Fundamentals II - Culture

Question 1

Culture

Answer 1

Culture is a set of beliefs, attitudes, values, norms, morals, customs, roles, statuses, symbols, and rituals shared by a self-identified group, a group whose members think of themselves as a group

Question 2

Beliefs

Answer 2

Accepted ideas about some aspect of reality; cultural truisms

Question 3

Attitudes

Answer 3

Preferences that refer specifically to how things are evaluated as good or bad

Question 4

Values

Answer 4

Guiding principles and shared goals of members in a wide range of situations

Question 5

Top 10 Cross-Cultural Values Ranked by Importance

Answer 5

1) Benevolence, 2) Self-direction, 3) Universalism, 4) Security, 5) Conformity, 6) Achievement, 7) Hedonism, 8) Stimulation, 9) Tradition, 10) Power
(Some type of reference of each of these across different cultures)

Question 6

Norms

Answer 6

Shared beliefs about appropriate or expected behaviour in particular situations (not stagnant)

Question 7

Morals

Answer 7

• Beliefs about the nature of good and bad behaviour (who are they, what are they about)
• Community morals (community-based)
• Autonomy morals (things good for individual & not harmful toward others)
• Divinity (sacred, spiritual, religious, wisdom)

Question 8

Intellectual Roots of the Study of Morality

Answer 8

• Focus on autonomy morals (how should I behave & how does it impact you?)
• Overly secular, left-wing, western view of morality

Question 9

Moral Blind-Spot in Science

Answer 9

• Contrasting and disregarded Non-Secular and Eastern moral codes
• Focus more on ethics of community and divinity
• Disgust is linked with morality, as emotional disgust primes heightened moral conviction
• Divinity, purity, and obedience not easily explained as an ethic of fairness or harm

Question 10

Moral Foundations Theory

Answer 10

• Functional account of morals (what do morals do rather than what is bad and why is it bad?)
• Culture dictates what we value and moralize
• Different cultures, different morals
• Every culture has moral foundations that involve psychological systems, are intuitive, inborn and that culture is built upon

Question 11

Duality of Foundations

Answer 11

• Individual-focused (protects the individual)
• Group-focused (binds the group together)

Question 12

Moral Foundations

Answer 12

1) Harm/care (I should not hurt you and if needed I should help you)
2) Fairness/reciprocity (typically strong across morals, what you put in is what you receive
3) Ingroup/loyalty (emphasizes moral to be good group member & prefer/be loyal to ingroup over outgroup and may surpass individual)
4) Authority/respect (Most cultures have hierarchy & paying respect to superiors is expected)
5) Purity/sanctity (certain things are sacred and should be left as such (unchanged), a lot of religious and bodily ties)

Question 13

Other or Fewer Foundations

Answer 13

• Have been questions as to why there are 5 and only 5 foundations
• Considerations for others, like personal freedom/liberty, or for there being only one foundation, like harm
• Cannot say 1 group understands morals better than another

Question 14

Customs

Answer 14

Specific patterns or styles of dress, speech, and behaviour, deemed appropriate in a particular context within a given culture

Question 15

Social roles

Answer 15

Positions within a group that entails specific ways of acting, dividing labour, responsibility, and resources (age, gender, social status, etc.)

Question 16

Cultural symbols

Answer 16

Represent culture as a whole; beliefs or values prevalent in a culture

Question 17

Rituals

Answer 17

Patterns of actions performed in particular reinforcing contexts that often signal change associated with the beginning or end or something of biological or cultural significance

Question 18

Cultural Evolution

Answer 18

The process whereby cultures develop and propagate according to systems of belief or behaviour that contributes to the success of a society

Question 19

Cultural Diffusion

Answer 19

The transfer of inventions, knowledge, and ideas from one culture to another; if idea working, it is in need of diffusion

Question 20

Culture Transmission

Answer 20

The process whereby members of a culture learn explicitly or implicitly to imitate the beliefs and behaviours of others in that culture

Question 21

Cultural Diffusion and Transmission through Art

Answer 21

• Culture provides values and systems for understanding
• Art is the ‘Face’ of Culture, as it communicates or expresses a culture’s beliefs, values, norms, attitudes, roles, morals, etc.
• Common belief or value of tension between benevolence and power, depicted through many cultures’ art (cave paintings, epic of Gilgamesh, Icarus’ Melted Wings (Nothing of the Self in Excess))

Question 22

How Culture Helps Us Adapt

Answer 22

Warner (1959) proposed that culture helps people adapt to three aspects of their environment:
1) Physical (natural) environment
2) Social environment
3) Metaphysical environment

Question 23

1. Culture and the Natural Environment

Answer 23

• People live in groups which face challenges
• Groups adapt by creating technologies in response to specific environmental challenges (Hot vs cold climate presents different challenges and different cultural solutions)
• Adaptation to physical surroundings influences people’s basic perceptions and thought processes

Question 24

Culture and Beauty

Answer 24

• Evolutionary explanation of beauty is that it signals fitness, something well made like the peacock’s feathers, and demonstrates skill and/or good genes
• Other demonstrations of skill are not beautiful however, so doubts on the extent of this explanation

Question 25

What is beautiful?

