rules with indicate expected behaviour

Enculturation of gender roles (through observation, imitation, shaping)

Acculturation

Blending into new culture by beginning to adopt their norms

  • Integration: Maintaining heritage culture while adopting some norms

  • Assimilation: Adopt new culture and forget heritage culture identity

  • Separation: Maintain norms of heritage culture and don’t adopt new culture

  • Marginalisation: Don’t maintain heritage culture or adopt new culture

Berry accult. model

Adopting

the new

culture

Keeping

Yes

No

heritage

Yes

Integration

Separation

culture identity

No

Assimilation

Marginalisation

Ethnocentrism: Inability to empathize with another culture (assessing other cultures with yours as the standard)

Acculturation gaps: Difference in understanding of values between parents and children due to difference in acculturation strategies

Acculturative stress or culture shock

Some terms:

  1. Stereotype: An over-generalized belief usually about a group of people.

  2. Prejudice: An often unfavourable attitude toward any member of a category.

  3. Discrimination: Treating someone differently based on their membership of a group, rather than on individual merit.

  4. Stereotype threat: Internalized stereotypes could negatively influence an individual’s self-perception and behaviour. (fear of confirming a stereotype about your group could stress you out and make you perform worse, kinda confirming stereotype)

Formation of stereotypes:

  1. Social categorisation into in-groups and out-groups and favouring your in-group

  2. Reduced variability in in-group (we are the same), positive stereotype and out-group (they all suck)

  3. Increased variability in out-group (they are different)

  4. Group might have stereotypes against out-group so when joining, you adopt them to be accepted

  5. Illusory correlation: Human tendency to see unrelated connections between driving, intelligence, race, gender, etc. and then overestimating that relationship to form generalized stereotype

Prejudice can boost in-group self esteem by acting negatively towards out-group (Fein and Spencer)

Increased diversification: Being able to tell apart more people within own group due to familiarity