Defining Culture: Metaphors, Characteristics, and Cultural Distinctions
Introduction and Metaphorical Frameworks of Culture
Purpose of Cultural Definition:
Establishes a foundational framework for studying human development within cultural contexts.
Uses intuitive metaphors prior to examining formal definitions, psychological theories, and categorizations.
Definition of Metaphor:
A figure of speech in which two dissimilar entities are likened, enabling the reader to gain a deeper understanding of one entity's characteristics by drawing parallels with those of another.
The Fish-in-the-Water Metaphor:
Illustrates the pervasive and unexamined nature of culture in everyday life.
Individuals exist within their cultural surroundings without consciously recognizing cultural influence, routinely taking their own practices for granted.
Being surrounded by similar individuals fosters the assumption that local ways of thinking and behaving are universal rather than localized.
Deep immersion can cause individuals to view foreign groups as possessing culture while perceiving themselves as culturally neutral or default. As noted by Kim (1991, cited by Greenfield, 1994, p. 23): "For Japanese in Japan, Americans have culture, but they themselves do not. For Americans, Japanese have culture, but they themselves do not."
Demonstrates that culture is essential for survival, thought, and behavior, yet its full significance becomes recognizable primarily when stepping outside one's familiar environment.
The Garden Metaphor:
Derived from the etymological origins of the word culture.
Originates from the Latin verb colere (appearing between 1400 and 1450; Kuper, 1999), which originally referred to tilling soil and land cultivation.
Evolved over time into a "noun of process," signifying the active nurturing of crops or animals (Williams, 1973, p. 87).
Yields three central developmental insights (Cole & Packer, 2011):
Indispensability of Cultural Organization: Culture creates an artificial environment designed to optimize conditions for living organisms. Human development does not occur arbitrarily, but follows patterns structured by cultural organization.
Theory of Promoting Development: Early agricultural concepts embedded a theory of optimal growth conditions (Cole & Packer, 2011, p. 73). Cultivation required evaluating soil conditions relative to specific organisms, utilizing physical tools (such as hoes) alongside generational intellectual instruments and theories (e.g., the agricultural wisdom of "not planting until winter is over").
Interrelatedness: Culture and human development share vocabulary, concepts, and descriptive terminology.
The Comfort Metaphor:
Highlights that culture is performed and experienced dynamically rather than possessed statically.
Daily cultural behaviors are executed automatically without conscious reflection, producing an underlying baseline feeling of comfort (Mahler, 2012).
Discomfort manifests when individuals enter unfamiliar cultural settings, feeling like a "fish out of water" due to unclear behavioral expectations.
Two core features of cultural experience:
Culture functions as an internal standard of normality, where familiarity breeds psychological comfort.
Experiencing cultural differences (discomforts) can prompt ethnocentric reactions due to an automatic preference for familiar cultural comforts.
Limitations of Cultural Metaphors:
Unlike water, culture is not merely an external medium; it is an internal, integral component of individual psychology.
Unlike passive crops in a garden, children are active participants in their own developmental processes.
Formal Definition and Core Characteristics of Culture
Defining Culture in Psychological Literature:
Variously conceptualized across disciplines as:
Information such as values and beliefs (Kashima & Gelfand, 2012).
A specific group of people.
The products or artifacts associated with a group.
A shared way of life (Hofstede, 1980).
Circular Logical Challenge: Culture is itself a construct created by culture, meaning it can only be defined within the framework and comprehension of a culture that prompts the need for such a definition (Fox, 2020).
Developmental Definition: A collection of ideas, values, actions, and their products, passed down without genetic inheritance, persisting over an extended timeframe, which provides the foundation for generating and sharing meanings and identities among a particular group of individuals (Fox, 2020; Hofstede, 1980; Kashima, 2008; Phinney, 1990).
Core Characteristic 1: Culture is Learned:
Acquired through socialization or enculturation as children develop within their communities.
Parents act as enculturation agents transmitting values absorbed from previous generations.
Non-genetic acquisition: Culture is not inherited through biological reproduction, gene pools, or physical makeup. Cultural differences across populations (such as Africans, East Asians, Europeans, and Native Americans) do not stem from biological or genetic differences.
Psychic Unity of Man: A 19th-century anthropological doctrine stating that despite emotional or intellectual variations among individuals, all human populations possess equivalent capacities for culture and can acquire any cultural tradition regardless of physical appearance or genetic background.
Enculturation unifies group members through shared developmental experiences that shape psychological processes.
Core Characteristic 2: Culture is Shared:
A collective phenomenon attributed to individuals as group members, linking them through shared beliefs, values, memories, and expectations.
Distinguishes one social group from another based on the presence or absence of shared psychological phenomena.
Intra-cultural Variation: Cultural groups are non-homogeneous. Members display individual differences in adherence, conformity, and internalization of cultural norms.
