Unit 1

Introduction

Goals of Psychology

 The first is to build a body of knowledge about people. Psychologists seek to understand behaviour when it
happens, explain why it happens, and even predict it before it happens. Psychologists achieve this by conducting
research and creating theories of behaviour based on the findings from that research.
 The second goal of psychology involves allowing others to take that body of knowledge and apply it to intervene
in people’s lives to help improve those lives.

Cultural Psychology

 A subdiscipline within psychology that examines the cultural foundations of psychological processes and
human behaviour.
 It includes theoretical and methodological frameworks that posit an important role for culture and its influence
on mental processes behaviour, and vice versa.

What is Culture?

 Human culture as a unique meaning and information system, shared by a group and transmitted across
generations, that allows the group to meet basic needs of survival, pursue happiness and well-being, and derive
meaning from life.
 Functional Understanding of Culture
o People have needs that must be met in order to survive, and come to the world with a universal
psychological toolkit to help address those needs.
o They live in groups, and the groups exist in different ecologies, with different resources.
o Thus, groups of people need to adapt their behaviours to their ecologies by maximizing the use of their
available resources in order to meet their needs; the abilities and aptitudes in their psychological toolkits
give them the tools to adapt.
o These adaptations produce behaviours, ways of living, ways of thinking, and ways of being.
o These ways become the contents of a group’s culture.
o The concept of culture in fact, is an abstract metaphor for these ways.
 Definitions
o Tylor (1865)
 defined culture as all capabilities and habits learned as members of a society.
o Linton (1936)
 referred to culture as social heredity.
o Jahoda (1984)
 argued that culture is a descriptive term that captures not only rules and meanings but also
behaviours.
 o Geertz (1975)
 defined it as shared symbol systems transcending individuals.
o Berry et al. (1992)
 defined culture simply as the shared way of life of a group of people.

Where does Culture Come From?

 Group Life
o Humans are social animals, and have always lived in groups.
o Groups increase our chances for survival because they increase efficiency through division of labour.
o The division of labour allows groups to accomplish more than any one person can, which is functional
and adaptive for all the members of the group.
o Division of labour allows for accomplishing more tasks so that survival rates increase.
o But there’s a downside to living in groups, which is that there is potential for social conflict and chaos
because people are different.
o Because of those differences, groups can become inefficient, reducing the probability for survival.
 Environment
o Groups live in specific environments, and the ecologies of those environments have a major impact on
how they live.
o One aspect of ecology that influences cultures is climate.
o More important to culture than the absolute temperature of an area is the deviation from temperate
climate.
o Humans need to regulate their body temperatures and have an easier time doing so in temperate climates,
which happens to be around 22°C.
o Harsher climates also create greater risks of food shortage and food spoilage, stricter diets, and more
health problems.
o Demanding climates require special clothing, housing, and working arrangements, special organizations
for the production, transportation, trade, storage of food, and special care and cure facilities.
o Another factor is population density. The number of people living within a given unit of space.
o In a place like a city in which a large number of people live in a relatively small space, the population
density is higher than in a rural area where fewer people live in each similar amount of space.
o Population density is the number of people in an area in relation to the amount of arable land in that area
- that is the amount of land on which food can grow to sustain the people in that area.
o A huge number of people in a small amount of space with scarce food will create a different way of living
compared to a small number of people in a huge amount of space with abundant food.
o Other ecological factors also influence culture. For instance, global changes in climate across history have
affected the evolution of humans, as has the incidence and prevalence of infectious diseases in different
regions of the world.
 Resources
o Resources can be natural, such as the presence or absence of water or land to farm to grow vegetables or
raise animals.
 o A land void of natural resources may encourage teamwork and community spirit among its members and
interrelationships with other groups that have abundant resources in order to survive.
o These needs and relationships will foster certain psychological characteristics and attributes that
complement teamwork, community spirit, and interdependence.
o In a land with abundant resources, however, a group would have less need for such values and attitudes,
and these attributes would be less important in its culture.
o Perhaps the major type of resource that influences cultures today is money.
o Money is a human cultural product; it is not a natural resource part of the land or environment.
o Affluence, which refers to the amount of money available to a person or group, can have a major impact
on culture.
 The Evolved Human Mind
o Needs and Motives
 Humans have basic needs that are ultimately related to reproductive success.
 These include physical needs, safety and security needs.
 These needs are universal to all people of all cultures.
 These basic needs are associated with social motives which include the motive to achieve and the
motive to affiliate with others.
o Universal Psychological Toolkits
 The universal psychological toolkit is a term we use to refer to the many abilities and aptitudes
that nature and evolution endowed humans with in order to help them to address their basic
needs and social motives, and ultimately to adapt and survive.
 These tools emerged with the evolution of the human brain, and are important parts of the
human mind

