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Culture - Y2 - Coggle Diagram
Culture - Y2
What is culture?
A set of attitudes, behaviours and symbols shared by a large group of people and usually communicated from one generation to the next (Shiraev and Levy, 2016)
- Attitudes - an enduring organisation of beliefs, feelings and behavioural tendencies towards socially significant objects, groups, events or symbols
-> Also, a general feeling or evaluation - positive or negative - about a person, object or issue (Hogg, 2020)
-> Beliefs - political, ideological, moral and religious etc
-> Values, opinions, superstitions and stereotypes
- Behaviour - what people actually do, which can be measured objectively
How does our culture influence who we are?
- Self
- Behaviours - norms, roles, customs, traditions, habits, practices and fashions
- Norms
Symbols - represent things or ideas
- Come in different forms - material objects, a colour, a sound, a slogan, a building, a flag
- The meaning which people give to things differs
In psychological science -
- Volkerpsychologie - Wilhelm Wundt, 1832-1920
-> Psychological experiments were too limited in researching human behaviour
-> He created a brand of psychology which would use comparative methods instead of just experiments alone
-> This was a type of psychology which dealt with the communal and cultural products of human nature which includes religions, languages and mythologies
Culture is a set of attitudes, behaviours and symbols shared by a large group of people
- Cross cultural psychology is the study of psychological phenomena, using comparative methods; across cultures
- Some phenomena can be considered universal - there is much between and within variation
- Culture varies among many multiple dimensions -
-> Individualism-collectivism, looseness-tightness, power distance
- Culture influences self-concept, behaviour and norms adherence
Why American psychology needs to become less American - Arnett, 2009
- 95% of participants are from WEIRD - Western, Educated, Industrialised, Rich and Democratic countries
- 68% came from the US
- Most first authors are from the US - from 1998-2007, 70-80% of authors were from universities in the US
- Slightly better in social psychology, in which 65% of first authors are from the US
WEIRD - western, educated, industrialised, rich and democratic - psychologically distinct group (Hernich, Heine and Norenzayan, 2010)
- WEIRD participants demonstrate some of the most extreme responses in behavioural science research e.g. visual perception, analytic reasoning, fairness, cooperation and memory
Cross cultural psychology -
- Systematic study of behaviour and experience as it occurs in different cultures (Triandis, 1980)
- Critical and comparative study of cultural effects on human psychology (Shiraev and Levy, 2016)
How the West became WEIRD: https://news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/2020/09/joseph-henrich-explores-weird-societies/
- These cultures make people more analytical, individualistic and impersonal
- Prioritise impersonal pro-sociality over interpersonal relationships
- Highly individual - tendencies to self enchance and be overconfident
- Rely on analytics rather than holistics
-> WEIRD people focus on people's intentions, beliefs and desires in moral judgement rather than their actions
-> E.g. murder - in WEIRD culture, charge depends on intention - not the case elsewhere
- WEIRD institutional influence -
-> As European societies became dominated by monogamous nuclear families, laws centered on the individual and their intentions, rights and obligations as separate from their kin groups
-> These families cause more analytic, individual and impersonal thinking - only care about self and family
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Six dimensions of culture - Hofstede, 1980; 2011
- Power distance - extent to which the less powerful members of institutions and organisations within a country expect and accept that power is distributed unequally
- Individualism - collectivism - integration of individuals into primary groups
- Masculinity - femininity - division of gender roles between women and men
- Uncertainty - avoidance - level of stress in society in the face of an unknown future (society's tolerance for ambiguity)
- Long-short term orientation - choice of focus for people's efforts; the future or the present and past (example; spending and consumption v savings and investment)
- Indulgence - restraint - gratification v control of basic human desires related to enjoying life
Culture articles
Rethinking the concept and measurement of societal culture in light of empirical findings - Schwartz et al, 2013:
https://journals-sagepub-com.surrey.idm.oclc.org/doi/full/10.1177/0022022113490830
- Values vary much more within countries than between them - cultural values are not individual ones (interaction of various beliefs?)
