LECTURE 2 - NATURE OF CULTURE What is culture? · According to Kroeber and Kluckhohn 1952 (academic description) o Descriptive: all social activities in the broadest sense such as language, marriage, property systems, etiquette, art etc. " o Historical: total social heredity of mankind where a specific term of culture means a particular strain of social heredity o Normative: Standardized social procedures and customs passed on socially, that form a people's way of life Punishment is incurred for braking these norms o Structural: system or organization of interdependent customs common to spe- cific social groups forming a pattern unique to each society. More about the values that give rise to norms o Psychological: result of all human learned effort of adjusting · Textbook definitions o Information acquired from other members of one's species through social learn- ing which can affect behaviours o Groups of individuals existing in some sort of shared context Shared identity Countries - may be problematic for defining cultures · Problems with nationally defined culture o Fuzzy boundaries Culture is not bound by international borders o Constant changes within a culture o Within country cultural variation General Psychology vs Cultural psychology Wilhelm Wundt (1900s) · Credited with the first psychology lab · Experimental control to study low level processes at first · Later studied high level processes (volkerpsychologie) o Religion, language, and folk stories o Need to be able to relax experimental control to study these topics Behaviourism - John Watson in USA · we can only objectively measure human behaviours measured as stimulus response pattern · ignored thoughts and feelings
1950s - Cognitive revolution · recognition that thoughts and mental processes are actually important and cannot be ig- nored . used a computer as an analogy of the brain - implies that brains are the same across the globe o ignored real differences still exist in the way the brain processes information Richard Shweder - 1980 · advocated for giving the brain more credit than what the computer analogy gives it. . It changes and learns in response to the environment, and also influences the environ- ment around you · Mind and environment mutually constitute each other (interwoven) Chapter 1 notes ? Explain different ways in which culture can be defined ? Understand three challenges associated with thinking about groups of people as constituting cultures ? Compare cultural psychology to other schools of psychology ? Discuss evidence supporting cultural psychology's assertion that the mind and culture make each other up ? Define the four degrees of psychological universality ? Understand the importance of the WEIRD people problem What is culture? . Any information acquired from those around you through social learning, can impact be- haviour · A group of individuals existing with some kind of shared context Challenges with groups of people defined as cultures . Exposure to distant cultures at home . Multiple Non-national cultures existing within the same country
· Cultures change over time · Variability among individuals exists Psychological processes can vary across