CHAPTER 1: INTRODUCTION I. A PSYCHOLOGY FOR A CULTURAL SPECIES · different cultures; live life very different, different languages, customs, food, religious beliefs, child rearing practices, etc · psychology processes are shaped by experiences; people in different cultures have different experiences. · experiences shape psych processes but don't necessarily determine them · psych processes are constrained and afforded by the neuro structures that underlie them · tension between universal and culturally variable psychologies A. WHAT IS CULTURE? · 2 different things: 1. particular kind of information - any info that is acquired from other members of one's species through social learning that is capable of affecting an individual's behaviour; any idea, belief, technology, habit practice that is acquired through learning from others. 2. a particular group of individuals - people who are existing within some kind of shared context. exposed to same kind of kind of cultural ideas, attend some instituions, similar cultural practices, follow same norms, convos day to day. · Western culture = people participating in cultures that stem from countries clustered in North West Europe (UK, France, Germany) like US, Canada, Australia . East Asian culture = China, Japan, Korea, Vietnam · challenges with thinking of groups of people as constituting cultures: o boundaries of cultures are not always clear cut, not always distinct; thus, fluid nature of cultural boundaries weakens researchers abilities to find differences between cultures. o cultures change over time, some info disappears and new habits replace the old; but a lot of cultural info persists too; cultures = dynamic and ever changing · important challenge: variability among individuals who belong to same culture; i.e. people inherit different temperaments, predispositions, people have unique history of individual experiences that shape their views. ? culture = dynamic groups of individuals that share a similar context, exposed to many similar cultural messages, contain broad range of different individuals who are affected by those cultural messages in divergent ways II. PSYCHOLOGICAL PROCESSES CAN VARY ACROSS CULTURES · one psych differs between cultures: humor. · cultural variation in psychological processes can extend deeper than just preferences of clothes, movies, foods, etc. A. Is the Mind Independent From, or intertwined with, culture? · much of psychology assumes mind operates under a set of natural, universal laws that are independent from content or context = people are same everywhere you go BUT in many important ways people are NOT the same everywhere we go · we can learn about the mind by figuring out the universal and invariant ways it operates · psychologists tend to be more captivated by arguments about human universality than about cultural variability; they think mind is like a computer that operates without thinking about the content it is thinking about or context within which it is thinking. cultural psychs disagree
· cultural psychologists interaction with the content that one is thinking about and participating in the context within which one is doing the thinking; ways people thinking are influenced by the specific particular ways that cultural