PSYC 307 Book Notes #Chapter 1: What is Cultural Psychology? Psychological processes are shaped by experience: because people in different cultures have many different experiences, we should then expect to find differences in many ways that they think. Although experiences shape psychological processes, they certainly do not determine them. What is Culture? 1. Any kind of information that is acquired from other members of one's species through social learning that is capable of affecting an individual's behavior. (Culture is any kind of belief, idea, technology, habit or practice that is acquired through learning from others) 2. A particular group of individuals > People who are existing within some kind of shared context Challenges with thinking about groups of people as constituting cultures: 1. The boundaries of cultures are not always clear-cut. 2. There are other kinds of groups aside from countries that can be argued to have cultures - urban culture, gay and lesbian culture, Harvard culture, etc. Why can we call them "culture"? This is because their members exist within a shared context, communicate with each other, have some norms that distinguish them from other groups, and have some common practices and ideas. 3. Cultures also change over time, and some shared cultural information disappears as new habits replace the old. Cultures are thus NOT static entities but are dynamic and ever changing. 4. The last challenge is the variability among individuals who belong to the same culture -> People inherit distinct temperaments they each belong to a unique collection of various social groups with their own distinctive cultures, and they each have had a unique history of individual experiences that has shaped their perspectives. #Psychological Processes can vary across cultures > One striking way that people's psychology differs between cultures is their sense ofhumor. -> Many basic psychological processes, such as the way people perceive the world, their sense of right and wrong, and the things that motivate them, can emerge in starkly different ways across cultures. Question to think about: How can we understand the workings of the human mind when it apparently works in different ways in different contexts. #Is the Mind Independent from, or Intertwined with, Culture? General Psychology (Richard Shweder - father of the modern incarnation of cultural psychology) > the mind operates under a set of natural and universal laws that are independent from content or context. ("People are same wherever you go")
However, in many important ways people are not same wherever you go. Example: people in some cultures bite their tongues when they are nervous, people in other cultures don't. General psychology = universal psychology (cultural variation in ways of thinking cannot exist) Schweder-> general psychologists tend to be more captivated by arguments about human universality than about cultural variability. General psychologists tend to conceive of the mind as a highly central processing unit (CPU) that operates independently of the content that it is thinking about or of the context within which it is thinking. Context and context are viewed as