Cultural Consensus Theory (Romney, Weller, & Batchelder, 1986):
Asserts that cultural knowledge is shared and systematically distributed across a group.
Individual agreement with the cultural consensus (the average response across a group) defines an individual's level of cultural competency or expertise.
Core Characteristic 3: Culture is Both Material and Symbolic:
Consists of material and symbolic tools accumulated over time, transmitted via social processes, and providing developmental resources (Cole, 2005; Rogoff et al., 2007; Valsiner & Rosa, 2007).
Represents the present residue of historical human activity transforming nature to suit human ends.
Human tool use drastically exceeds nonhuman primates in complexity, scope, and environmental modification (Savage-Rumbaugh, Toth, & Schick, 2007).
Material Tools: Physical objects (abacuses, calculators, cell phones, iPads) and observable behavioral patterns, including family routines (bedtime procedures, dinner organization) and social practices (educational structures, birthday celebrations).
Symbolic Tools: Abstract knowledge, belief systems, values, language, mathematics, gender expectations, and religious traditions.
Case Example of Kojima (Japan):
Material Environment: Lives in a house with paper shoji screens; swaddled as an infant; sleeps on a mat with parents rather than a crib; sits on family members' laps and uses adult eating utensils without high chairs or sippy cups; carried on his mother's back during daily work without electronic baby monitors (Jenkins, 1998; Enfield & Levinson, 2006).
Symbolic Environment: Learns mathematics as a symbolic system for building or business accounting; learns gender-coded behavioral expectations; internalizes Shinto spiritual beliefs regarding sacred nature, family honor, and physical cleanliness as spiritual purity.
Inextricable Interconnection: Bathing in a river several times a week is simultaneously an observable physical routine (material culture) and an expression of spiritual purification (symbolic culture).
Mediation: The process through which cultural tools organize children's activities and environmental interactions. Central to debates regarding violent video games, media influence on body image, and educational values.
Core Characteristic 4: Culture is Integrated:
Cultures form structured, integrated, and patterned systems. Transmission involves structuring children's attitudes, motivations, values, perceptions, and beliefs to function in society.
Custom Complex (Whiting & Child, 1953, p. 27; Shweder et al., 2006): Consists of a typical practice in a culture and the cultural beliefs that provide the basis for that practice.
Analysis of Dating as a Custom Complex:
Practice is non-universal: Common in the United States, less common in Europe, historically discouraged in many non-Western cultures, and structurally distinct from pre-20th-century adult-monitored courtship (Bailey, 1989; Schlegel, 2000, 2010; Schlegel & Hewlett, 2011).
Underlying Cultural Beliefs:
Adolescents and emerging adults should possess substantial independent leisure time (versus family-centered leisure).
Young people hold the right to independently select intimate partners (versus parental selection).
Premarital sexual experimentation is healthy and acceptable (versus post-marital exclusivity).
Core Characteristic 5: Culture is Adaptive (and Maladaptive):
Primary mechanism for human environmental adaptation, survival, and reproduction.
While nonhuman animals adapt primarily via slow biological evolution (developing physical adaptations like canine teeth), humans utilize rapidly adaptable cultural tools (knives, firearms) to survive across extreme environments (deserts, polar regions, space).
Maladaptive Features: Cultural tools and patterns can produce dysfunctional by-products (e.g., air conditioning and automobiles yielding pollution, ozone depletion, and global warming). Unchecked maladaptive patterns lead to population extinction or forced cultural transformation.
Relativity of Adaptability: Skills critical for success in one culture (e.g., algebra, word analogies, reading comprehension in the US) hold minimal adaptive value in other settings (e.g., Nuer pastoral herdsmen in Sudan).
Temporal Variability: Cultural innovations (e.g., firearms and snowmobiles among traditional Inuit hunters) may initially enhance survival through efficient caribou hunting, but become maladaptive across generations by depleting the primary food supply.
Core Characteristic 6: Culture is a Moving Target:
Culture is dynamic and constantly changing. Technological innovations can spread within a single generation, causing rapid shifts (Matsumoto, 2002).
High intra-cultural variability and lower consensus occur during periods of rapid transition.
Systemic integration dictates that economic changes drive broader societal changes (e.g., 1950s American women preparing primarily for domestic careers versus contemporary college women expecting paid careers).
Core Characteristic 7: Culture is a Process:
Grounded in cultural psychology (Markus & Hamedani, 2007, 2019), which views mind and culture as non-separable.
Mutual Constitution (Shweder, 1990, p. 24): Mind and culture "make each other up" in a continuous reciprocal relationship. Individuals are changed by culture, while simultaneously generating and modifying culture.
Intersubjectivity and shared meanings generate everyday defining practices (Bruner, 1993, p. 516; Scribner & Cole, 1981; Jahoda, 1992). Culture functions as an internal process ("what I do" as a verb).
