Brainscape's Knowledge GenomeTM


Top Flashcards (Certified)
All Flashcards

Cross-cultural Psychology of Health & Illness (Leiden University 22-23) > Week 3 - Cross-Cultural Cognition > Flashcards

Week 3 - Cross-Cultural Cognition Flashcards

(49 cards)

Start Studying
1
Q

CULTURAL
DIMENSIONS THEORY: Hofstede (2001)

A

Individualism–collectivism
* How interdependent is a culture?

Uncertainty avoidance
* How do people deal with ambiguity?

Power distance
* How hierarchical is a culture?

Long-term/short-term orientation
* Connection with tradition, also economic orientation

Masculinity/femininity
* How distinct are gender roles? Distribution of classical male/female traits

How well did you know this?
1
Not at all
2
3
4
5
Perfectly
2
Q

CULTURAL VARIATION

A

Cultures = fluid and dynamic, changing
over time

How well did you know this?
1
Not at all
2
3
4
5
Perfectly
3
Q

ideas and norms don’t necessarily emerge to
address universal problems…

A

result from cultural learning

How well did you know this?
1
Not at all
2
3
4
5
Perfectly
4
Q

SOURCES OF
CULTURAL VARIATION

A

-Ecological and geographical differences
- Local ecologies (cultural values and norms)

Proximate causes vs. distal causes
Evoked culture vs. transmitted culture

How well did you know this?
1
Not at all
2
3
4
5
Perfectly
5
Q

PROXIMATE AND
DISTAL CAUSES

A

Proximate causes: Differences that have direct and
immediate effects

Distal causes: Early differences that lead to effects
over long periods of time

How well did you know this?
1
Not at all
2
3
4
5
Perfectly
6
Q

EVOKED AND
TRANSMITTED CULTURE

A

Evoked culture: “biologically encoded”; Specific environments evoke specific
responses from (all) people within that environment,
becoming part of a culture

Transmitted culture: Cultural information passed on or
learned via social transmission or modeling

–> Not always clearly separated!
Transmitted culture is arguably always involved in
maintaining cultural norms, even when evoked cultural
responses are also present

How well did you know this?
1
Not at all
2
3
4
5
Perfectly
7
Q

TRANSMISSION OF
CULTURAL INFORMATION:

A

Biological evolution vs Cultural evolution

How well did you know this?
1
Not at all
2
3
4
5
Perfectly
8
Q

Biological evolution: ideas need to be retained and passed on

A
  • Natural selection
  • Sexual selection

–> Sometimes conflicting! (e.g., peacocks males and their feather tales are easy to spot, not good for hiding)

How well did you know this?
1
Not at all
2
3
4
5
Perfectly
9
Q

Cultural evolution: Similarities with biological evolution

A
  • Ideas can be persistent (high survival rate)
  • Ideas can be more prone to being passed around
    (reproduced more)
How well did you know this?
1
Not at all
2
3
4
5
Perfectly
10
Q

Cultural evolution: differences from biological evolution

A
  • More copying errors in cultural ideas
  • Cultural ideas can be transmitted horizontally among
    peers, not only vertically across generations (ideas move faster than psychological traits)
  • Cultural ideas do not have to be adaptive
How well did you know this?
1
Not at all
2
3
4
5
Perfectly
11
Q

Information going viral: Memes

A

Agents of cultural transmission (Dawkins)
–> Shared jokes/context

How well did you know this?
1
Not at all
2
3
4
5
Perfectly
12
Q

COMMUNICABLE
IDEAS: In order to be easily shared, information might be especially…

A
  • useful or informative
  • elicit emotional response
  • simple to communicate
How well did you know this?
1
Not at all
2
3
4
5
Perfectly
13
Q

Ideas generally spread within social networks, leading to
clustering of attitudes: ???

A

Dynamical social impact theory (Norms develop among those who communicate regularly)

How well did you know this?
1
Not at all
2
3
4
5
Perfectly
14
Q

PERSISTING IDEAS: persist longer how?

