PSYSCHOLOGY PSY101

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PSY101Lecture72020.ppt
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PSY101
Introduction to Cultural Psychology

Lecture 7

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Chapter Outline

  • Culture as Cognition
  • Culture and Attention
  • Culture and Perception
  • Perception and Physical Reality
  • Cultural Influences on Visual Perception

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Chapter Outline

  • Culture and Thinking
  • Culture and Categorization
  • Culture and Memory
  • Culture and Math
  • Culture and Problem Solving
  • Culture and Creativity
  • Culture and Dialectical Thinking
  • Summary
  • Culture and Consciousness
  • Culture and Time
  • Culture and Pain

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Chapter Outline

  • Culture and Intelligence
  • Traditional Definitions of Intelligence and its Measurement
  • The Nature versus Nurture Controversy
  • Expanding the Concept of Intelligence across Cultures
  • The Impact of Cross-Cultural Research on the Concept of Intelligence in Mainstream American Psychology
  • Conclusion

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CULTURE AS COGNITION

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Cognition

  • Includes all mental processes used in transforming sensory input into knowledge

Culture as Cognition

  • Psychologists view culture as cognition
  • Norms, opinions, beliefs, values, and worldviews are cognitive products that are defined as culture
  • Culture is viewed as a knowledge system that was created to solve complex problems of living and social life
  • Humans have certain cognitive skills that other animals do not, which allows them to create cultures
  • People’s mental models of culture influence their ways of thinking, feeling, and behaving
  • Priming: Determines if one stimulus affects another

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CULTURE AND ATTENTION

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Attention

  • Masuda studies - Americans and Japanese differed in paying attention to:
  • Background objects
  • The expressions of the individual and the group
  • Cultural differences in environment results in cultural differences in perception and attention

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Attention

  • Attending to the relationship between the object and the context in which it is located

Holistic perception

  • Context-independent and analytic perceptual processes that focuses on salient objects

Analytic perception

Source: Reprinted from Masuda and Nisbett (2001), with permission.

Figure 8.2 - Shot of Animated Swimming Fish Scene

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Source: From “Attending holistically versus analytically: Comparing the context sensitivity of Japanese and Americans,” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 81, pp. 922–934, 2001, Copyright © American Psychological Association. Reprinted with permission.

Figure 8.3 - American and Japanese Recognition Rate Differences as a Function of Background

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CULTURE AND PERCEPTION

Perception and Physical Reality

  • People’s perceptions of the world and the physical reality are not the same
  • Blind spot: A spot in one’s visual field with no sensory receptors
  • Microsaccades: Micro eye movements that helps the brain absorb scenes
  • Provides a perception that one can see everything
  • People test the limits of their own senses by asking questions

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Cultural Influences on Visual Perception

  • Optical illusions: Perceptive discrepancy between how an object looks and what it actually is
  • Best known illusions - Muller-Lyer illusion, horizontal–vertical illusion, and the Ponzo illusion

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Theories Based on Optical Illusions

  • Carpentered world: Suggests that people in urbanized, industrialized societies are used to seeing things that are rectangular in shape
  • Unconsciously expect objects to have squared corners
  • Front-horizontal foreshortening
  • Interpretation of vertical lines as horizontal lines extending into a distance
  • Symbolizing three dimensions in two
  • Westerners focus on representations on paper and spend more time learning to interpret pictures

Figure 8.8 - Hudson’s (1960) Picture of Depth Perception

CULTURE AND THINKING

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Culture and Categorization

  • Categorization: People group things together based on similarities and attach labels to those classifications
  • Helps sort out complex stimuli
  • Some categories are universal across cultures
  • Examples - Facial expressions, colors, and shapes
  • Cultural differences in categorization can be studied using sorting tasks

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Culture and Memory

  • Decrease in memory abilities due to aging is consistent across cultures
  • Hindsight bias: Individuals adjust their memory for something after they find out the true outcome
  • Cultural differences in memory as a function of oral tradition is limited to meaningful material
  • Serial position effect: The finding that people remember the first or last item in a list

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Culture and Memory

  • Episodic memory: Recollection of specific events that took place at a particular time and place in the past
  • Differences occur due to cultural differences in:
  • Self-construals
  • Emotion knowledge
  • Interpersonal processes

Culture and Math Abilities

  • Ability to do math is a universal human psychological process
  • Culture is represented in math and the way a society teaches and learns it
  • Cross-national differences exist in math abilities and achievements
  • Gender stratification hypothesis: Gender differences related to cultural variations in opportunity structures for girls and women
  • Studies regarding everyday cognition indicate that even without formal educational systems members of all cultures learn math skills

