Developing individual in society Lecture 19: 04/05/2021 Cultural Psychology ! Lecturer: Annemieke van Den Tol What is culture? - Cultura: The cultivation of the soul. - 15th century, this word entered the English language with exploration and colonization. - In the 19th century, it was a characteristic associated with the upper class. - Kerskovits (1948) claimed culture is the "man-made part of the human environment". - Kluckohn (1954) claimed culture is to society what memory is to individuals. - Geertz (1973) claimed culture is a historically transmitted pattern of meanings mebodied in symbols, inherited conceptions expressed in forms by means which men communicate and develop knowledge about attitudes towards life. - Berry et al (1997) claimed culture is a shared way of life of a group of people. - Chiu & Hong (tt006) claimed culture is a network of shared knowledge thati s produced and distributed. - Heine (2008) claimed culture is: o Information acquired from other members of one's species through social learning, capable of affecting an individuals' behaviours. o People that exist within some kind of shared context. o However, boundaries are not always clear. " Cultures change over time. " Much variability among individuals in the same cultural group. Culture: Dynamic group of individuals that share a similar context, are exposed to similar cultural messages and contain a broad range of different individuals who are affected by these cultural messages in divergent ways. While humans are good with culture, it is NOT UNIQUE to us. - Termite eating behaviour among chimps - Aggressive behaviours in elephants - Similarities in song between groups of birds. Humans however stand out in the extent of their cultural learning skill, there is cumulative cultural evolution. Humans are selective in who they imitate.
Two capacities allow humans to learn from one another: - Ability to consider perspective of others (Theory of mind). - Advanced language abilities. Nagel et al., 1993 studied imitative and emulative learning through tools used in an experiment with chimpanzees and tt year olds. Cultural Psychology - Even the psychological database is of interest to cultural psychologists. - It is a largely western database. - Journal of Personality & Social Psychology, 9tt% of papers written by North-American institutions. - 99% of papers written by Authors in Western institutions. - However, as is known, samples in the west are not always representative of all humans. The top journals in 6 different sub-areas are 68% American and 90% Western, mostly using undergraduate students as participants. WEIRD people Most psychological studies are conducted with people in: - Western - Educated - Industrialized - Rich - Democratic societies Randomly selected American Undergrad 4000x more likely to be a participant than a randomly selected participant outside of the west. Some theories seem to assume the mind operates under universal and natural laws, independent of context. However, the assumption in cultural psychology is the mind does not operate independently of what one is thinking about, and the context. Culture and mind cannot be separated. -