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34 Cards in this Set
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Cross-Cultural Psychology |
Psychology research and theorizing that attempts to account for the psychological differences between and within different cultural groups |
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How does culture intersect with personality psychology? |
- Individuals may differ from each other, to some extent, because they belong to different cultures - Members of groups may differ from each other in different ways - What differences are important may vary across cultures |
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Cross-Cultural Universals vs. Specificity |
- External, unsolvable issue - Traditionally emphasized how people in separate cultures are different - Recently, emphasizing how people around the world are psychologically similar and turning more attention to how people differ within cultures |
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What is culture? |
- May include language, modes of thinking, fundamental views of reality - Enculturation: Where cultural groups are learned; a child will pick up on the culture he/she is born into - Acculturation: When a person moves from one country to another and may gradually pick up on the culture of their new home - Due to more than genetics |
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Importance of Cross-Cultural Differences |
- Increasing international understanding - Assessing the degree to which psychology applies to people around the world *Possible limits on generalizability *Most research based on WEIRD countries - Appreciating the varieties of human experience
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Characteristics of Cultures |
- Can be compared in many ways relevant to personality - Ways in which culture shapes behavior, emotional experience, thoughts, one's sense of connection with the larger world - Etics: Universal components of an idea - Emics: Particular aspects of an idea
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Characteristics of Cultures |
- Tough & Easy - Achievement & Affiliation - Complexity - Tightness & Looseness - Head vs. Heart |
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Characteristics of Cultures Tough & Easy |
Easy - Individuals can pursue many different goals and at least some of them are relatively simple to attain
Tough - Only a few goals are viewed as valuable - Few ways to actually achieve them
*Overall stressfulness of the culture - Indexed by degree to which they were characterized by homicide, suicide, "drunken brawling" etc. |
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Characteristics of Cultures Achievement & Affiliation |
- Looking at children's stories - Certain cultures come up with stories that talk more about achieving goals, reflecting high cultural need for it - Others talk more about high cultural need for love, etc. - Causes culture to bring up children to be more achievement-oriented or do these cultures just naturally think up stories about achievement? |
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Characteristics of Cultures Complexity |
- How can you tell? - Even the seemingly simple cultures have their own complex ways of something specific - Are they as simple on the inside as they look on the outside? |
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Characteristics of Cultures Tightness & Looseness |
Tightness - Tolerate very little deviation from proper behavior - Ethnically homogenous - Densely populated
Looseness - Allow fairly large deviations from cultural norms - More diverse, more spread out
*Diversity is key - Varies a lot within the US - Ex: Utah vs. NYC
*Examine left- and right-handedness - Degree of pressure to be right-handed
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Characteristics of Cultures Head vs. Heart |
"Strengths of Heart" - Fairness - Mercy - Gratitude - Hope - Love - Religiosity
"Strengths of Head" - Artistic excellence - Creativity - Curiosity - Critical thinking - Learning
*Why does this matter? *What do cities vary on these dimensions? - Selective migration: attracted to a certain city for specific reason - Social influence (ex: gay marriage) - Ecological factors (weather, etc.) |
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Characteristics of Cultures Collectivism-Individualism |
- Importance of needs and rights of the group vs. the individual - The self and others - Personality & collectivism *Respect for elders; difference of how much respect *Individualist countries: self-esteem is more important *Collectivist countries: satisfaction with life is based on the harmony of one's relationships with others
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Characteristics of Cultures Collectivism-Individualism: Behavior, Emotion, Motivation |
Behavior, emotion, motivation - Social interactions - Self-focused vs. other-focused emotions - Importance of love in marriage - What emotional experience depends on - Fundamental motivations |
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Characteristics of Cultures Collectivism-Individualism: Vertical vs. Horizontal |
- Can be crossed with collectivism-individualism - Does not apply to all individuals within a culture
*CAREFUL: Do not interpret cultural differences as meaning that everyone in the same culture is the same |
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Characteristics of Cultures Collectivism-Individualism: Vertical Type |
Collectivism - Self different from others - Communal sharing - Authority ranking - Low freedom - Low equality Ex: China
Individualism - Self different from others - Market economy - Authority ranking - High freedom - Low equality Ex: France |
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Characteristics of Cultures Collectivism-Individualism: Horizontal Type |
Collectivism - Self same as others - Communal sharing - Low freedom - High equality Ex: Israel
Individualism - Self same as others - Market economy - High freedom - High equality Ex: Norway |
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Characteristics of Cultures Collectivism-Individualism Theory |
Culture is split into 3 parts; how they differ in these 3 dimensions - Honor - Face - Dignity
"Individual differences within a society are every bit as important, if not more important, than the differences between them." |
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Characteristics of Cultures Honor |
- Said to emerge in environments where the forces of civilization - police & laws - are weak or nonexistent - People must protect themselves, their families, and their belongings - Insults are important; if tolerating an insult, could show vulnerability and put person or property at risk - Must show readiness for retaliation if necessary; always willing to fight back - Highly sensitive to threats to honor or reputation - Said to have higher rates of suicide - Higher risk for depression |
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Characteristics of Cultures Face |
