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Summary Chapter 2 - Social psychology
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The notes are based on Chapter 2 in 'Social Psychology, a South African perspective' textbook.
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Chapter 2Culture and nature
1st Topic
Introduction
Gender identity
o Consider the case of Brenda: born a boy, but raised as a girl after a botched circumcision
Never fit in; wanted to play rough games like the boys; became rebellious.
Additional cases revealed that others born as boys, but raised as girls, did not turn out to be
typical adult women
o Some parts of who you are come from biology.
Nature, nurture and social behaviour
Psyche: A broad term for mind, encompassing emotions, desires, perceptions, and all other
psychological processes.
o Nature and culture have shaped each other.
o Nature and culture shape the psyche.
o Nature has prepared human being specifically for culture.
Nature: The physical world around us, including its laws and processes.
o Includes trees, animals, gravity, birth, death
o Can help explain human behavior
o Geneticists: behaviour is the result of genes
o Advocates of nature: evolutionary theory to understand bahaviour patterns
Culture: What people learn from their parents, from society and from their own experiences.
Charles Darwin: Theory of evolution
Theory of Evolution: A theory proposed by Charles Darwin to explain how change occurs in
nature.
o Focuses on how change occurs in nature
o The drive to prolong life
o Change from one generation to the next
Natural selection: The process whereby those members of a species that survive and produce
most effectively are the ones that pass along their genes to future generations.
, Natural selection decides which traits will disappear, and which will endure
o Survival: living longer, living long enough to reproduce
o Reproduction: producing babies that are also able to reproduce
o Mutation: new gene or combination of genes
Nature and Social Behavior
Human being are social ‘animals’, or social being who seek connections to others.
Being social is a strategy that enables some species to survive and reproduce effectively.
Being social benefits survival and reproduction rates.
Advantages of being social:
o Find more food
o Mate and reproduce easier
o Alert each other to danger
o Take care of sick and injured
Disadvantages of being social:
o It is more difficult to achieve than a solitary life.
To achieve being social, social animals need complex, powerful brains.
The social brain
o Social brain theory: Animals with bigger brains live in larger, more complex social groups
o Human beings have evolved brains to enable them to have rich, complex social lives.
o Social animals (including humans) accomplish things by means of social interaction
o People with bigger social networks have been found to be bigger in some key parts of the
brain. (Orbital Frontal Cortex)
o Inner processes serve interpersonal functions.
Culture and Human Social Life
Social animals: Animals that seek connections to others and prefer to live, work and play with
other members of their species.
Cultural animals: Humans have rich & powerful cultural systems
Culture is the essence of what makes us human
Culture is a kind of social system.
Culture is an advanced way of being social.
Culture Defined
Important features of culture
o Shared ideas: the brain is strongly oriented toward shared ideas
o Culture as a social system: network linking many different people
o Culture as praxis: shared ways of doing things
o All cultures use language to encode and share information
o Cultural animal theory: The view that evolution shaped the human psyche so as to enable
humans to create and take part in culture.
Culture: an information-based system that includes shared ideas and common ways of doing
things
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