- This challenges the idea of culture as a shared meaning system with high consensus, in which values have a central role
- Concept of a culture that does not assume shared individual values - views societal culture as the hypothetical, latent and normative value system that underlies and justifies the functioning of social institutions
-> Culture is therefore external to individuals
- Lack of in-country consensus in personal values does not challenge the idea of cultural values as a set of hypothetical, latent variables and there is still an ability to infer cultural values from individual ones
-> Concept of culture does not require a high degree of sharedness
-> Cultural values are not all individual values - culture values concern institutions
-> Cultural values explain nation-level differences in attitudes and behaviours, whereas individual values explain individual differences
Psychology and culture - Lehman, Chiu and Schaller, 2004:
- Culture influences psychological processes, and these influence culture
- Individual thoughts and actions influence cultural norms and practices as they evolve over time, and these cultural norms and practices influence the thoughts and actions of individuals
- Cross cultural research has enriched this area
- Context of research - evolutionary processes, epistemic needs, interpersonal communication, attention, perception, attributional thinking, self regulation, human agency, self worth and contextual activation of cultural paradigms
Culture, mind and the brain - Kitayama and Uksul, 2011 -https://www-annualreviews-org.surrey.idm.oclc.org/content/journals/10.1146/annurev-psych-120709-145357
- Neuronal-culture interaction - brain serves as a crucial site that accumulates the effect of cultural experience, with neural connectivity likely modified through sustained engagement in cultural practices
- Culture is a collective process composed of cross-generationally transmitted values and associated behavioural patterns - practices, tasks and conventions
-> Collective level factors - ecology, economic development, industrialisation, socio-economic status, residential mobility, pathogen susceptbility, voluntary frontier settlement
-> Cultural values more likely to be transmitted in family lines, cultural practices are more likely to spread horizontally though behavioural imitation
Neural changes that results from engagement in cultural practices
- As each individual forms self identity, the individual chooses from the pool of available practices the one that suits their developing identity best and incorporates them as cultural tasks - which they perform to become a respectable member of the culture
- As a result of repeated, sustained engagement in cultural tasks, relevant brain pathways undergo rewiring - neuroplasticity - linked to self-beliefs on cultural dimensions
- Culturally shaped activation patterns of the brain script behaviours when these are called for by the specfici situation
-> Enables automatic action - achieve biological adaptation as assessed by reproductive success - culture is a context of biological selection
- Behaviour, brain, culture and genes are related
-> Gene expressions depend on cultural environment, and cultural environments themselves are the creation of people who show culture-contingent behaviours
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Tight and Loose cultures - Gelfand et al, 2011
(Differences between tight and loose cultures: A 33 nation study - Gelfand, 2011 - in lecture: https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.1197754)
- Tight societies -> have strong norms and a low tolerance of deviant behaviour
- Loose societies -> have weak norms and a high tolerance of deviant behaviour
- Tightness-looseness is independent of other cultural dimensions -
-> Japan - collectivistic and tight
-> Brazil - collectivistic and loose
How does culture influence social norms -
- Anthropologist Pelto (1968) observed differences in cultures propensity to follow norms
- Tight cultures -
-> Hutterites - Germany Ethnic group
-> Lubara people - centra sudanic people
- Loose cultures -
-> Skolt Sami - Northern Norway, Finland and Russia
-> Kung - Sans people from the Kalahari desert
Gelfand et al, 2011 -
- N = 6823 respondents from 33 nations
- 6 item scale measuring cultural tightness and looseness
- People generally agree about the tightness and looseness
- People generally agree about the tightness and looseness of their culture
- Countries with greater historical and ecological hardships are tighter
- People in tight nations are less likely to participate in collective action (Gelfand et al, 2011)
- Especially when they are public (e.g. demonstrations, protests, petition signing)
Tigther cultures have been able to contain the spread of the COVID-19 virus more effectively and efficiently than looser cultures
- Tight societies have -
-> Higher impulse control
-> More cautious
-> Greater self-monitoring
Liu et al, 2018 -
- N = 13,789 (39% male, 60% female and 1% did not indicate gender
- Participants were Facebook users from different states in the US
- Aims and methods -
-> Online survey to compare Facebook users from different states in the US in terms of their emotional expression on social media
- Findings -
-> Participants from tight (v loose) states in the US -> more likely to express positive emotions than negative emotions on Facebook, especially if they had a dense (v sparse) network
-> Individuals from tight (v loose) cultures may use more impression management strategies to maintain a positive image in their online communities
Violence against women in tight and loose cultures - Jamshed et al, 2022
- N = 315 (56.3% women, 43.7% men) participants from the US - loose culture
- N = 138 (73% women, 27% men) participants from Pakistan (tight culture)
- Aim -
-> To examine sexual double standards and violence against women in the US and Pakistan
- Theoretical model -
-> Social dominance theory - human societies tend to be organised as group-based social hierarchies, including hierarchies based on gender, age, religion and ethnicity (Sidanius and Pratto, 2001)
- Method - online survey
- Key variables - social dominance orientation, sexual double standards, cultural tightness/looseness norms i.e. norms around sexuality
- Key findings -
-> Social dominance orientation is positively associated with endorsing sexual double standards across both countries (Pakistan and the US) regardless of tightness / looseness
-> Both are patriarchal societies, regardless of their levels of tightness/looseness
-
Norms violations - Stamkou et al, 2019
Rationale - norms violations may be considered a threat to the social order in tight cultures, which is particularly problematic given that these contexts tend to have high ecological and human-made threats
- Main hypothesis -
-> Collectivism and tightness are positively associated with moral outrage (anger, contempt, disgust) in response to a moral violation
- Sample - N = 2,369 participants in 19 countries
- Scenario - norm violation v norm adherence
-> Organisational meeting in which the focal actor named K, either violated or adhered to norms typical for organisational meetings, such as punctuality, discretion and talking in turns norms
- Results -
-> Higher levels of collectivism - higher moral outrage in response to norm violations - also, norm violator is perceived as less powerful
-> Lower levels of collectivism - lower moral outrage in response to norm violations - also, norm violator is perceived as more powerful
-> Respondents in tighter cultures expressed a stronger preference for norms followers as leaders