 Morality, a uniquely human product, is rooted in this unique human cognitive ability.
 One of the major functions of language, in fact, is to allow us to communicate a shared intentionality.
 Another important ability that humans have that animals do not is the ability to continually build upon
improvements.
 When humans create something that is good, it usually evolves to a next generation, in which it is
even better.
 Ratchet Effect – The concept that humans continually improve on improvements, that they do not
go backward or revert to a previous state. Progress occurs because improvements move themselves
upward, much like a ratchet.
Is Culture a Uniquely Human Product?

 Animals have cultures too.

o Many animals are social; that is, they work and live in groups.
o In animal societies, there are clear social networks and hierarchies.
o Many animals invent and use tools.
o Many animals communicate with each other.
 Yet human cultures are different from other animal cultures, and understanding how we are different serves as an
important basis to understanding how all humans are universally similar in important ways.
 Cumulative culture allows human cultures to differ from animal cultures on complexity, differentiation, and
institutionalization.

Difference between Society and Culture

 Society
o Society is a system of interrelationships among people.
o It refers to the structure of relationships that exist among individuals.
o In human societies, individuals have multiple relationships with multiple groups, and the groups
themselves have interrelationships with other groups.
o Thus, human societies are complex.
o Nonhuman animals are also social and have societies
 Culture
o Culture, however, refers to the meanings and information that are associated with those social networks.
o Family is a social group that exists in both the human and nonhuman animal world.
o But human cultures give the concept of family its own unique meaning, and individuals draw specific
information from these meanings.
o Moreover, different human cultures assign different meanings to this social group.
o Thus, while many societies have a structural system of interrelationships, the meanings associated with
those systems are cultural.