Distinguishing Culture from Related Concepts
Culture is Not Race:
Race refers to physical or biological characteristics, whereas culture consists of learned behaviors and shared meanings.
Categorization models vary widely, ranging from 3 primary races to 37 historical classifications (Yee et al., 1993). Physical anthropologists frequently rely on population gene frequencies, leading many scholars to view traditional racial distinctions as arbitrary or social constructions (Lewontin, Rose, & Kamin, 1984; Zuckerman, 1990; Betancourt & Lopez, 1993).
Culture provides the psychological meaning and context attributed to racial constructs.
Culture is Not Ethnicity:
Ethnic groups share ancestral heritage, national origin, religion, or language (Whitfield & McClearn, 2005).
Ethnicity is a social construction (nurture). Shared ethnicity does not guarantee shared culture (e.g., individuals of Irish heritage in Ireland, Australia, and North America differ culturally; British culture encompasses multiple ethnic groups).
Ethnic identification becomes heightened in proximity to other groups (e.g., identifying as Sicilian vs. Italian, South Korean vs. East Asian, or specific African ethnic groups vs. broad regional labels).
Culture is Not Nationality:
Equating nation-states with uniform cultures (Hofstede, 1980) overlooks internal diversity.
Nations contain distinct majority and minority subcultures coexisting within shared political borders.
Culture is Not Personality:
Culture consists of shared group-level attributes, whereas personality refers to individual-level trait differences across a lifespan.
Culture is Not Just What "Other People" Do:
Members of majority cultures often harbor the ethnocentric assumption that they lack culture or accents. All human practices—including those of researchers, journalists, midwives, and shamans—are cultural products.
Culture is Not Just Context:
Culture is not a static backdrop or environmental variable; it is inextricably woven into human psychological functioning.
Categorizing Culture and Cultural Distinctions
Individualism and Collectivism:
Formulated by Triandis (1989) as a primary categorization framework.
Individualism: Behavior driven by concern for oneself and immediate family/primary group.
Collectivism: Behavior driven by group concern, tradition, and shared values.
Functions across "strong ties" (family, close friends) and "weak ties" (acquaintances; Granovetter, 1973).
Conflict Resolution: Collectivist cultures favor harmony-enhancing strategies; individualist cultures favor competitive strategies.
Empirical findings show higher individualism in Western nations and higher collectivism in Eastern nations (Hofstede, 1980 survey of IBM employees across 40 countries; Marshall, 2008; Triandis, 1995).
Independent vs. Interdependent View of the Self:
Formulated by Markus & Kitayama (1991):
Independent Self: Autonomous, self-contained entity endowed with unique dispositions (predominant in North America and Western Europe).
Interdependent Self: Embedded within social networks including family and co-workers (predominant in Asia, Africa, and Latin America).
Empirical Studies on the Self:
Sentence Completion Task (Trafimow et al., 1991): North American students filled "I am…" prompts with personal traits ("I am shy"); Chinese students referenced group affiliations ("I am a college student"). Similar findings observed comparing Australians and Malaysians (Bochner, 1994).
Self-Effacement vs. Credit: North Americans overestimate personal contributions, take credit for success, and externalize blame; collectivistic individuals underestimate personal roles and present in modest, self-effacing terms (Akimoto & Sanbonmatsu, 1999; Heine et al., 2000).
Preference for Uniqueness vs. Conformity:
Figure Preference Study (Kim & Markus, 1999): American participants preferred abstract subfigures that stood out as unique; Korean participants preferred subfigures that fit into the group pattern.
Pen Choice Study (Kim & Markus, 1999): Airport pedestrians offered a gift pen from a set containing 3-4 common colors and 1-2 unique colors. 74% of Americans chose unique pens; 76% of East Asians chose common pens.
Simpatico in Latino Culture: Latino cultures value simpatico (expressive charm, graciousness, hospitality; Holloway et al., 2009). On self-description tasks, Latino participants used significantly more simpatico-related terms (likable, friendly, sympathetic, amiable, gracious) than White Americans.
Independent Self | Interdependent Self |
|---|---|
Emotional detachment from group. | Self is defined in terms of group. |
Personal goals have primacy over group goals. | Personal goals relate to group goals. |
Behavior regulated by attitudes and by analysis of cost and benefits to self. | Behavior regulated by group norms and analysis of costs and benefits to group. |
Confrontation considered OK. | Harmony within the group considered important. |
Dialecticism and Cultural Thinking Styles:
Dialecticism: Eastern system of thought accepting contradictory traits within a person through compromise (Peng & Nisbett, 1999; e.g., "Beware of your friends, not your enemies").
