Transcript Welcome to PSY 381 Psychology of Culture

Dr. Jill Norvilitis
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Journey’s End Refugee Services
Financial literacy
6 sessions with newly arrived families
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About 20 hours
Teams of three students
Orientation next week
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Smiling to express happiness
Kissing
Temperament
Anorexia nervosa
Depression
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1) Build a body of knowledge about people
2) Apply this knowledge to intervene in
people’s lives
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How do we get this knowledge?
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Not from a single study
Most research has been done with American college
students
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Does our knowledge about people hold up in
another culture?
Cultures is the independent variable
Look for universals and culture-specific
information.
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Diverse influences
Interests in human diversity began to emerge in the 15th
century
Philosophers of the 17th and 18th century began to debate the
nature of human beings
By end of 19th, early 20th cent—anthropologists,
psychologists, and other social scientists began to speculate
on cc human behavior
Slowly things began to get empirical
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Galton—cc work on intelligence
William Rivers—New Guinea
Richard Thurnwald—Melanesia—cognitive functions
C-c psych really came into its own in 1960s
Until recently, though, people viewed CC Psych as
something only a few esoteric psychologists did
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APA Division Memberships
2. Experimental: 925
6. Behavioral Neuroscience: 538
7. Developmental: 1,142
20. Adult Dev. and Aging: 1,132
50. Addictions: 993
53. International: 714
PsycInfo: hits for "cross-cultural"
1980: 289/28,737=.0097
1990: 839/58,451=.014
2000: 1545/70,567=.021
2010: 2931/161,743=.018
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Added as major subject heading in PsycInfo in 1997
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Critical and comparative study of cultural
effects on human psychology
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At least two cultural groups
Not the same as cultural psychology—seeks to
discover links between a culture and the psychology
of individuals living in that culture
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Race—a group of people distinguished by
certain similar and genetically transmitted
physical characteristics
Ethnicity—a group of people with a shared
cultural heritage
Nation— a group of people who have a
common geographical origin, history, and
language and are defined as a unified political
entity
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Kroeber & Kluckholn (1952)—6 categories in
which culture is discussed
Descriptive
 Historical
 Normative
 Psychological
 Structural
 Genetic
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Different aspects of these will be emphasized
by people in different cultures
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General characteristics
Food and clothing
Housing and technology
Economy and transportation
Individual and family activities
Community and government
Welfare, religion, and science
Sex and the life cycle
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Tylor (1865) culture—all capabilities and habits
learned as members of a society
Linton (1936)—social heredity
A set of attitudes, behaviors, and symbols
shared by a large group of people and usually
communicated from one generation to another
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Scientific
Popular or folk
Ideological
Legal
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The environment—available natural resources
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If few, must work together and with others
If many, less need for teamwork
Population density—higher may require
greater social order
Affluence—related to individualism and
emotionality
Technology
Climate—food, clothes, health, housing
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Dimensions along which cultures vary
Typologies
Hsu, 1972—dominant family role
Hall—high vs. low context communication
Triandis—social distance
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Murdock and Provost
Writing and records
Fixity of residence
Agriculture
Urbanization
Technological specialization
Land transport
Money
Density of population
Level of political integration
Social stratification
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Traditional
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Rooted in traditions, rules, symbols, and principles
established predominantly in the past.
Tends to be more conservative and intolerant of
innovations.
Nontraditional
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New principles, ideas, and practices; often science
and technology based.
Individuals’ choices are not strongly restricted to the
social prescriptions.
Embrace individualism. Good and evil is relative.
Often associated with economic and social change.
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Factors leading to tightness—
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Cultural homogeneity
Isolation from other cultural influences
Population density
Where there is need for coordinated action
Factors leading to looseness
Heterogeneity
 Much space between people
 Strong influences from other cultures
 Many solitary occupations
 Warmer climates favor looseness
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Began in 1960s
Culture’s Consequences
Cultures and Organizations
“Cultural atlas”—helps person from X position
self around Y
Over 50 countries
4 dimensions emerged, then 5th
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Power distance—how we deal with the inequality
between people that is inevitable—are we highly
stratified or not?
