cultural psychology

Question 1

what is the ‘secret’ to human success?

Answer 1

• it is not our physical capabilities
• fast processing and strong memory capabilities
• capabilities for generating and accumulating culture, previous generations, technology development and other new creations.

Question 2

what is culture?

Answer 2

culture is any information that is passed on from one individual to another via social learning.
values, beliefs, traditions - these reinforce culture
these occur through - observation, imitation, modelling, spoken/written language and teaching.

Question 3

what is the general intelligence hypothesis
(Hermann et al, 2007)

Answer 3

humans larger brains enable us to perform all kinds of cognitive operations more efficiently than other species.

humans greater memory, faster learning, faster perceptual processing, long-term planning.

Question 4

what is the adapted intelligence hypothesis

Answer 4

large brains accomplish species-specific tasks.

birds that cache their foods have greater memory capacity.

• living with others in groups has created unique evolutionary pressures, primates lineage, constant social calculations of who you can cooperate with and who you are in competition with.

Question 5

what is the cultural intelligence hypothesis

Answer 5

in humans, unlike primates we are not just social but ultra social - to function well in this world we must have special cognitive skills for social learning and communication.

Question 6

outline and discuss the results of Hermann’s research against the general intelligence v cultural intelligence

Answer 6

• recruited chimpanzees alongside 2.5 year old children.
• administered a battery of cognitive tests, physical domains here include spatial memory, object permanance, social domains include social learning, communication.

results/observations
- human children are only better at social tasks, non-human primates are capable only of copying observed behaviours, whereas humans expect to be taught.

Question 7

how is the human mind adapted for social learning.
- discuss social learning biases

Answer 7

• children are dependent on others for certain needs, but quickly become dependent on others for information. children are intuitively skeptical, they only utilise specific sources.
• this is selective social learning, our minds are cognitively structured in ways which enable us to be selective social learners.
• selective attention is used on cultural information when it comes from successful individuals, family members, or those like ourselves.

Question 8

discuss social learning as it happens around us and how this creates culture

Answer 8

• humans have developed cognitive capacities for social learning that operate largely without awareness.
• high-fidelity imitation - copy behaviour with high accuracy
• imitation is key to our success ; beliefs, values, language.
• we imitate to learn and over time these behaviours accumulate across people and communities which creates culture.

Question 9

does scientific research encompass all culture?

Answer 9

• humans are cultural, but that is not a central feature in scientific research
• random sampling allows research to generalise humans, but only from a sample of the population. and so is not applicable to all.

Question 10

discuss the WEIRD population, which are the focus of many research

Answer 10

• western, educated, industrialised, rich and democratic.
• psychology blatantly ignores the vast majority of human cultural variation.
• not only are the ppts WEIRD, but so are the researchers and sources of funding.
• the consequences of this limit diversity of views, narrow our understanding of humanity, perpetuates the west is best attitude both implicitly and explicitly.

Question 11

discuss Muthukrishna et al, 2020 research on cultural distance

Answer 11

• conducted a world value survey in 100 countries, gathered a big database of values, attitudes, beliefs, demographic info.
• distilled responses into cultural group DNA
• confirmed that some countries conform and are very similar, while other more eastern ones are culturally distinct.

Question 12

discuss tightness and looseness (Gelfand et al, 2011)

Answer 12

• this is one key critical dimension of cultural variation.

tight cultures = strong norms and low tolerance for deviant behaviours, emphasise order and self-control, defined rules and social norms.

loose cultures = weak social norms and high tolerance of deviant behaviours, value individual expression and flexibility.

places with high population density, natural disasters, conflict, disease create a pressure on human culture - TIGHT

without these threats cultures are free to be LOOSE.