A

Ideas that have a small number of counterintuitive elements
persist longer
- minimal
- religious narratives / myth/storytelling

How well did you know this?
1
Not at all
2
3
4
5
Perfectly
15
Q

CHANGING CULTURES: changing and evolving
in several ways…

A
  • Increasingly interconnected
  • Increasingly individualistic
  • People increasingly intelligent
How well did you know this?
1
Not at all
2
3
4
5
Perfectly
16
Q

CHANGING CULTURES: INCREASES IN
INTERCONNECTEDNESS

A
  • easier & cheaper transports and long-distance communication
  • create a global culture
  • countered by increased tribalism or modern populism
How well did you know this?
1
Not at all
2
3
4
5
Perfectly
17
Q

CHANGING CULTURES: Individualism vs Collectivism
(Cultures often studied on an Individualism/Collectivism (I/S)
dimension (cf Hofstede))

A
  • Individualism = individuals encouraged to consider
    themselves as distinct from others and prioritize own personal
    goals over collective goals
  • Collectivism = individuals encouraged to place more
    emphasis on goals of one’s collective or in-group
How well did you know this?
1
Not at all
2
3
4
5
Perfectly
18
Q

CHANGING CULTURES: INCREASES IN
INDIVIDUALISM

A

Visible when comparing younger and older Americans,
proposed reasons include
* More pressures of time and money
* Increased suburbanization
* More electronic entertainment
* Higher socioeconomic status
* More secular
* Decrease in rates of infectious diseases (!)

How well did you know this?
1
Not at all
2
3
4
5
Perfectly
19
Q

CHANGING CULTURES: INCREASE IN INDIVIDUALISM (in collectivistic society)

A

Also visible in traditionally collectivistic cultures, e.g. Japan
* Higher divorce rates
* Decreases in family size
* Placing higher value on independence in children

How well did you know this?
1
Not at all
2
3
4
5
Perfectly
20
Q

CHANGING CULTURES: INCREASES IN
INTELLIGENCE

Study These Flashcards
A

Longitudinal data suggests that IQ scores rise between 5 and
25 points per generation
- dependent of intelligence test
- largest increase seen for “ravens matrices test” –> culture free and focused on problem-solving

21
Q

Proposed reasons for increased intelligence include:

Study These Flashcards
A
  • Improved nutrition
  • More ppl receive education (higher degrees)
  • Pop-culture, increasingly more complicated (complex plots in movies and tv-shows)
22
Q

PERSISTENCE OF
CULTURE: Changes are usually slow, and some cultural qualities persist for far longer than their initial usefulness!

Study These Flashcards
A
  • Persistence is an effect of pre-existing structure
  • Facilitated by pluralistic ignorance = tendency to collectively
    misinterpret the thoughts that underlie other people’s behavior
23
Q

Pluralistic ignorance (e.g., death-sentence)

Study These Flashcards
A

pluralistic ignorance = tendency to collectively
misinterpret the thoughts that underlie other people’s behavio

24
Q

PERCEPTION AND COGNITION
Thought of as mostly universal functions! However, there are cross-cultural differences in the basic phenomena of:
sensation…
perception…
cognition…

Study These Flashcards
A

sensation: Seeing, hearing, touching, smelling, tasting

perception: Perceptual organisation - How to structure & interpret incoming sensory information

