Welcome to PSY 381 Psychology of Culture

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Welcome to PSY 381 Psychology of Culture

• Dr. Jill Norvilitis

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Volunteer Service Learning

• Journeys End Refugee Services
• Financial literacy
• 6 sessions with newly arrived families
• About 20 hours
• Teams of three students
• Orientation next week

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Are the following universal?

• Smiling to express happiness
• Kissing
• Temperament
• Anorexia nervosa
• Depression

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Goals of Psychology

• 1) Build a body of knowledge about people
• 2) Apply this knowledge to intervene in peoples
  lives
•  
• How do we get this knowledge?
• Not from a single study
• Most research has been done with American college
  students

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Cross-Cultural Psychology

• 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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Brief History of the Field

• 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 centanthropologists,
  psychologists, and other social scientists began
  to speculate on cc human behavior
• Slowly things began to get empirical
• Galtoncc work on intelligence
• William RiversNew Guinea
• Richard ThurnwaldMelanesiacognitive 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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C-C Psych Today

• 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
• Added as major subject heading in PsycInfo in
  1997

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What is cross-cultural psychology?

• Critical and comparative study of cultural
  effects on human psychology
• At least two cultural groups
• Not the same as cultural psychologyseeks to
  discover links between a culture and the
  psychology of individuals living in that culture

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Small groups Define culture
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What culture is not

• Racea group of people distinguished by certain
  similar and genetically transmitted physical
  characteristics
• Ethnicitya 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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Definitions of Culture

• Kroeber Kluckholn (1952)6 categories in which
  culture is discussed
• Descriptive
• Historical
• Normative
• Psychological
• Structural
• Genetic
• Different aspects of these will be emphasized by
  people in different cultures

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Aspects of Life Touched by Culture

• 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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Definitions of Culture

• Tylor (1865) cultureall 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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Types of Knowledge

• Scientific
• Popular or folk
• Ideological
• Legal

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Factors that Affect Culture

• The environmentavailable natural resources
• If few, must work together and with others
• If many, less need for teamwork
• Population densityhigher may require greater
  social order
• Affluencerelated to individualism and
  emotionality
• Technology
• Climatefood, clothes, health, housing

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Cultural Syndromes

• Dimensions along which cultures vary
• Typologies
• Hsu, 1972dominant family role
• Hallhigh vs. low context communication
• Triandissocial distance

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Cultural Complexity

• 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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Modernity

• Traditional
• Rooted in traditions, rules, symbols, and
  principles established predominantly in the past.
  
• Tends to be more conservative and intolerant of
  innovations.
• Nontraditional
• 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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Tight/Loose

• Factors leading to tightness
• 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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Geert Hofstede

• Began in 1960s
• Cultures Consequences  
• Cultures and Organizations
• Cultural atlashelps person from X position
  self around Y
• Over 50 countries
• 4 dimensions emerged, then 5th

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Power Distance

• Power distancehow we deal with the inequality
  between people that is inevitableare we highly
  stratified or not?
• Lower PDpreference for consultation/interdependen
  ce
• High PDpreference for dependence or
  counterdependence
• Scores are largely for middle class
• High PD at workwide salary range between top and
  bottom at work, subordinates expect to be told
  what to do
• Low PD at workideal boss is a resourceful
  democrat, privileges and status are frowned upon

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Individualism/Collectivism

• Power of the group vs. the power of the
  individual relatively independent form PD
• Collectivistpeople are born into extended
  families or other ingroups which continue to
  protect them in exchange for loyalty
• Individualisteveryone grows up to look after
  him/herself and his/her immediate family only
• We vs. I
• Collectivistrelationships over task
• Individualisttask prevails over relationship
• Collectivistharmony and consensus
• Individualistself-actualization is the goal

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Masculinity/Femininity

• Degree to which culture holds to traditional
  gender roles
• Differences by gender in scores on this dimension
• Feminine cultures
• More leveling
• More likely in colder climates
• Dominant valuescaring for each other and
  preservation people and warm relationships
• Masculine cultures
• Dominant valuesmaterial 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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Uncertainty Avoidance

• Degree to which members of a society feel
  uncomfortable with uncertainty and ambiguity
• Importance of punctualityclocks
• Weak UALow stress, uncertainty is a normal
  feature of life and each day is accepted as it
  comes no more rules than necessary
• Strong UAUncertainty inherent in life is felt as
  a continuous threat which must be fought high
  stress lots of rules

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Confucian Dynamism

• Bond designed questionnaire with non-Western bias
  and 10 basic Chinese valuesdid no locate
  uncertainty avoidance, but did id this.
• Long term vs short term orientation

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More on Individualism/Collectivism

• 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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Evaluating Cross-Cultural Research

• Considerations in hypothesis testing
• 1) Choice of theory and hypothesisbegin with a
  question
• 2) Design the methodology
• Pick a research paradigm
• Participants
• Selection of variables
• Environment, setting, and procedures
• 3) Decisions about analyzing data and reporting
  findings
• Choice of statistics
• Interpretation of results
• 4) Ethics

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Preparing for a Cross-Cultural Study

• Equivalence
• Hypothesis generation
• Design issues
• Comparativist
• Application-oriented
• Explanatory
• Ecological or cultural-level
• Sampling adequacy
• SES
• Literacy

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Definitions of Variables

• 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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Other Issues

• Response sets
• Cultural influences on the interpretations of
  findings
• Cant make causal statements if you didnt test
• Cant assume something is related to, say,
  indiv-collect if you didnt assess IC
• Researcher bias/value judgments

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What If We Havent Achieved Equivalence?