Lower PD—preference for
consultation/interdependence
High PD—preference for dependence or
counterdependence
Scores are largely for middle class
High PD at work—wide salary range between top and
bottom at work, subordinates expect to be told what to
do
Low PD at work—ideal boss is a resourceful democrat,
privileges and status are frowned upon
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Power of the group vs. the power of the
individual; relatively independent form PD
Collectivist—people are born into extended
families or other ingroups which continue to
protect them in exchange for loyalty
Individualist—everyone grows up to look after
him/herself and his/her immediate family only
We vs. I
Collectivist—relationships over task
Individualist—task prevails over relationship
Collectivist—harmony and consensus;
Individualist—self-actualization is the goal
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Degree to which culture holds to traditional
gender roles
Differences by gender in scores on this dimension
Feminine cultures
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More leveling
More likely in colder climates
Dominant values—caring for each other and
preservation; people and warm relationships
Masculine cultures
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Dominant values—material success and progress; money
and things are important; men should be tough and
assertive, women should be tender and take care of
relationships;
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Degree to which members of a society feel
uncomfortable with uncertainty and ambiguity
Importance of punctuality—clocks
Weak UA—Low stress, uncertainty is a normal
feature of life and each day is accepted as it
comes; no more rules than necessary
Strong UA—Uncertainty inherent in life is felt
as a continuous threat which must be fought;
high stress; lots of rules
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Bond designed questionnaire with nonWestern bias and 10 basic Chinese values—did
no locate uncertainty avoidance, but did id this.
Long term vs short term orientation
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Basic question of how do we get social order
Perceived potential to explain economic
development
Allocentrism
Idiocentrism
Emotions and IC
Fundamental Attribution Error
Self-Serving Bias/False Uniqueness Effect
Social loafing vs. social striving
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Considerations in hypothesis testing
1) Choice of theory and hypothesis—begin with a
question
2) Design the methodology
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3) Decisions about analyzing data and reporting
findings
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Pick a research paradigm
Participants
Selection of variables
Environment, setting, and procedures
Choice of statistics
Interpretation of results
4) Ethics
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Equivalence
Hypothesis generation
Design issues
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Comparativist
Application-oriented
Explanatory
Ecological or cultural-level
Sampling adequacy
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SES
Literacy
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Equivalence of language
Test translation
Words that seem straightforward may not be.
 Need to avoid words like ‘it’ and ‘former’ or ‘latter’
 Some phrases have no equivalent in some languages
 Avoid metaphors like ‘foot in mouth’ and vague
words like ‘frequently’
 Even when words are the same, strength may differ
 Back translation
 Give the same scale to bilinguals
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Response sets
Cultural influences on the interpretations of
findings
Can’t make causal statements if you didn’t test
 Can’t assume something is related to, say, indivcollect if you didn’t assess IC
 Researcher bias/value judgments
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1) Don’t compare—the conservative choice
2) Reduce the nonequivalence
3) Interpret the nonequivalence
4) Ignore it—a mistake that many make
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Absolutist
Relativist
Emic (between) and Etic (within)
Most researchers combine these.
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Ask someone who is knowledgeable about the cultures
to collaborate with you
Get a full demographic assessment of all your subjects
Search for measures that have psychometric reliability
and validity for all subjects
Run a pilot study
Develop a culture-free analysis plan that involves raw
scores as well as a standardized ones
Have people of different culture backgrounds check
your interpretations of the data
In designing your study and interpreting its results,
give some thought to what kinds of underlying
psychological dimensions of culture produced or
should produce differences
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Draw a map of the world
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Whittaker and Whittaker, 1972
Small group discussion of questions
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Making judgments about other ethnic, national, or
cultural groups and events based on the observer’s
own ethnic, national, or cultural group’s outlook.