- Emerge in societies where people have stable hierarchies based on cooperation - Motivated to protect each others' social image by being careful not to insult, overly-criticize or disagree with each other in public - Authority figures are respected and obeyed - 3 H's: hierarchy, humility, harmony |
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Characteristics of Cultures Dignity |
- Key Idea: Individuals are valuable in their own right and this value does not come from what other people think of them - Attitude leads to people "thinking different" *"Sticks and stones may break my bones..." - Internal strength allows one to be true to oneself - Living up to one's own values and not the values of anyone else - Fits well with market economies that are based on equal exchanges of goods and services among free individuals |
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Cultural Assessment & Personality Assessment |
3 dimensions can be applied to individuals - Cultural complexity: cognitive complexity - Cultural tightness: conscientiousness and intolerance for ambiguity - Collectivist vs. individualist: allocentrism (when one believes the group is more important than the individual) vs. ideocentrism (when one believes the individual is more important than the group) |
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Cultural Assessment & Personality Assessment Different traits for different cultures? |
- Best way to compare is by using the Big Five - Many variations also founds - Only conscientiousness, extraversion, and agreeableness should be considered universal - Difficulties in translations
Create endogenous scales - Some of Big Five traits have emerged - Seven factors found in China & Spain - Factors other than Big Five: unselfishness, gentle temper, dependency/fragility, positive valence, negative valence, pleasantness, engagement, interpersonal relatedness |
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Cultural Assessment & Personality Assessment Thinking |
- Because behavioral traits are different, safe to assume thought processes must be different as well - Difficult to specify in which way thought process from one culture may differ from another
Holistic - Explain events in context rather than in isolation - Integrate divergent points of view rather than setting one against the other - Appears most in how one thinks about themselves
Independent - Express more original points of view - Has to do with self-expression and how suppressed the ego is - Other point of view: Depends on how much a person thinks about what is being said, how long it takes to process it, etc. - Humility ensures better learning; think before you speak |
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Cultural Assessment & Personality Assessment Values |
- People are very sensitive about what they feel is right and wrong and can become angry and upset when other people do not have the same idea of values as they do
Search for Universal Values - Research has followed two tracks:
1 Values are universal to all cultures - Must infer that a value held in all cultures is in some sense "real" and goes beyond cultural judgement - If we can find a common set of values, might be able to use them to settle disputes between cultures by developing compromises based on a universal agreement
Possible list of 10 universal values 1 Power 2 Achievement 3 Hedonism 4 Stimulation 5 Self-direction 6 Understanding 7 Benevolence 8 Tradition 9 Conformity 10 Security
- Can be organized into terms of two dimensions: openness to change-conservatism and self-transcendence--self-enhancement - Ratings of these follow the two-part structure, more or less, in countries like Israel, Japan, and Australia *Hope is to develop not just the universal list of values but an understanding of how these values relate to each other and apply decisions, behaviors, and cultural priorities |
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Cultural Assessment & Personality Assessment Values: Moral Reasoning |
- Liberty - Freedom of choice - Rights - Individual needs vs. obligations - Reciprocity - Duties in the group
*Based on imposing independent and individual choice or a group norm - Seen in the debate on abortion |
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Origins of Cultural Differences Why are cultures so different? |
Philosophy of deconstructionism - Reality has no meaning apart from what human invent - Important part of modern study of literature and anthropology - Implies that any answer to why a culture is the way it is would itself have to be based on another culture - No meaningful answer is possible
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Origins of Cultural Differences Ecological Approach |
Older Model: Ecology --> Culture --> Socialization --> Personality --> Behavior
- Behavior comes from personality, which comes from implicit and explicit teaching during childhood, which is the product of culture
Newer Model: <--> Ecology <--> Culture Mind & Behavior
- Everything effects everything else - Culture and the minds of people who live in a culture change each other over time as well
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Origins of Cultural Differences Cultural differences from genetics? |
Assumption: Difference are learned, not innate - Genetic differences are small, at most - People within cultures differ from each other - Culture itself is based on more than genetics - People can belong to more than one culture - Possible that personality could influence culture |
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Challenges & New Directions for Cross-Cultural Research Ethnocentrism |
Judging another culture from point of view of your own culture - Whatever observations you make will be influenced by your own background |
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Challenges & New Directions for Cross-Cultural Research Exaggeration of Cultural Differences |
- Focus of research has been on differences - Large sample sizes lead to statistically significant results even when differences are small - Outgroup homogeneity bias: where members of a group to which one does not belong seem more alike than do members of a group to which one does not belong |
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Challenges & New Directions for Cross-Cultural Research Cultures & Values |
Can sometimes lead to cultural relativism - Idea that all cultural views of reality are equally valid and that it is presumptuous or ethnocentric to judge any of them as good or bad - Does not always work - Makes the search for universal values especially important |
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Challenges & New Directions for Cross-Cultural Research Subcultures & Multiculturalism |
- Difficult to define culture - Important subgroups exist within larger cultures - People can belong to more than one culture *Bicultural Identity Integration (BII) |
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Universal Human Condition |
- New evidence on how people are psychologically similar - Differences in rule for appropriate behavior might mask similar motivation - Culture may influence how people want to feel more than how they actually feel - Desire to please one's parents - Personal goals |