Answer 25

- Has been considered in many ways and some ideas appear related (universality of what we find beautiful visually and aurally) - Common characteristics include symmetry, averageness, 'divine' proportions, mathematical (pythagoras), balance & harmony and prototype - In effect, patterns and rules that you expect and know which are set by culture

Question 26

Ugly vs Beautiful

Answer 26

- Ugliness has no limit, is unpredictable, while beauty, although there are variations, is bound by rules - Ugly breaks the rules and is more interesting - Essentially, we have a pattern in our head and we overlay it on our perceptions

Question 27

Beauty as an interaction between Person and Environment

Answer 27

- The person has expectations that impacts perception (illusions) and a major source of this expectation is culture, which determines the prototype, average and the mean - The environment is the actual object - Neither are objective or subjective alone however, we 'like' what we expect because we can completely ignore it, it is not alarming/new - Can be found with new art which is difficult to appreciate until you learn the value, belief or idea behind it

Question 28

Expectation in Art

Answer 28

Perceptions can change when you acquire knowledge around the object of interest; a painting that appears like scribbles may not be appreciated until you learn the philosophical/insightful context behind it; a beautiful, seemingly skillful painting may be idealized until you find out that the artist is a horrible person, like Hitler, and all of a sudden you may judge a lot more negatively

Question 29

2. Culture and the Social Environment

Answer 29

- Fiske proposed four basic patterns of social relationships: Community sharing (allows us to relate to other ppl by showing what's mine is yours), Authority ranking (orders and following), Equality matching (friendship), and Market pricing through business/transactional relationships

Question 30

Modernization and Cultural Values

Answer 30

- Maleable, as culture changes so do values - Increased socioeconomic development (individualism, as there is less reliance on others and more emphasis on the individual) - Industrial, technological, and economic advancements (social media, selfies) - Democratization (social norm that voting is important, as democracy relies on idea that informed public will go out to vote)

Question 31

3. Culture and the Metaphysical Environment

Answer 31

Metaphysical environment is the nature of reality, significance of our lives, cosmic order (Terror management theory)

Question 32

Terror management theory

Answer 32

- Existential and psychodynamic - Tension between our mortality and awareness of our mortality, which gives false sense of immortality - Death awareness is a wellspring of anxiety and the 'Worm at the core', which is we do not deal with it by finding an answer often via culture

Question 33

Striving for Immortality

Answer 33

- Various forms of immortality are found in all cultures and suggest a human desire to minimize the terror of death - There is literal immortality, through an afterlife (Heaven) - Also symbolic immortality

Question 34

Symbolic Immortality

Answer 34

- Biosocial (a part of me will live on) - Creative (something I create will stay behind as permanent link to me) - Natural (give back to nature, as decomposing and feeding the earth) - Experiential (part of larger cosmic order, we do not mean anything and yet we are still here)

Question 35

Defenses against Mortality Salience

Answer 35

- Increased adherence to cultural worldview, increases one's sense of belonging, biosocial immortality and decreases anxiety - Self-esteem boosts also help, and can be tied back to cultural worldview as how you adhere to the latter affects the former (if I do a lot, I am a good person) - Draws attention away from death and mortality towards sense of self and purpose/belonging

Question 36

Cultural Worldview

Answer 36

- Human-constructed, shared, symbolic conceptions of reality that imbue life with meaning, order, and permanence - All cultural world views consist of a theory of reality; institutions, symbols, rituals that support world view; standards of value; and the promise of actual or symbolic immortality - Antidote to death awareness/mortality salience

Question 37

Self-Worth

Answer 37

- Living up to cultural-value standards provides a sense of self-esteem, which vary w/in and between cultures - Self-esteem is a person's evaluation of his or her value or self-worth - Can also relieve death awareness as creative immortality - Just world beliefs of good things happen to good (worthy) people and bad things happen to bad (unworthy) people

Question 38

What roles does Social Validation Play

Answer 38

- Confidence in the absolute correctness of our beliefs and values is bolstered by TNT, through social consensus and validation which implies correctness - Doubt about personal world view after learning about another culture may play a central role in prejudice and intergroup conflict, as the existence of conflicting cultures can be profoundly threatening - Therefore we must psychologically or physically remove the threat

Question 39

Empirical tests of TMT

Answer 39

- Research to assess TMT has focused primarily on cultural world views and self-esteem - Mortality salience hypothesis is that cultural worldview protects against death and death reminders should cause people to bolster their world views OR self-esteem (has been researched in regards to harsher sentences for a criminal (deviance w/in a culture)

Question 40

Protective Shield of Cultural Beliefs

Answer 40

- When cultural beliefs are compromised, thoughts of death leak into a person's mind - Death thought accessibility (DTA) hypothesis - Reminders of death increase investment in culture, but threatening culture increases awareness of death