Have a tendency to view the outgroup as inferior.
Many say we need to rid ourselves of
ethnocentrism.
Others say it is a natural psychological process.
Alternative view: cultural relativism—using one’s
own country’s standards to judge that culture
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Ingrained rules from childhood
Expect these rules to be widely shared
Become annoyed, frustrated, angry when others
don’t share these
 Expect people of other cultures to act like we do
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Flexible ethnocentrism vs. Inflexible
ethnocentrism
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Triandis, 1994
What goes on in our culture is seen as natural and
correct. What goes on in other cultures is
unnatural and incorrect.
We perceive our ingroup customs as universally
valid.
We unquestionable think that ingroup norms,
rules, and values are correct
We believe that it is natural to help and cooperate
with members of our ingroup, to favor our
ingroup, to feel proud of our ingroup, and to be
hostile/distrustful of outgroups
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Contact reduces prejudice when
Contact is between groups that are roughly = in
social, economic, or task-related status
 People in authority and or the general social climate
are in favor of and promote the contact
 The contact is intimate and informal enough to allow
participants to get to know each other as individuals
 The contact is pleasant and rewarding
 The contact involves cooperation and
interdependence
 Superordinate goals are more important than
individual goals
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Contact increases prejudice when
Contact reinforces stereotypes
 Contact produces competition between groups
 Contact emphasizes boundaries between groups
 Contact is unpleasant, involuntary, frustrating or
tense
 Contact is between people of unequal status
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Evaluative bias of language
Differentiating dichotomous variables and
continuous variables
Similarity-uniqueness paradox
The Barnum effect
The assimilation bias
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Remember to accommodate
Representativeness bias
The availability bias
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Political Difficulties in Doing Research in this
Area
People assume that biology causes the psychology
 Improper reliance on race as a measure of culture
 Biases in interpretation can be used for
personal/political agendas
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Sensation—process by which receptors are
stimulated and transmit their information to
higher brain centers.
Absolute threshold
 Difference threshold
 Sensory adaptation
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Perception—process that organizes various
sensations into meaningful patterns
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Perceptual expectations that make certain
interpretations more likely to occurmakes
perception fast and efficient
Varies by culture
Personal experiences shape this
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Related to education and socialization
Picture scanning
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Linked to reading and writing patterns
Also draw circles in the way you write
Three dimensions in two
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Three universal dimensions
Hue
 Brightness
 Saturation
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Is color universal?
Language-related theories of color perception
 Emphasize the role of language in the identification and
labeling of colors in every language
 Even though the majority of healthy individuals can
identify the same colors, some languages lack certain
words for particular colors
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 Red always has a separate word, but green and blue are
sometimes not distinguished linguistically
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Adams and Osgood, 1973—looked at 23 cultures
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Red—salient and active
Black and gray—bad
White, blue, green—good
Yellow, white, gray—passive
Around the world, people view white with more + feelings
than black
Roberson et al., 2004
Followed English (11 basic terms) and Himba (5 basic terms) from
Namibia 3 and 4 yo longitudinally
 Looked at language and color.
 Acquired color terms the same way.
 Children in both cultures didn’t acquire terms in any particular
order, in contrast to the widely held idea that primary colors +
green are learned first
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Carpentered world hypothesis
Front-horizontal foreshortening
Symbolizing three dimensions in two
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All cultures respond to the same 4 basic tastes—
sweet, salty, sour, bitter
Fifth taste—umami—savoriness
The ability to taste varies only slightly by culture
Preference for salty and sweet is universal. All
cultures avoid spoiled or rotten foods
A supertaster is a person whose sense of taste is
significantly sharper than average. Women are
more likely to be supertasters, as are Asians,
Africans, and South Americans.
