Culture Flashcards
Culture refers to
Culture refers to the beliefs, values, behavior and material objects that, together, form a people’s
way of life. It determines how we view the world around us. Culture includes the traditions we
inherit and pass on to the next generation. Overall it is the totality of our shared language,
knowledge, material objects, and behavior.
Cultural differences span a vast variety of areas and they can already be apparent in aesthetic
representations. For example, East Asian paintings take a very broad perspective on the scenes they
represent. They tend to put the horizon high as it would be seen by a bird flying over the landscape
or an artist perched on a high outcropping. Western landscapes put the horizon low, as it would be
seen from the ground. Consequently, less of the landscape is seen. Eastern portrait paintings tend to
diminish the size and salience of the central figure relative to Western paintings. The behaviour of
ordinary contemporary people duplicates these cultural trends. When Japanese and American
students were asked to take a photo of a person, the Japanese photos showed the person as small
relative to the field. Japanese literally never made photographs with the person taking up as large a
fraction of the total space, but it was common for Americans to do so.
Individualist Cultures
A key construct within cultural psychology is the distinction between two types of general
underlying cultural communities.Individualist Culturesvalue independence. They promote
personal ideals, strengths, and goals, pursued in competition with others, leading to individual
achievement and finding a unique identity. In contrast, Collectivist Cultures value interdependence.
They promote group and societal goals and duties, and blending in with group identity, with
achievement attributed to mutual support.
Markus and Kitayama (1991) Independent Self and Interdependent Self
Markus and Kitayama (1991) introduced the concepts of Independent Self and Interdependent Self
to distinguish between the different kinds of self that are found in different cultures. People in
individualistic (Western) cultures generally have an independent self, whereas people in collectivist
(Eastern) cultures have an interdependent self. The independent self is an autonomous entity with
clear boundaries between self and others. Internal attributes, such as thoughts, feelings and abilities,
are stable and largely unaffected by social context. The behaviour of the independent self is governed
and constituted primarily according to one’s inner and dispositional characteristics. In contrast, the
interdependent self has flexible and diffuse boundaries between self and others. It is tied into
relationships and is highly responsive to social context. Others are seen as a part of the self, and the
self is seen as a part of other people. There is no self without the collective. One’s behaviour is
governed and organised primarily according to perception of other people’s thoughts, feelings and
actions.
Asch’s (1951) study of Conformity to group pressure
Asch’s (1951) study of Conformity to group pressure is one of the most widely replicated social
psychology experiments of all time. Smith and Bond (1998) report a meta-analysis of Asch-type
studies carried out in the United States and sixteen other countries, which reveals considerable
variation in the degree of conformity across different cultures. Conformity was generally stronger
outside Western Europe and North America. The reason why conformity in the Asch paradigm is
greater in non-Western cultures is probably that participants did not wish to cause embarrassment by
disagreeing with the majority’s erroneous responses - conforming to the majority was a way to allow
the majority to ‘save face’.
On a cognitive level, East Asians and Westerners perceive the world and think about it in very
different ways.
On a cognitive level, East Asians and Westerners perceive the world and think about it in very
different ways. Westerners are inclined to attend to some focal object, analysing its attributes and
categorizing it in an effort to find out what rules govern its behaviour. East Asians are more likely to
attend to a broad perceptual and conceptual field, noticing relationships and changes and grouping
objects based on family resemblance rather than category membership. Social factors are likely to be
important in directing attention. East Asians live in complex social networks with prescribed role
relations. Attention to context is important to effective functioning. More independent Westerners
live in less constraining social worlds and have the luxury of attending to the object and their goals
with respect to it. As a consequence of these different cognitive processes, there are a number of
findings on which different cultures show different effects.
Liang-Hwang Chiu (1972)
Objects relate
Liang-Hwang Chiu (1972) showed triplets of objects to Chinese and American children and asked
them to indicate which of the two objects went together. American children put the chicken and the
cow together and justified this by pointing out that “both are animals.” In contrast, Chinese children
put the cow and the grass together and justified this by saying that “the cow eats the grass.”
Similarly, Norenzayan and colleagues (2002) asked participants to report whether a target object to a
group of other objects. The target object, the flower with round petals, bears a strong family
resemblance to the group of similar flowers, but there is a rule that allows placing the object in the
group on the right, namely, “has a straight stem.” East Asians were inclined to think that the object
was more similar to the group with which it shared a family resemblance, whereas European
Americans were more likely to regard the object as similar to the group to which it could be assigned
by application of the rule.