Contents of Culture

 Objective Elements
o The objective elements of culture involve objective, explicit elements that are physical.
o These would include architecture, clothes, foods, art, eating utensils, and the like.
o In today’s world, advertising, texts, architecture, art, mass media, television, music, the Internet, Facebook,
and Twitter are all physical, tangible, and important artifacts of culture.
 Subjective Elements
o Values
 Values are guiding principles that refer to desirable goals that motivate behaviour.
 They define the moral, political, social, economic, aesthetic, or spiritual ethics of a person or
group of people.
 Values can exist on two levels—personal values and cultural values.
 Personal values represent transitional desirable goals that serve as guiding principles in people’s
lives.
 Cultural values are shared, abstract ideas about what a socially collective view as good, right, and
desirable.
 Hofstede suggests that there are five value dimensions that differentiate cultures –
 Individualism vs. Collectivism
 Power Distance
 Uncertainty Avoidance
 Masculinity versus Femininity
 Long- versus Short-Term Orientation
 Another approach to understanding cultural values comes from Shalom Schwartz, who has
identified seven cultural values that are universal -
 Embeddedness - The degree to which cultures will emphasize the maintenance of the
status quo, propriety, and restraint of actions or inclinations that might disrupt the
solidarity of the group or the traditional order. It fosters social order, respect for tradition,
family security, and self-discipline.
 Hierarchy - The degree to which cultures emphasize the legitimacy of hierarchical
allocation of fixed roles and resources such as social power, authority, humility, or wealth.
 Mastery - The degree to which cultures emphasize getting ahead through active self-
assertion or by changing and mastering the natural and social environment. It fosters
ambition, success, daring, and competence.
 Intellectual Autonomy - The degree to which cultures emphasize promoting and
protecting the independent ideas and rights of the individual to pursue his/her own
intellectual directions. It fosters curiosity, broadmindedness, and creativity.
 Affective Autonomy - The degree to which cultures emphasize the promotion and
protection of people’s independent pursuit of positive experiences. It fosters pleasure
and an exciting or varied life.
 Egalitarianism - The degree to which cultures emphasize transcending selfish interests in
favour of the voluntary promotion of the welfare of others. It fosters equality, social
justice, freedom, responsibility, and honesty.
 Harmony - The degree to which cultures emphasize fitting in with the environment. It
fosters unity with nature, protecting the environment, and a world of beauty.
 Some cultural values are non-negotiable. These are called sacred values and they differ from
normal values because they incorporate moral beliefs that drive action in ways dissociated from
prospects for success.
 Beliefs
 A belief is a proposition that is regarded as true, and different cultures foster different belief
systems.
 Cultural beliefs are known as social axioms.
 They are assertions about the relationship between two or more entities or concepts; people
endorse and use them to guide their behaviour in daily living.
 Leung et al. (2002) demonstrated the universal existence of five types of social axioms on the
individual level in 41 cultural groups.
 Bond et al. (2004) then conducted cultural-level analyses on these data, and demonstrated that
two social axiom dimensions existed on the cultural level –
 Dynamic Externality - This dimension represents an outward-oriented, simplistic
grappling with external forces that are construed to include fate and a supreme being. It
is the culture-level reflection of the belief structures that form part of a psychological
constellation that aids citizens to mobilize psychologically to confront environmental
difficulties. Cultures high on this dimension tend to be more collectivistic, conservative,
hierarchical; have high unemployment levels, less freedom, and fewer human-rights
activities; and have aspirations for security, material resources, and a longer life. There is
a strong sense of spirituality in this dimension.
 Societal Cynicism - This dimension represents a predominantly cognitive apprehension
or pessimism of the world confronting people. Cultures high on this dimension believe
that the world produces malignant outcomes, that they are surrounded by inevitable
negative outcomes, and that individuals are suppressed by powerful others and subjected
to the depredations of wilful and selfish individuals, groups, and institution.
 Religion
 Religions are organized systems of beliefs, and are important to many people and
cultures.
 They tie together many attitudes, values, beliefs, worldviews, and norms.
 They provide guidelines for living.
 Religions are all similar in the sense that they serve a specific need—to help people
manage themselves and their behaviours with others in order to avoid social chaos and
provide social coordination. But they all do so in different ways.
o Norms
 Norms are generally accepted standards of behaviour for any cultural group.
 Norms dictate the behaviour that members of any culture have defined as the most appropriate
in any given situation.
 All cultures give guidelines about how people are expected to behave through norms.
 Norms and others kinds of social conventions are a normal aspect of our everyday lives.
 Normal behaviour is related to social rituals in different cultures.
 Rituals are culturally prescribed conduct or any kind of established procedure or routine.
  An important dimension of cultural variability with respect to norms involves a concept known
as tightness versus looseness (Pelto, 1968).
 Tightness–looseness has two key components:
 The strength of social norms, or how clear and pervasive norms are within societies
 The strength of sanctioning, or how much tolerance there is for deviance from norms
within societies
 It is a dimension of cultural variability that refers to the variability within a culture of its members
to norms.
 Tight cultures have less variability and are more homogeneous with respect to norms; loose
cultures have more variability and are more heterogeneous.
o Attitudes
 Attitudes are evaluations of things occurring in ongoing thoughts about those things, or stored in
memory.
 Cultures facilitate attitudes concerning actions and behaviours, which produces cultural filters.
 Cultures also foster attitudes that are not tied to specific kinds of actions, such as believing that
democracy is the best form of government.
o Worldview
 Cultures also differ importantly in cultural worldviews.
 These are culturally specific belief systems about the world; they contain attitudes, beliefs,
opinions, and values about the world.
 They are assumptions people have about their physical and social realities.
 An important aspect of our worldviews is how we think about our self—our self-concept.
 The cognitive representations of who one is, that is, the ideas or images that one has
about oneself, especially in relation to others, and how and why one behaves.
 The sum of one’s idea about one’s self, including physical, mental, historical, and
relational aspects, as well as capacities to learn and perform.
 Self-concept is usually considered central to personal identity and change over time.
 It is usually considered partially conscious and partially unconscious or inferred in a given
situation.
Interface between Psychology and Culture

Research

 Most research to date is based on WEIRDOS—

o Western
o Educated
o Industrialized
o Rich
o Democratic cultures
 It is severely limited because WEIRDOS aren’t representative of everyone as a whole and that psychologists
routinely use them to make broad, and quite likely false, claims about what drives human behaviour.