Regions closer to the equator prefer spicier foods
Taboo foods vary
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Pressure, temperature, pain
Lots of individual factors affect it
Anxiety can increase pain, anger can decrease
it, pride can cause people to hide it
Cultural norms—labor pain is lower in cultures
where childbirth is not considered to be
defiling and where little help and comfort is
offered
Halonen and Santrock (1995)—lower access to
health care may create increased threshold for
pain
Categorization
 On basis of similarities
 Some appear to be universal
 Tend to categorize on the best examples of basic
forms
 But, among cultures, differences may occur in
The elaboration of language codes for the categories
Category boundaries
The organization of categories in superordinated
structures
 The treatment of interprototype stimuli
 The rules for the use of categories (Mesquita, Frijda,
Scherer, 1997)
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Within Euro-Am cultures, we use prototypes
How people sort—
People pick categories by shared attributes
Young kids—sort by striking, superficial properties like
color or number
 Sorting by form is slightly more advanced
 Older kids—shared function or taxonomic label
 This development appears to be related to education
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Yupno of Papua New Guinea
Illiterate adults sorted by form, but educated sorted by
color (Wassman & Dagen, 1994)
 The highest, most abstract level is that everything is either
hot or cold
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Early work—Bartlett, 1932
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Ross and Milson, 1970
Oral traditions: better memories
But memory is not better overall.
Cole and colleagues—Kpelle of Liberia did not perform
better on lists of words than Americans.
 Kpelle didn’t use categories that were logical (but
imposed by researchers) or learn by rote (serial position
effect, primacy, recency)
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Overall—some things like STM and rates of
forgetting seem universal
But mnemonics, strategies, structure vary and
formal education play a role
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Drawing inferences and predicting future events based on analysis of
past events
Western value to behave scientifically is to see the world as it really is
But other modes of thought include intuition and mysticism
Inferential reasoning
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Verbal logical reasoning—
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Using a new combination of previously learned elements
To study this, have to create new situations
 Kpelle and US children
Syllogisms—In the north, were there is snow all year, the bears are white. Novaya
Zemyla is in the far north. What color are the bears?
 This formal reasoning is a specific school-related task
Creativity
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CC, people think of divergent thinking, not convergent thinking
Also, hard work, risk taking, tolerance for ambiguity and disorder
But, how creativity is fostered varies
 In high uncertainty avoidance, people prefer creative people to work through
organizational structures
 High power distance, get permission from authority
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Westerners define punctuality using precise measures of time—1 min, 1
hr, etc
Prior to information revolution, Arabs used only 3 sets of time—no time
at all, now (which varied), and forever (too long)—Hall, 1959
Akbar (1991)—In West, time is a commodity to be bought and sold, but
not in Africa—time is very elastic
What is late?
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How long to walk 100 ft down a street at business time as a sign of time
pressure
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Asked US and Brazilian students what is late for lunch—
Japan—20.7 sec
England—21.6
US—22.6
Indonesia—27.2
Hamermesh (2003)—US, Germany, Australia, Canada, South Korea—as
wealth increases, people become more dissatisfied with their lack of time
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The amount of sleep that each of us needs is
physiologically determined
In each culture, some sleep for 5-6 hours, some 910 hours
Dream
Monophasic—cultures that value cognitive experiences
that take place only during waking hours—more
materialistic
 Polyphasic—value dreams and treat them as part of
reality—more spiritual view
 Manifest content—actual content—varies, though falling,
eating, swimming, death, exams—are common
 Latent content—meaning
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Phenomena that are different from normal waking consciousness and
include mystic experiences
But ASC are widely reported around the globe
Trance—sleeplike state marked by reduced sensitivity to stimuli, loss or
alteration of knowledge, automatic motor activity
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Beliefs about possession
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Worldwide sample—experienced in 90% of countries—Bourguignon, 1994
Need to examine from observer’s standpoint, victim’s view, and community’s view
Associated with stress due to job dissatisfaction, work conflicts, economic hardship
May be associated with mental illness
Also a cultural belief
Meditation
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Quiet and relaxed state of tranquility in which person achieves integration of
thoughts, perceptions, and attitudes
Usually obtained through a special principle or belief
Therapeutic—reduces stress