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Cross Cultural Psychology - Coggle Diagram
Cross Cultural Psychology
Sense of community
Membership: the feeling of belonging or sharing a sense of personal relatedness. Having membership also means there must be boundary - some people belong others do not. This boundary provides emotional safety which is important for fulfilment of needs and also helps members develop closer connections to each other. This can be helped by having a common symbol. Personal investment increases dentification with a community.
Influence: To feel a part of a community a person needs to see themselves as having influence over that community and perceive they matter to it. Communities also exert an influence over the individual - its a bidirectional relationship.
Integration and fulfilment of needs: Being a part of a community needs to have positive reinforcement of association for its members. Relevant reinforcers include the status of the membership in the community, success of the community and how skilled other community members are. It is also important that there are shared values as this allows the community to prioritise actions which members find most rewarding. It is also best if the community can have people reinforced by contributing to the fulfillment of other members' needs.
Shared emotional needs: members need to identify with a past history of events relevant to the community. These events should have closure as ambiguous interactions inhibit cohesiveness of a community. The more important events are to members the more likely they are to bond. Members should also have frequent contact - the more positive/high quality these interactions are the lower social distance is likely to be. Investment increases emotional significance of group members. Greater emotional investment = greater connection is likely to be. Being humiliated/honoured has a significant impact on members connection to a community. Further, all communities share a spiritual bond of some form which contributes to shared emotional needs.
Combining cultures
Assimilate: when a minority group changes to adopt behaviours, values and beliefs of a majority culture and lose their own culture.
Integrate: the minority culture becomes a part of the social structure of the majority.
Pluralism: where smaller groups are integrated into a dominant group and retain their own cultural identity and beliefs, behaviours and values so long as they don't conflict with those of the majority.
Multi-culturalism: where there are many cultures which retain their distinct identities, however, in multi-culturalism there is no distinct culture.
Challenges of immigration
Culture shock: describes a range of experiences associated with living in an unfamiliar culture. Includes anxiety, stress, panic, disorientation, feelings of vulnerability and misunderstandings that occur as a result of extended cross-cultural contact. Symptoms can result in people socially withdrawing and having reduced self-esteem. Often heightened by homesickness.
Acculturation: change that results from continuous first-hand contact with an unfamiliar culture often resulting in changes in mental wellbeing and allculturative stress.
Assimilation: process where a person adapts a new culture and loses their previous one. A form of acculturation and can take various forms itself. E.g. assimilation could be forced or cultures could merge to form a new one.
Cultural diversity as a source of conflict
Social identity theory tells us that we categorise people into groups and elevate groups we hold membership to. Confirmation and self-serving biases can ingrain stereotypes about other groups and due to fundamental attribution error we are likely to attribute behaviours to dispositional factors rather than situational ones. These stereotypes can develop into racism (explicit or implicit).
Reducing prejudice
Intergroup contact: Having contact with each other (and avoiding segregation) reduces social distance and as we learn more about people from other groups we identify with them more and are less prejudiced against them. However, prejudice does reduce the likelihood of intergroup contact due to anxieties about interactions with members of the group.
Sustained contact: contact must also be sustained. If contact is not ongoing there is a high risk that insufficient information will allow stereotypes to continue. Additionally, to build trust for members where there was pervious prejudice multiple interactions must occur. The eventual goal is that people learn to see members of the group they were prejudiced towards as individuals rather than defining them by their membership also known as reducing perceptions of outgroup homogeneity.