• 1) Dont comparethe conservative choice
• 2) Reduce the nonequivalence
• 3) Interpret the nonequivalence
• 4) Ignore ita mistake that many make

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Two Basic Positions

• Absolutist
• Relativist
• Emic (between) and Etic (within)
• Most researchers combine these.

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Tips for Doing Your Own CC Research

• 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
• Whittaker and Whittaker, 1972
• Small group discussion of questions

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Ethnocentrism

• Making judgments about other ethnic, national, or
  cultural groups and events based on the
  observers own ethnic, national, or cultural
  groups 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 relativismusing
  ones own countrys standards to judge that
  culture

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From Where Does Ethnocentrism Come?

• Ingrained rules from childhood
• Expect these rules to be widely shared
• Become annoyed, frustrated, angry when others
  dont share these
• Expect people of other cultures to act like we do
• Flexible ethnocentrism vs. Inflexible
  ethnocentrism

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Four Generalizations

• 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 Hypothesis

• 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 Hypothesis

• 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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Critical Thinking in CC Psych

• Evaluative bias of language
• Differentiating dichotomous variables and
  continuous variables
• Similarity-uniqueness paradox
• The Barnum effect
• The assimilation bias
• Remember to accommodate
• Representativeness bias
• The availability bias

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Basic Psychological Processes

• 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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Basic Principles

• Sensationprocess by which receptors are
  stimulated and transmit their information to
  higher brain centers.
• Absolute threshold
• Difference threshold
• Sensory adaptation
• Perceptionprocess that organizes various
  sensations into meaningful patterns

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Perceptual Set

• 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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Perception of Depictions

• Related to education and socialization
• Picture scanning
• Linked to reading and writing patterns
• Also draw circles in the way you write
• Three dimensions in two

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Perception of Color

• Three universal dimensions
• Hue
• Brightness
• Saturation
• 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
• Red always has a separate word, but green and
  blue are sometimes not distinguished
  linguistically

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Trends in Color Perception

• Adams and Osgood, 1973looked at 23 cultures
• Redsalient and active
• Black and graybad
• White, blue, greengood
• Yellow, white, graypassive
• 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 didnt acquire terms in
  any particular order, in contrast to the widely
  held idea that primary colors green are learned
  first

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Optical Illusions
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Why Illusions Occur

• Carpentered world hypothesis
• Front-horizontal foreshortening
• Symbolizing three dimensions in two

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Taste

• All cultures respond to the same 4 basic
  tastessweet, salty, sour, bitter
• Fifth tasteumamisavoriness
• 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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Touch

• 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 normslabor 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

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Culture and Cognition

• 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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Sorting

• Within Euro-Am cultures, we use prototypes
• How people sort
• People pick categories by shared attributes
• Young kidssort by striking, superficial
  properties like color or number
• Sorting by form is slightly more advanced
• Older kidsshared function or taxonomic label
• This development appears to be related to
  education
• 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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Culture and Memory

• Early workBartlett, 1932
• Ross and Milson, 1970
• Oral traditions better memories
• But memory is not better overall.
• Cole and colleaguesKpelle of Liberia did not
  perform better on lists of words than Americans.
• Kpelle didnt use categories that were logical
  (but imposed by researchers) or learn by rote
  (serial position effect, primacy, recency)
• Overallsome things like STM and rates of
  forgetting seem universal
• But mnemonics, strategies, structure vary and
  formal education play a role

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Problem Solving

• 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
• Using a new combination of previously learned
  elements
• To study this, have to create new situations
• Kpelle and US children
• Verbal logical reasoning
• SyllogismsIn 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
• 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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Perception of Time

• Westerners define punctuality using precise
  measures of time1 min, 1 hr, etc
• Prior to information revolution, Arabs used only
  3 sets of timeno 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 Africatime is very
  elastic
• What is late?
• Asked US and Brazilian students what is late for
  lunch
• How long to walk 100 ft down a street at business
  time as a sign of time pressure
• Japan20.7 sec
• England21.6
• US22.6
• Indonesia27.2
• Hamermesh (2003)US, Germany, Australia, Canada,
  South Koreaas wealth increases, people become
  more dissatisfied with their lack of time

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Sleep and Dreams

• The amount of sleep that each of us needs is
  physiologically determined
• In each culture, some sleep for 5-6 hours, some
  9-10 hours
• Dream
• Monophasiccultures that value cognitive
  experiences that take place only during waking
  hoursmore materialistic
• Polyphasicvalue dreams and treat them as part of
  realitymore spiritual view
• Manifest contentactual contentvaries, though
  falling, eating, swimming, death, examsare
  common
• Latent contentmeaning

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Altered States of Consciousness

• Phenomena that are different from normal waking
  consciousness and include mystic experiences
• But ASC are widely reported around the globe
• Trancesleeplike state marked by reduced
  sensitivity to stimuli, loss or alteration of
  knowledge, automatic motor activity
• Worldwide sampleexperienced in 90 of
  countriesBourguignon, 1994
• Beliefs about possession
• Need to examine from observers standpoint,
  victims view, and communitys view
• Associated with stress due to job
  dissatisfaction, work conflicts, economic
  hardship
• May be associated with mental illness
• Also a cultural belief
• Meditation
• Quiet and relaxed state of tranquility in which
  person achieves integration of thoughts,
  perceptions, and attitudes
• Usually obtained through a special principle or
  belief
• Therapeuticreduces stress