cognition: Memory, attention, task switching, imagery, reasoning, etc

25
SENSING VS PERCEIVING
Sensation: * Vision/seeing * Audition/hearing * Haptic sense/touching * Olfactory sense/smelling * Gustatory sense/tasting * (more: proprioception, pain/itch, temperature, balance…) Perception: conscious experience
26
ENCULTURATION IN PERCEPTION: previous exposure & predictability
Previous exposure: leads to changed processing of new information --> increased sensitivity Predictability: if known what to expect, infrequently perceived things become more interesting, but processed less successfully (e.g., faces, weather, colors. tastes, music, etc...)
27
STATISTICAL LEARNING: (frequent, together, important)
what is Frequent: COMMON vs RARE what goes Together: NORMAL vs SURPRISE what is Important: SALIENT aspects of a stimulus are processed more efficiently
28
BOTTOM-UP & TOP-DOWN
Top-Down Modulation: Internally-driven attention (interpretation of incoming information based on prior knowledge, experiences, and expectations.) Bottom-Up Processing: Externally-driven attention (retrieval of sensory information from our external environment)
29
Higher-order information, (bottom-up & Top-down)
= prior knowledge and experience, help to interpret patterns going beyond basic stimulus properties
30
Different cultures lead to different ‘auditory environments’
Different rhythms (regular or irregular) & beats --> Rhythmic biases
31
AUDITORY ENVIRONMENT: LANGUAGE
- Syllable-timed: e.g., French & Spanish - Stress-timed: e.g., Dutch & English - Mora-timed: e.g., Japanese
32
NORMAL PAIRWISE VARIABILITY INDEX: NPVI
nPVI: calculates the durational variability of successive vocalic duration The higher the nPVI value, the larger the contrast of successive duration (English composers are "better" than French)
33
PERCEPTION AND THINKING STYLES
- Analytic thinking (greek) - Holistic thinking (chinese) Analytic and holistic thinking appear to be culturally variant, potentially based on philosophical traditions (Cf. Greek vs Chinese)
34
Analytic thinking involves (individualistic society)
* Focus on objects and attributes * Objects perceived as independent from contexts * Taxonomic categorization * More prevalent in individualistic societies
35
Holistic thinking involves (collectivistic society)
* Attending to the relations among objects * Predicting an object’s behavior on the basis of those relationships * Thematic categorization * More prevalent in collectivistic societies
36
ART: HORIZONS AND CONTEXT
Western art: horizontal view, one vocal point Eastern art: "bird view" , more relations
37
PORTRAITS: West vs East
Typical western portrait (left): bigger faces, less background Typical Eastern portrait (right): more context
38
CITY-SCAPES When comparing the view from specific locations in American and Japanese towns, Japanese views are generally more complex
--> Perceptual environments can induce specific patterns of attention! Thus Japanese notice "change-blindness" changes better
39
ANALYTIC & HOLISTIC APPROACHES Relationships between figure and ground (field), focal and contextual information Field dependence: linking/integrating an object into its context, difficulty to see separate elements
Holistic thinkers perceive a scene as an integrated whole * More field dependence Analytic thinkers are able to separate objects from each other * Field independence
40
FIELD DEPENDENCE IN THE LAB (the rod-and-frame task) The line is: A—perfectly vertical B—a couple of degrees off vertical
The line is: A—perfectly vertical B—a couple of degrees off vertical Right answer --> B
41
FIELD DEPENDENCE IN THE LAB: Attending to foreground and background (fish) American vs Japanese (fish + original background; fish + no background; fish + novel background)
Americans: unaffected by background manipulation Japanese: more errors with new background (not affected by absent background)
42
FOCAL ATTENTION: Attention operationalized as gaze direction: eye-tracking data
the more time the bigger difference in cultural groups but not within the group itself. Time matters for attention processing, but not in the long run.
43
UNDERSTANDING BEHAVIOR OF OTHERS: Analytic thinkers
more likely to make dispositional attributions even when contextual/environmental constraints are made explicit, e.g., more related to the person then the context
44
UNDERSTANDING BEHAVIOR OF OTHERS: Holistic thinkers
Holistic thinkers are more likely to pay attention to contextual information and make situational attributions. e.g., more related to the context then the person
45
ACCEPTING CONTRADICTION:
Analytic thinking: traceable to Greek philosophical tradition, heavy on formal logic * Does not accept contradictions: A=B or A=Not B Holistic thinking: traceable to Chinese philosophical tradition (Confucianism), focus on continual change * Everything is interconnected, moving between opposites - attitudes to the self: Holistic thinkers give more contradictory self-descriptions - future expectations: Analytic thinkers assume linear progressions, holistic thinkers expect change
46
OTHER INFLUENCES ON THINKING: TALKING
- Vocalizing thoughts helps Westerners but not Easterners --> Speech forces focus which facilitates analytic thinking but interferes with holistic thinking
47
LANGUAGE & THOUGHT: All spoken communication contains both implicit (i.e. nonverbal) and explicit information.
High context cultures (East-Asian) = people highly connected with each other, much shared information guides behavior, less explicit information is needed for communication --> harder time ignoring implicit information Low context cultures (Western) = less shared information, more explicit information is necessary for communication
48
LANGUAGE & THOUGHT: Linguistic relativity
Strong version = language determines thought: without access to the right words, people cannot have certain kinds of thoughts Weak version = language influences thought: having access to certain words influences the kinds of thoughts that one has
49
EFFECTS OF LANGUAGE ON PERCEPTION AND COGNITION
* Color perception * Odor perception * Temporal perception * Spatial perception * Perception of agency * Numerical cognition & math

Cross-cultural Psychology of Health & Illness (Leiden University 22-23) (5 decks)

Brainscape helps you reach your goals faster, through stronger study habits.
© 2025 Bold Learning Solutions. Terms and Conditions