Summary Cultural Psychology - Steven J. Heine (2020)
Chapter 1 - 13 (until ‘Culture and Sleep’ p. 510)
Chapter 1: A Psychology for a Cultural Species (p. 3-33)
- Humans are poorly developed for survival and don’t ensure the survival of our
species through rampant reproduction
- But humans have culture, which compensates for everything they lack
- Humans rely on culture more than any other species, and it is this reliance that has
enabled them to succeed in diverse environments
- People from different cultures live their lives differently
- Different languages, customs, foods, religious beliefs, child-rearing practices,
etc.
- Unique contribution from cultural psychology is that people from different cultures
also differ in the ways they think and behave
- Psychological processes are shaped by experiences
- People in different cultures have different experiences, and thus we
expect to find variations in the way they think
- Although experiences shape psychological processes, they do not determine
them
- Psychological processes are made possible and limited by the brain
structures that underlie them, and in every culture, people have
identical brains
What is culture?
- In this book, the term ‘culture’ means two things
- Culture is any kind of idea, belief, technology, habit or practice that is
acquired through learning from others
- Culture indicates a particular group of individuals
- Challenges with thinking about a group of people as constituting a culture
- Boundaries are not always clear-cut / distinct
- E.g. being exposed to other cultural ideas through immigrant parents
- Additionally, there are groups aside from countries, e.g. Jewish
culture, LGBT culture
- They still qualify as culture because the members exist within a
shared context, communicate with each other, have some
norms that distinguish them from other groups, and have some
practices and ideas
- Cultures change over time
- (Most important:) there might be 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 person has a unique history and individual experiences
- Cultural membership does not determine individual responses
Psychological Processes Can Vary Across Cultures
- In various cultures around the world, psychological processes emerge in quite
different ways
, - Cultural variation in psychological processes can extend much more deeply than
personal preferences
- Many basic psychological phenomena can emerge in different ways around
the worlds
Is the Mind Independent from, or Intertwined with, Culture?
- Richard Shweder → important cultural anthropologist (US)
- Argues that the field of psychology (general psychology) assumes that the
mind operates according to a set of natural and universal laws that are
independent from context or content
- “People are the same wherever you go” → not always the
case
- General psychologists tend to conceive the mind as a highly abstract
central processing unit (CPU) that operates independently of the
context within which it is thinking, or of the content it is thinking about.
- In 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
- Cultural psychologist assume that in many ways the mind does not operate
independently of what is it thinking about
- Thinking is not only the operation of universal CPU, but also involves
participation in the context within which one is doing the thinking and
interacting with the content one is thinking about
- People from Western cultures tend to perform better at absolute tasks, people from
non-Western cultures tend to perform better on relative tasks.
- How could the mind be shaped by cultural experiences?
- The human brain continues to change, grow, and rewire itself in response to
experience
- Brain is highly plastic throughout life, especially at a young age
- Hardware changes in response to what we do
- E.g. cab drives develop better navigation skills, not people with good
navigation skills become cab drivers
- 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, behaviours, and feelings.
- This network gets activated whenever people encounter a reminder of the
cultural idea
- Humans are so embedded in their cultural worlds that they are always behaving as
cultural actors, and their mental habits are continuously supported by the
interpretations they get from their culture
Case Study: The Sambia
- Initiation ritual to transform young boys into men
- Because boys are to dependent on their mothers
- Ritual involves pain, such as piercing the septum of the nose and thrashing
the boys with sticks
- They believe semen is acquired, through years of ritualised homosexual
behaviour, after marriage only heterosexual
- Such rituals are not only present in Sambian culture
, - In Western society, sexual orientation is seen differently, as a lifestyle which affects
how people view themselves, shapes their activities, and determines the people with
whom they associate
Psychological Universals and levels of AnalysisI
- There are four levels to identify the level of universality (from lowest - highest)
- Nonuniversal
- When a particular process does not exist in all cultures. This reflects
an absence of universality
- Existential universal
- When a psychological process is available in all cultures, but the
process is not necessarily used to solve the same problems, nor is it
equally accessible across cultures
- Functional universal
- When a psychological process exists in all cultures and is used to
solve the same problems across cultures, but is more accessible to
people from some cultures than others
- Accessibility universal
- When a psychological process exists in all cultures, is used to solve
the same problems across cultures, and is accessible to the same
degree across cultures
The Psychological Database Is Largely WEIRD
- Vast majority of psychological studies have thus far been limited to explorations of
the minds of people living in WEIRD-societies
- Western
- Educated
- Industrialised
- Rich
- Democratic
- Also not representative of Westerners more generally, participants recruited from
undergraduate psychology classes
- Available cross-cultural data results:
- People from industrialised societies respond differently than those from small-
scale society
- People from Western industrialised 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
- Even though there has been a flood of excellent research in cultural psychology of
the past few decades, many key questions have yet to be investigated
Why Study Cultural Psychology?
- Colour-blind approach (aka “culture-blind”): people are the same everywhere
- People can easily adopt an “us versus them” mindset and favour their own
group
- “#AllLivesMatter”
, - Multicultural approach: focusing on and respecting group differences
- People really do identify strongly with their groups, and most group identities
are very meaningful
- You are more likely to identify with your group, if the group is a minority
- Minority group members prefer a multicultural approach more than majority
group members
- People will fare better when the distinctive characteristics of their group are
observed and appreciated
- Groups that emphasise multicultural messages fare better in many ways than groups
that emphasise colour-blind messages
- People who hear more colour-blind arguments are less likely to see prejudice where
it actually exists
- White students show more positive attitudes toward minority members when the
environment presents multicultural messages
- However, sometimes majority group members feel that multicultural messages
exclude them, thus messages should highlight the benefits for major and minor
groups for more effectiveness
- 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
You Are a Product of Your Own Culture
- For the most part, our own culture remains invisible to us
- Our own thoughts and behaviours appear natural to us, because we don’t know how
we could think and behave otherwise
- Culturally normative behaviour comes to be seen as natural, and
deviations from that natural path often tend to be viewed as less desirable
and even immoral → error of ethnocentrism
- Ethnocentrism = judging people from other cultures by the standards of one’s
own culture
Summary
- Two definitions for culture
- Culture is information people get from other members of their species through
social learning
- A culture is a dynamic group of people sharing a similar context or
environment
- Cultural psychology views mind and culture to be ultimately inseparable
- Our thoughts, actions, and feelings are shaped by cultural information that
gives them meaning
- The human brain is shaped by experiences
- Culture provides people with experiences → cultural differences in
activation of certain brain regions, as well as associated
psychological processes
- The Sambia provide a dramatic example of how various cultural experiences can
lead to diverse understandings of sexuality
- Four levels of universality of psychological processes (from lowest to high)
- Nonuniversal