Cross-Cultural Research

 Cross-cultural research involves participants of differing cultural backgrounds and allows for comparisons of
findings across those cultures.
 Cross-cultural research is a method that allows psychologists to examine how knowledge about people and their
behaviours from one culture may or may not hold for people from other cultures.
 As a method, cross-cultural research can be understood as a matter of scientific philosophy—that is, the logic
underlying the methods used to conduct research and generate knowledge.
 This idea is based on a few assumptions.
o The results of any psychological research are bound by our methods, and the standards of care we use
when we evaluate the rigor and quality of research are also bound by the cultural frameworks within which
our science occurs.
o Theories depend on research to confirm or disconfirm them; research involves methods designed to
collect data to test theories and their hypotheses. Methods involve many parameters, one of which
includes decisions about the nature of the participants in the study.
o Cross-cultural research involves the inclusion of people of different cultural backgrounds - a specific type
of change in one of the parameters of research methods.
o Scientific philosophy suggests that we have a duty and an obligation to ask these questions about the
scientific process and about the nature of the truths we have learned, or will learn, about human behaviour.
 Cross-cultural research plays an important role in helping psychologists produce that accurate knowledge for all
because it tests whether what is true for some is also true for others.

The Contribution of the Study of Culture on Psychological Truths

 The contribution that cultural psychology and cross-cultural research makes to psychology as a whole goes far
beyond simple methodological changes in the studies.
 Cross-cultural research not only tests whether people of different cultures are similar or different; it also tests
possible limitations in our knowledge by examining whether psychological theories and principles are –
o universal (true for all people of all cultures)
o culture-specific (true for some people of some cultures)
  Because cross-cultural research is a method, it is not topic-specific.
 Thus, cultural psychologists are interested in a broad range of phenomena related to human behaviour - from
perception to language, child rearing to psychopathology.
 What distinguishes cultural psychology from mainstream psychology, therefore, is not the topic of study but the
interest in understanding cultural influences on behaviour, and the testing of limitations to knowledge using cross-
cultural research methods.

The Contribution of the Study of Culture in Our Own Lives

 Psychological theories are only as good as their applicability to people in their lives and one of the main
contributions of cross-cultural research to application is the process it fosters in asking questions.

The Growth of Cultural Psychology and Cross-Cultural Research

 Although cross-cultural research has been conducted for over a century, cultural psychology has truly made a
substantial impact on psychology in the past two decades.
 Much of this popularity is due to the increased awareness of the importance of culture as an influential factor on
behaviour and, unfortunately, to increased awareness of the frequency of intercultural conflicts within and between
countries.
 The flagship journal of the International Association of Cross-Cultural Psychology, the Journal of Cross-Cultural
Psychology, has now passed its 40th year of publishing top-level cross-cultural research.
Cultural Differences

Culture and Nationality

 Nationality refers to a person’s country of origin, and countries have their own cultures.
 This is because countries are associated with each of the factors that influence culture.
 The concept of country is a geopolitical demarcation that may include many different cultures.

Culture and Language

 A cultural group defines meaningful things in its world by encoding its world in words, and by incorporating unique
aspects of language (syntax, grammar, pragmatics).
 Thus, different language groups typically have different cultures.
 Even if the language is the same, different dialects of a language often denote slightly different cultures.
 English, for example, is the primary language of England, parts of Canada, the United States, Australia, and New
Zealand.
 But there are differences in the use of English in each of these countries, and they denote interesting differences
in their cultures.

Culture and Ethnicity

 The word ethnicity is derived from the Greek ethnos, meaning people of a nation or tribe, and is usually used to
denote one’s racial, national, or cultural origins.
 Ethnicity is generally used in reference to groups characterized by a common nationality, geographic origin,
culture, or language.
 Phinney (1996) has outlined three key aspects of ethnicity that deserve further attention:
o cultural norms and values
o the strength, salience, and meaning of ethnic identity
o attitudes associated with minority status.

Culture and Gender

 Sex refers to the biological differences between men and women, the most obvious being the anatomical
differences in their reproductive systems.
 Accordingly, the term sex roles are used to describe the behaviours and patterns of activities men and women
engage in that are directly related to their biological differences and the process of reproduction.
 Gender refers to the behaviours or patterns of activities that a society or culture deems appropriate for men and
women.
 These behaviour patterns may or may not be related to sex and sex roles, although they oftentimes are.
 Gender role refers to the degree to which a person adopts the gender-specific and appropriate behaviours ascribed
by his or her culture.
 Gender differences arise because of differences in the psychological cultures transmitted to men and women.
 Gender differences are thus cultural differences.
Culture and Disability

 Persons with disabilities share some type of physical impairment in their senses, limbs, or other parts of their
bodies.
 A number of authors have begun to describe the culture of disability.
 These works highlight the unique psychological and sociocultural characteristics of disabled individuals, refocusing
our attention on a broader picture of the person in understanding the psychological characteristics of persons with
disabilities.