Cultural differences in low-level perceptual processing
Cultural differences have also been observed for seemingly low-level perceptual processing. The
Muller-Lyer illusion shows up to different degrees in different populations, with American
undergraduates (in this sample from Evanston, Illinois) anchoring the extreme end of the
distribution, followed by the South African-European sample from Johannesburg. On average, the
undergraduates required that line “a” be about a fifth longer than line “b” before the two segments
were perceived as equal. At the other end, the San foragers of the Kalahari were unaffected by the
so-called illusion (i.e., it is not an illusion for them). While the San’s PSE value cannot be
distinguished from zero, the American undergraduates’ PSE value is significantly different from all
the other societies studied. As discussed by Segall and colleagues these findings suggest that visual
exposure during ontogeny to factors such as the “carpentered corners” of modern environments may
favour certain optical calibrations and visual habits that create and perpetuate this illusion. That is,
the visual system ontogenetically adapts to the presence of recurrent features in the local visual
environment. Because elements such as carpentered corners are products of particular cultural
evolutionary trajectories, and were not part of most environments for most of human history, the
Muller-Lyer illusion is a kind of culturally evolved by-product.
Fundamental Attribution Error -cross cultural attribution research
Another area of cross-cultural attribution research is the Fundamental Attribution Error, which we
discussed in Lecture 1. We have seen that in Western cultures people have a tendency to make
dispositional attributions for others’ behaviour. In non-Western cultures, however, people are less
inclined to make such dispositional attributions. Miller (1984) compared North Americans and
Indian Hindus from each of four age groups (adults, and 15-, 11- and 8-year-olds). Participants
narrated prosocial and antisocial behaviour and gave their own spontaneous explanations of the
causes of this behaviour. Miller was able to code responses to identify the proportion of dispositional
and contextual attributions that participants made. Among the youngest children there was little cross-cultural difference. As age increased, however, the two groups diverged, mainly because the
Americans increasingly came to adopt dispositional attributions. This finding is probably partly a
reflection of the more pervasive and all-enveloping influence of social roles in more collectivist nonWestern cultures and partly a reflection of a more holistic worldview that promotes contextdependent, occasion-bound thinking.
Display Rules-Ekman (1972)
Much evidence suggests that people share a universal experience of basic emotions, and they
produce universal facial expressions of those emotions. However, whether or not certain emotions
are displayed in a given situation differs across different cultures. It has been proposed that these
differences in emotional expression are due to so-called Display Rules. Ekman (1972) defined them
as “what has been learned, presumably fairly early in life, about which emotion management
techniques are to be applied by whom, to which emotions, under what circumstances.” These
emotion management techniques include intensifying, deintensifying, neutralizing, and masking a
felt emotion (Ekman, 1972). Display rules also govern the intensity of emotions: among the
Japanese, display of intense emotions in public is discouraged, while Americans may exaggerate
their emotional displays in public.
Ekman (1972) conducted a key experiment on display rules by showing a series of stress-inducing
films, which had been previously confirmed to produce negative emotional arousal, to Japanese and
American participants. When the participants watched the film alone, both Americans and Japanese
showed reactions of disgust. However, when participants discussed the films with a confederate
interviewer of the same culture, the Americans continued to express disgust, but the Japanese
participants smiled. This was explained as an instance of a display rule prevalent in Japanese culture,
whereby the Japanese mask their emotional displays with a polite smile.
Moral Foundations Theory
Culture comes into play in social contexts. Beyond emotions another key area is in the domain of
what behaviours are considered acceptable or even praiseworthy, relative to those that are considered
immoral. Moral Foundations Theory was developed to understand why morality varies so much
across cultures yet still shows so many similarities and recurrent themes. In brief, the theory
proposes that several universally available psychological systems are the foundations of “intuitive
ethics.” Each culture then constructs virtues, narratives, and institutions on top of these foundations,
thereby creating the unique moralities seen around the world, and conflicting within nations too. Five
specific foundations have been discerned:
1) Care/Harm : This foundation is related to our long evolution as mammals with attachment
systems and an ability to feel (and dislike) the pain of others. It underlies virtues of kindness,
gentleness, and nurturance.
2) Fairness/Reciprocity: This foundation is related to the evolutionary
process of reciprocal altruism. It generates ideas of justice, rights, and autonomy.
3)Ingroup/Loyalty: This foundation is related to humans’ long history as tribal creatures able to form
shifting coalitions. It underlies virtues of patriotism and self-sacrifice for the group. It is active
anytime people feel that it’s “one for all, and all for one.”
4) Authority/Respect: This foundation
was shaped by the long primate history of hierarchical social interactions. It underlies virtues of
leadership and followership, including deference to legitimate authority and respect for traditions.
5) Purity/Sanctity: This foundation was shaped by the psychology of disgust and contamination. It
underlies religious notions of striving to live in an elevated, less carnal, more noble way. It underlies
the widespread idea that the body is a temple which can be desecrated by immoral activities and
contaminants, although this is a general idea not unique to religious traditions.
An important finding applying moral foundations theory has been that politically liberal and
conservative people differ in the extent to which they endorse the specific foundations. In particular,
whereas liberal people preferentially weigh Harm and Fairness, conservative people find all five
foundations relevant to a greater extent. Thus, this work suggests that also within given cultures,
such as Western nations, more specific subgroupings can also arise and therefore be considered
expressions of cultural variability.
