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CCPHI - Summary book (4th ed.) C1, 3-11, 13-15
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Summary of the book Cultural Psychology (International Student Edition) 4th ed. (schoolyear )
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C1 - A PSYCHOLOGY FOR A CULTURAL SPECIESWhat Is Culture?
First, culture is acquired from other members of one’s species through social learning that can
influence an individual’s behaviors.
Second, a culture is a group of people who are existing within some kind of shared context.
Third, culture refers to a dynamical group of people who share a similar context, are exposed to
many similar cultural messages, and contain a broad range of different individuals who are affected
by those cultural messages in various ways.
A few challenges with thinking about a group of people as constituting a culture.
- First, the boundaries are not always clear-cut.
- Second, cultures change over time.
- Perhaps the most important challenge is the variability among individuals who belong to the
same culture.
- Each person inherits a distinct temperament
- Each person belongs to a unique collection of various social groups, each with its
own distinctive culture
- Each person has a unique history of individual experiences that has shaped his or her
views.
Psychological Processes Can Vary Across Cultures
In various cultures around the world, psychological processes emerge in quite different ways.
General psychology assumes that the mind operates according to a set of natural and universal laws
that are independent from context or content.
According to this perspective, important cultural variations in ways of thinking cannot exist because
cultures merely provide variations in context and content that lie outside the operations of the
underlying CPU.
An assumption that tends to be embraced by cultural psychologists is that in many ways the mind
does not operate independently of what it is thinking about.
Thinking also involves participation in the context within which one is doing the thinking and
interacting with the content one is thinking about.
Because humans are cultural beings, their actions, thoughts, and feelings are immersed in cultural
information, and this information renders these actions, thoughts, and feelings to be meaningful.
The human brain continues to change, grow, and rewire itself in response to experience.
And because cultures provide people with particular sets of experiences on a daily basis, we can see
how cultural influences could change their brains.
When people in one culture are considering a particular cultural idea, they will focus on it a great
deal, creating a rich network of thoughts, behaviors, and feelings.
,Culture and mind make each other up. Cultures emerge from the interaction of the various minds of
the people that live within them, and cultures, in turn, shape how those minds operate.
When we consider culture and psychology, we have two contrasting views:
- One view is that psychological processes are essentially the same everywhere
- The other view is that psychological processes emerge differently according to the cultural
context
Nonuniversal → a particular psychological process can be said to not exist in all cultures, this reflects
an absence of universality. Nonuniversals are cultural inventions.
Existential universal → a psychological process is said to exist in all cultures, although the process is
not necessarily used to solve the same problems, nor is it equally accessible across cultures.
Functional universal → psychological processes that exist in all cultures, are used to solve the same
problems across cultures, yet are more accessible to people from some cultures than others.
Accessibility universal → a given psychological process exists in all cultures, is used to solve the
same problems across cultures, and is accessible to the same degree across cultures.
WEIRD societies → Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, Democratic
First, not only is the Müller-Lyer illusion an illusion in certain cultures but not others, but the cultural
variability points to a psychological mechanism that underlies the illusion.
Second,
- People from industrialized societies respond differently than those from small-scale societies
- People from Western industrialized societies demonstrate more pronounced responses than
those from non-Western societies
- Americans show yet more extreme responses than other Westerners
- The responses of contemporary American college students are even more different than
those of non-college-educated American adults.
Why Study Cultural Psychology?
In order to comprehend how the mind operates, it’s important to understand the role cultural
experiences play in terms of how people think and feel.
Color-blind approach:people are the same everywhere.
Attention to differences between groups can lead to discrimination. If people’s attention is not
drawn to the differences between cultures, they will be less likely to create boundaries between
themselves and others, and they will all get along better.
Multicultural approach: focusing on and respecting group differences.
Groups that emphasize multicultural messages fare better in many ways than groups that emphasize
color-blind messages.
An increased understanding and appreciation of cultural differences can lead people of different
backgrounds to get along better, be more fully engaged in their work, and be able to detect
discrimination when it exists.
,You Are a Product of Your Own Culture
We don’t really come to understand our own culture until we see it in contrast to other cultures.
Ethnocentrism: judging people from other cultures by the standards of one’s own culture.
C3 - CULTURAL EVOLUTION
Where Does Cultural Variation Come From?
Some of the influences of the physical environment on culture are quite direct.
Ecological differences can have indirect effects on culture as well. Different physical surroundings do
not just affect the diets of people; the different foraging behaviors can also come to affect how the
societies are structured and the values people come to adopt.
Proximate causes are those that have direct and immediate relationship with their effects.
Distal causes are those initial differences that lead to effects over long time periods, often through
indirect relationships.
Ways of thinking can also be influenced by geography.
Evoked culture refers to the idea that all people regardless of where they are from, have a
biologically based repertoire of behaviors that are accessible to them, and these behaviors are
engaged for appropriate situations.
Transmitted culture: people come to certain cultural practices through social learning, or by
modeling the behavior of others who live near them.
How Do Ideas Catch On?
Cultural evolution requires that certain ideas be passed on to others, and cultures change when new
ideas become widely shared.
Natural selection is the evolutionary process that occurs when the following three conditions are
present:
- Individual variability exists among members of a species on certain traits;
- Those traits are associated with different reproductive rates;
- Those traits have a hereditary basis.
Some ideas are more likely to attract followers than others, thereby becoming more common in
subsequent generations. As ideas become more common in a population, the beginning of the
cultural evolution of norms occurs.
One difference is that genes are copied faithfully from one generation to the next. Copying errors
are much more common for cultural ideas, and these errors are often intentional innovations that
are planned, rather than random accidents.
, A second key difference is that genes can only be passed vertically from parents to offspring, and the
evolution of genes is an enormously slow and gradual process that occurs across many generations.
A cultural idea can pass horizontally from one person to anyone else, it can be transmitted to many
people in an instant.
A third difference is that cultural ideas do not have to be adaptive in order to become common,
unlike evolutionary processes with genes.
Factors That Cause Ideas to Spread
Communicable ideas
What we communicate can change over time, in part, because the words we use also change over
time. One reason is that we are more likely to use words that are easier to remember. Another
reason is that some ideas are more likely to be communicated by others.
Stereotypes can be seen to reflect shared ideas in particular cultural contexts about some specific
cultural groups.
We are far more likely to communicate with people we see routinely than those we rarely meet.
Because of this people tend to be more infuenced by the ideas of those with whom they regularly
interact.
Dynamic social impact theory states that individuals influence each other through interacting,
ultimately leading to clusters of like-minded people who are separated by geography - cultures, in
other words.
Useful ideas
People will be more likely to remember and share stories that contain useful information.
Emotional ideas
Contemporary legends, also known as urban legends, are fictional stories that are told in modern
societies as though they are true.
We are motivated to share our emotional responses because doing so lets us connect with others.
Ideas that are sometimes unexpected
The kinds of stories that are especially likely to persist in our memories are ones that contain a few
minimally counterintuitive ideas, or statements that are surprising and unusual in the sense that
they violate our expectations but are not too outlandish.
How Have Cultures Been Changing?
Cultural interconnections are resulting in the formation of a global culture.
One common reaction has been for people to reject the globalizing force in an effort to return to the
traditional cultures of their past.
Yet despite globalization, there is increasing cultural diversity within the borders of many countries,
as many nations receive immigrants from around the world.
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