Culture and Sexual Orientation

 People form different sexual relationships with others, and the persons with whom they form such relationships
constitute their sexual orientation.
 We often view these relationships as the sole or major defining characteristic of a person’s sexual orientation.
 These distinctive psychological characteristics may be cultural.
 Understanding shared psychological attributes among people sharing the same sexual orientation as cultural (e.g.,
gay culture) has become well accepted in the social sciences.

Culture and Race

 Race is not culture, and the terms should not be used interchangeably.
 Many contemporary scholars suggest that there are three major races—Caucasoid, Mongoloid, and Negroid— but
past studies of the origins of race have proposed as many as 37 different races.
 Many psychologists today agree that race is more of a social construction than a biological essential.
 People have a natural propensity to create categories, especially those dealing with human characteristics.
 Interesting issues arise when race is understood as a social construction.
 Category boundaries among the socially constructed races are ambiguous and vary with social context
 In some cultures, race is a continuum along a dimensional scale, not a category

Culture and Personality

 Culture is not personality, and just because individuals exist in a culture and are representatives of a culture, they
should not be equated with the culture.
 Culture is a macro, social, group-level construct; it is the social psychological frame within which individuals reside,
much like the structure of our houses and homes.
 Culture, as we have defined it, involves a meaning and information system that is shared among individuals and
transmitted across generations.
 Personality and individual differences are not necessarily shared.
 Culture is relatively stable across individuals, whereas personality is vastly different.

Culture and Popular Culture

 From time to time, it is fashionable to refer to fads that come and go as culture. This is also referred to as popular
culture by the mass media and in everyday conversation.
 Popular culture refers to trends in music, art, and other expressions that become popular among a group of
people.
 Certainly, popular culture and culture as we have defined it share some similarities - perhaps most importantly,
the sharing of an expression and its value by a group of people.
 But there are also important differences.
o Popular culture does not necessarily involve sharing a wide range of psychological attributes across various
psychological domains.
o A second important difference concerns cultural transmission across generations. Popular culture refers
to values or expressions that come and go as fads or trends within a few years. Culture is relatively stable
over time and even across generations.
Culture and Human Behaviour

How Does Culture Influence Human Behaviours and Mental Processes?

 Individuals begin the process of learning about their culture, and more specifically, the rules and norms of
appropriate behaviour in specific situations and contexts, through a process known as enculturation.
 The enculturation process gradually shapes and moulds individuals’ psychological characteristics, including how
individuals perceive their worlds, think about the reasons underlying their and other people’s action, have and
express emotions, and interact with others in specific contexts.
 As children grow older, they learn specific behaviours and patterns of activities appropriate and inappropriate for
their culture in specific situational contexts.
 Scientists agree that many psychological processes - attitudes, values, beliefs, personality, cognition - are inherently
constructed by culture, that is, that they are so intertwined and infused with cultural influences that it doesn’t make
sense to understand them outside of a cultural context.
 At the same time, much of our behaviours and mental processes are influenced by individual factors, which
include personality, biological factors, and human nature.
 No one can deny that people come to the world with an amazing degree of individual differences in personality,
temperament, reactivity, and sensitivity.
 Another important point to remember is that the system described above is not static or unidirectional.
 It is dynamic and interrelated; it feeds back on and reinforces itself.
 Cultures change over time as the behaviours of its members change, and the environments within which groups
exist change.
 Technological changes bring about changes in ways of living that in turn change culture.
 Even changes in the ecology, such as changes in climate, can bring about changes in ways of living, which will
bring about changes in culture.
 Changes in affluence of a region, culture, or even individuals bring about changes in ways of living, and thus
changes in culture.
Etics and Emic

 Etics refer to those processes that are consistent across different cultures; that is, etics refer to universal
psychological processes.
 Emics refer to those processes that are different across cultures; emics, therefore, refer to culture-specific
processes.
 Each culture has had a different combination of geography, climate, resources, previous culture, and contact with
other cultures.
 Although we’re all born with the same toolkits, our cultures help us use those toolkits in different ways.
 We all have emotions, but cultures tell us what to become emotional about, and what to do about it when we are
emotional.
 We all have a sense of morality, but cultures differ on what is right and wrong, good and bad.
 Thus, culture influences how we communicate, think, make decisions, plan for the future, and solve problems.
 It dictates about politeness and etiquette. It defines religion and taboos.
 Because cultures exist in different regions of the world, they all do these things differently.
 That’s why we see cultural differences in these (emics).
 People all around the world in different cultures are trying to accomplish many of the same things (etics); they are
just going about doing them in very different ways (emics).