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Culture and Problem Solving

  • Problem solving: Process of discovering ways of achieving goals that do not seem attainable
  • People from different cultures were asked to solve unfamiliar problems in artificial settings
  • People drew conclusions easily when presented with familiar settings
  • Syllogisms
  • Individuals from traditional, illiterate societies were unable to provide answers to syllogisms containing unfamiliar information
  • Illiterate people did not understand the hypothetical nature of verbal problems

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Culture and Creativity

  • Creativity depends on divergent rather than convergent thinking
  • Constant across cultures
  • Creative individuals have:
  • High capacity for hard work
  • Willingness to take risks
  • High tolerance for ambiguity and disorder

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Culture and Creativity

Countries high on uncertainty avoidance

  • Preferred creative individuals to work within norms

Countries high on power distance

  • Preferred creative individuals to gain support from those in authority before action is taken

Collectivistic countries

  • Preferred creative people to seek cross-functional support

Differences amongst cultures

Culture and Dialectical Thinking

  • Dialectical thinking: Tendency to accept contradictions in thought or beliefs
  • Preferred by East Asians
  • Positive logical determinism: Viewing contradictions as mutually exclusive categories
  • Characterizes American and Western European thinking
  • Naïve dialecticism: Characterized by the belief that the truth is always somewhere in the middle

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Figure 8.9 - Comparison of American and Chinese Responses to the Conflicting Situations in Peng and Nisbett (1999)

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Summary

  • Ancient cultural systems produce differences in ways of perceiving and thinking about the world
  • Westerners employ analytic thinking
  • East Asians employ holistic thinking
  • Factors that produce cultural differences
  • Social orientation hypothesis: Cultural differences in individualism versus collectivism are caused due to different social orientation patterns
  • Educational systems
  • Linguistic, and genetic differences

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Table 8.1 - Analytic versus Holistic Cognitive Patterns

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CULTURE AND CONSCIOUSNESS

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Culture and Time

  • Cultural differences in time orientation can be agonizing in intercultural negotiation situations
  • Long- versus short-term orientation is a cultural dimension that differentiates among cultures
  • People in long-term cultures - Delay gratification of material, social, and emotional needs
  • Members of short-term cultures - Think and act in the immediate present and the bottom line

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Culture and Pain

  • Culture influences experience and perception of pain in:
  • Cultural construction of pain sensation
  • Semiotics of pain expression
  • Structure of pain's causes and cures
  • Cultural display rules include governing expression, perception, and feeling of pain
  • Tolerance of pain is based on cultural values

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CULTURE AND INTELLIGENCE

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Traditional Definitions of Intelligence and its Measurement

  • Intelligence - Conglomeration of many intellectual abilities centering on verbal and analytic tasks
  • Intelligence tests relied on verbal performance and cultural knowledge
  • Immigrants were at a disadvantage

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Nature versus Nurture Controversy

  • Nature
  • Differences in IQ scores between different cultures are mainly hereditary or innate
  • Nurture
  • Ethnic and societal differences in IQ occur due to nonbiological factors such as environment, history, and learning
  • Stereotype threat
  • Others’ judgments or one’s own actions will negatively stereotype one in a domain

Expanding the Concept of Intelligence in Other Cultures

  • Many languages have no word that corresponds to the general notion of intelligence
  • Difficulties in comparing intelligence cross-culturally
  • Cultural differences in defining intelligence
  • Tests of intelligence often rely on knowledge specific to a particular culture

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Impact of Cross-Cultural Research on the Concept of Intelligence in Mainstream American Psychology

Interpersonal

Bodily kinesthetic

Spatial

Musical

Linguistic

Intrapersonal

Gardner’s types of intelligence

Logical mathematical

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Impact of Cross-Cultural Research on the Concept of Intelligence in Mainstream American Psychology

  • Sternberg’s (1986) subtheories of intelligence
  • Contextual
  • Experiential
  • Componential intelligence
  • Collective intelligence
  • General ability of a group to perform a wide variety of tasks

Conclusion

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Conclusion

  • Perception, cognition, and consciousness are at the core of many psychological constructs
  • Cultural differences in these processes exemplify various levels of psychology that culture influences
  • Cultural differences and similarities in definitions and processes of intelligence have considerable relevance to various applied settings

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