Week 2 Flashcards
(26 cards)
Why do we study cultural factors?
- causal thinking differs
- cognitive beliefs differ
- perception of self differs
Morling’s article is
Cultural psychology
Cultural psychology highlights the importance of cultures at two levels
- Natural selection pressure that shapes humans as species: external agents that affects organism’s ability to survive in a given environment. Ex: geographic locations, predators
- Diverse set of social rules: they shape human cognitive functioning. Ex: social norms
WEIRD demographic
Western, educated, industrialized, rich and democratic
- they even perceive line lengths differently (Muller-Lyer illusion)
- categorized the words “rabbit, eggplant, and carrot” as vegetables / non-weird said as relationally
Allied focus
Fields of social cognition and cultural psychology overlap in studying the same phenomena. There are just different levels of analysis
Evolutionary social transmission
A highly adaptive process
Self-construal
Way a person understands the world or a situation
- asian-canadians: report in 3rd person
- european-canadians: report in 1st person
Independent self-construal
Encourages the idea that we are the centre of our own social worlds
Interdependent self-construal
Encourages us to see ourselves from others’ eyes in a specific setting. Third person perspective
Holistic thinker
- interdependent
- considers context or areas as a whole
- placing focus on relationships
Analytic thinkers
- independent
- focus on individual
- detachment from objects and context
Can dominant cultural values be copied into the minds of cultural participants?
No, because people can be “primed” with individualistic or collective mindsets.
- highly debated
Dual models
- automatic or controlled
- one is selected during action, when dealing with people, depending on motivation/goals
- typically, not a conscious process
Mindlessness (automaticity mindlessness)
Automatic response
Not thinking too much about it
Mentally disengaged
Full automaticity
Unintentional, uncontrollable, unconscious, efficient, goal-independent, purely stimulus-driven, fast responses
- when behaviour becomes over-learned, like walking or driving
Subliminal priming
- subconscious
- response is activated from something in the environment that is below conscious awareness
- some examples: priming of emotions and pattern-matching
- studies are difficult to run
This part of the brain is responsible for priming of emotions
Amygdala
Conscious priming
Conscious perception of the prime, but no awareness of its effect on subsequent reactions
Supraliminal priming
Like conscious priming
Ex: german wine and french wine experiment
Chronic accessibility
- particular traits stick out to form impressions
- can lead to prejudice and stereotyping
- habitually labeling others by their traits
Goal-driven automaticity
- intentional and conscious but partly automatic
- like when answers come easy to you because it is something you know very well.
Goals
Mental representations of desired outcome
Goal-inconsistent automaticity
When you can’t think what you want
- white bear study
Rumination
- repetitive, often harmful thinking
- stemming from goal-directed thinking when goals are not met
- associated with depressive symptomology
