PSYC 307: Cultural Psychology Lecture 2: 4th January 2019 1) What is "Culture" and how do you define "Culture"? 2) What challenges are there in defining culture? Academic definitions of culture: Kroeber and Kluckhohn, 1952 > * Descriptive definitions are the definitions where the term culture refers to just what you see; collection of all the activities that people see; what does the language sound like. Descriptive definitions are also the simplest definitions. Culture refers to "all social activities in the broadest sense, such as language =, marriage, property system, etiquette, industries, art, etc. * Historical definition: Culture means the total social heredity (versus biological heredity) of mankind, while as a specific term a culture means a particular strain of social heredity. * Normative definition: These are normative, procedures that are enforced. If you don't act accordingly, there will be repercussions. Culture is all standardized social procedures and customs, passed on socially that form a people's way of life. * Structural definition: What kind of values do these social norms reference? structural definitions reference constellation of values. Culture is a system or organization of interdependent values common to specific social groups, forming a pattern that is unique to each society. * Psychological definition: The broadest definition; argues that everything we do is culture. Culture consists of all results of human learned effort at adjustment. Defining culture: (according to the textbook) > Information acquired from other members of one's species through social learning that can affect one's behaviors > Group of individuals existing in some shared context Issues with defining culture: (in a shared context) 1) Cultural boundaries are not clear-cut; culture has fuzzy boundaries. As you get closer to borders, there are different cultural frameworks on the other sides of the borders. Getting closer to the borders, you also see cultural blending.
2) Culture is constantly changing. 3) There is often more variability within a cultural group than that that exists between cultural groups. General psychology versus Cultural psychology One of the four fathers of Modern psychology: > Wilhelm Wundt: established first academic lab for psychology He was interested in low-level processes early on, memory. (Need experimental control) He was then fascinated with high-level processes: How should we study religion, language, and folk stories? It is difficult to study these processes with regulation of high experimental control. You needed very strong experimental control -> this idea was caught on in the United States Behaviorism: can we measure it? John B. Watson (Early 1900s) * Human behaviors are simply what can be objectively measured as stimulus- response patterns. 1950s' Cognitive revolution: when scientists finally recognized humanity, human thoughts and feelings and that our mental processes have meanings. Unfortunate consequences for using the computer as a metaphor for the human brain: 1) Homogenization of psychology: This means that human psychology is pretty similar in the world, as human brain will be same in one place when compared to another brain. This led to the implication that non- western brain is the same