Ch. 3

Worldview Determination:
- Culture determines how human beings view, interpret, and interact with the surrounding world.
Cultural Universality vs. Particularity:
- Universal Aspects: Some aspects and core elements of culture are universal across all human societies.
- Non-Universal Aspects: Many aspects of culture are not universal and vary substantially between societies.
Intergroup and Intercultural Relations:
- How individuals view their own culture in relation to others directly affects and governs their interactions with people from other cultures.
Cultural Dynamics and Internal Diversity:
- Culture changes continuously over time.
- Culture varies significantly even within larger, overarching cultural groups.

Broad Definition of Culture:
- Intangible Dimensions: Encompasses beliefs, thoughts, expectations, ideas, and attitudes.
- Tangible Dimensions: Encompasses physical objects, buildings, and infrastructure.
Material Culture:
- Definition: Physical objects or belongings created, owned, and used by members of a specific group.
- Specific Examples: Clothing, hairstyles, and school buildings.
Non-Material Culture:
- Definition: The intangible ideas, attitudes, and beliefs held by a society.
- Interrelationship: Non-material culture often represents and reflects material culture.

Cultural Values:
- Definition: The standards used by a culture for discerning goodness, justice, desirability, and beauty.
- Embeddedness and Transmission: Deeply embedded within social life, serving as an essential mechanism for transmitting and teaching cultural beliefs across generations.
- Social Function: Shapes society by suggesting what is good versus bad, sought versus avoided, and beautiful versus ugly.
- Ideal Culture vs. Real Culture:
- Ideal Culture: Portrays the standards, values, and goals that society would like to embrace and live up to.
- Real Culture: Represents the way society actually is, based on what occurs, exists, and is practiced in reality, which differs from ideal culture.
- Social Enforcement Mechanisms: Values are enacted and enforced through rewards, sanctions (permissions), and punishments.
- Fluidity: Values are dynamic rather than static and undergo transformation over time.
Cultural Beliefs:
- Definition: Specific tenets and convictions that individuals within a society hold to be true.

Fundamentals of Social Norms:
- Definition: Invisible rules for conduct that instruct individuals on how to behave according to what society defines as right, good, and important.
- Behavioral Conformity: The vast majority of people follow social norms in daily life.
Categorization of Norms:
- Formal Norms: Established, written, and explicitly agreed-upon rules or laws.
- Informal Norms: Casual behaviors that people generally conform to in everyday interaction, functioning much like behavioral scripts.
Empirical Study of Informal Norms:
- Breaching Experiments: Sociological techniques involving the intentional violation of informal social norms to reveal implicit social expectations and demonstrate the social discomfort experienced when norms are breached.

Mores:
- Definition: A specific subset of norms that directly embody the core moral views, principles, and ethics of a group.
- Severity of Violation: Violating mores can have serious social consequences because they threaten moral principles.
- Mechanisms of Social Enforcement: Guarded by strong public sentiment; violations result in severe reactions such as public shame, shunning, and formal or informal banning.
Folkways:
- Definition: Norms governing everyday behavior that lack deep moral underpinnings.
- Cultural Function: Direct appropriate behavior, routine etiquette, and personal expression within a culture.
- Key Characteristics:
- Vary widely from one culture to another.
- Subject to continuous societal change.
- Frequently consist of mannerisms and habits that individuals take for granted until confronted with cultural differences.

Critical Reflection Prompts:
- Childhood Folkways: Analyzing one's native environment to identify everyday folkways that were taken for granted during childhood.
- Experience of Culture Shock: Examining personal travel to other countries and the experience of "culture shock"—the disorientation felt when encountering distinct and contrasting folkways of different cultures.

Cultural Symbols:
- Definition: Gestures, signs, physical objects, signals, and words that help people make sense of their world and convey shared, recognizable meanings across a society.
- Material and Non-Material Synthesis: Tangible objects frequently represent abstract non-material concepts and convey significant cultural meaning.