Language Priming Study (Trafimow et al., 1997): Bilingual Hong Kong students tested in English cited personal traits, whereas those tested in Chinese cited group affiliations.
Situational Traits Study (English & Chen, 2007): European Americans maintained stable self-descriptions across settings (classroom, cafeteria, gym); Asian Americans displayed dialectical, context-dependent self-concepts.
Tight vs. Loose Cultures:
Conceptualized by Pelto (1968), Gelfand et al. (2006, 2011, 2018), Uz (2015), and Geeraert et al. (2019).
Tight Cultures: Clear, pervasive social norms with strict sanctioning and low tolerance for deviance. Individuals face higher accountability and exhibit lower behavioral variation. Associated with rural, conservative, and less creative contexts.
Loose Cultures: Weak, ambiguous social norms with high tolerance for deviance, encouraging novel behaviors.
Qualifications and Critiques of Cultural Distinctions:
Continuum vs. Dichotomy: Cultural distinctions are non-binary theoretical prototypes operating along a continuum rather than mutually exclusive categories (Putnam, 2002).
Principle of Parsimony: Cultural distinctions adhere to parsimony by providing simple, non-simplistic theoretical frameworks.
Blended Systems: Cultures are not pure types; Western cultures contain collectivist elements, and Eastern cultures contain individualist elements, heightened by globalization (Killen & Wainryb, 2000; Matsumoto, 2002; Tamis-LeMonda et al., 2008; Chang, 2008; Naito & Gielen, 2003).
Intra-cultural Variations: Significant individual differences exist within every cultural group (Killen & Wainryb, 1998).
Intra-individual Variations: Individuals apply individualist or collectivist orientations flexibly across different settings (e.g., individualistic at work/school, collectivist at home; Smetana, 1993).
Variation Within Clusters: Distinct cultural groups within the same overall cluster vary significantly (e.g., differences in shyness expressions between Chinese and Canadian children; Chen, 2011).
Key Terms and Definitions
Operationalization: The way researchers conceptually define a variable or construct (like culture) in their study.
Intra-cultural variation: Differences among the members of the group in terms of the degree to which individuals harbor their culture.
Cross-cultural variation: Differences between different cultural groups.
Cultural consensus: Cultural knowledge regarding a specific domain is shared and systematically distributed.
Cultural competency: The degree to which an individual agrees or overlaps with the culturally correct answer (i.e., consensus).
The psychic unity of man: 19th-century anthropological doctrine stating that, although individuals differ in their emotional and intellectual tendencies and capacities, all human populations have equivalent capacities for culture.
Mediation: The process through which tools organize people's activities and ways of relating to their environments.
Independent variable: The condition that is controlled by the researcher.
Dependent variable: The aspect of human activity that is studied and expected to change under the influence of an independent variable.
Cultural psychology: Approach that focuses on how one becomes and exists as a cultural being, emphasizing that the cultural and the psychological cannot be separated.
Mutual constitution: A concept of cultural psychology that asserts a reciprocal relation between individual and culture: They both "make each other up."
Cultural beliefs: The predominant beliefs in a culture about right and wrong, what is most important in life, and how life should be lived. May also include beliefs about where and how life originated and what happens after death.
Custom complex: Consists of a typical practice in a culture and the cultural beliefs that provide the basis for that practice.
Individualism: Complex behavior based on concern for oneself and one's immediate family or primary group as opposed to concern for other groups to which one belongs.
Collectivism: Behavior based on concerns for other people, traditions, and values they share together.
Cultural distinctions: Distinctions that help us conceptualize cultural aspects of human life in terms of contrasting characteristics.
Independent view of the self: The self is viewed as an entity that is distinct, autonomous, self-contained, and endowed with unique dispositions.
Interdependent view of the self: Here, the self is part of a larger social network that includes one's family, co-workers, and others with whom one is socially connected.
Principle of parsimony: A methodological principle in science commending a bias toward simplicity in the construction of theories.
Review and Discussion Questions
Review Questions:
How does the garden metaphor relate to various characteristics of culture (i.e., culture is adaptive, integrated, learned, etc.)?
What definition of culture is suitable for developmental psychology?
How does dating exemplify the idea of the custom complex?
What do you understand by the independent and interdependent self, and how are these constructs related to culture?
How are individualism and collectivism connected to the world's cultures?
List and explain 4 arguments against the view that concepts like collectivism/individualism are "too simplistic."
Compare and contrast:
Culture as an independent variable vs. culture as a process.
Cultural vs. cross-cultural psychology.
Individualism vs. collectivism.
Independent self vs. interdependent self.
Tight vs. loose cultures.
Discussion Questions:
Give an example of a custom complex you have experienced in your own culture. Describe how the customary behavior or practice reflects cultural beliefs.
Think about the cultural distinctions explained in this chapter. How do they apply to describe your cultural group and yourself?