Quiz 1

How does similarity bias compare to conformist transmission?

Only conformist transmission focuses on how common a behavior is in a group of people.

Army recruits are assigned randomly into specific sleeping quarters, where they do a lot of socializing during break time and at night. The political and religious attitudes of the recruits were surveyed before they were assigned sleeping quarters, and then again after several weeks of training. The generals found that the recruits' political and religious ideas tended to form clusters based on their sleeping quarters. Which of the following can best explain this situation?

People in close contact tend to influence each other.

Which of the following children demonstrates mentalizing?

XXX a child who assumes that everyone knows everything she knows

What is the highest level of universality?

accessibility universal

The encephalization quotient (EQ) is defined as

an animal's brain weight relative to the predicted brain weight for a comparable animal of the same body size.

Which of the following defines culture, according to the textbook?

any information learned from other members of one's species that can influence an individual's behaviors

A group of researchers wants to learn about the characteristics of home-cooking recipes in Culture X. What is this type of method an example of?

culture-level measuring

Whereas the term ________ describes explanations using factors that occurred a long time ago, the term ________ describes explanations using factors that have direct and immediate effects.

distal causes; proximate causes

A child observes a model using a new tool to crack open an acorn. The child does not copy exactly what the model does, nor does he understand that the model wanted to crack acorns. The child simply sees that the tool can be used to crack acorns and tries to figure out on his own how to use the tool for that purpose. What is the child exhibiting?

emulative learning

If a child wants to be a great basketball player and chooses to learn from LeBron James as a prestigious model, what aspect(s) of James is the child most likely to imitate, according to the prestige bias?

everything that LeBron James does, both related and unrelated to basketball

Your research team found evidence that people in multiple cultures walk with their shoes on their heads, but this "shoe-on-head" way of walking is activated for different reasons across cultures. This would be evidence of a(n)

existential universal.

A key difference between cultural psychologists and general psychologists is that

general psychologists believe that the mind is independent from context and content, whereas cultural psychologists believe that the mind cannot be separated from context and content.

Takeshi discovers a lot of tips and tricks to give him an easier time playing his favorite computer game, which he proceeds to show all his gaming buddies. Which of the following does this best illustrate?

horizontal transmission

According to prestige bias, humans will tend to

imitate another person who has skills and is highly respected, regardless of whether the domain of imitation is relevant to that person's talent.

It is not at all unusual for the officers at Police Station 54 to observe their colleagues using confrontational interview techniques. Even though they do not personally like the technique, many officers believe that the practice is widely approved of by others and expected of them. This is an example of

pluralistic ignorance.

In a gardening competition, the Martians' steel tools allowed them to easily defeat the Earthlings, who used wooden tools. Which of the following best explains why the Martians defeated the Earthlings?

proximal cause

Pluralistic ignorance is likely to lead to

the persistence of particular cultural practices.

Minimally counterintuitive ideas tend to persist within a culture because

they tend to be remembered more than intuitive ideas.

A strength of Nisbett and Cohen's research program into the impact of a culture of honor on regional differences in violence between the U.S. South and U.S. North is that

they used multiple methods across their studies.

Cat A teaches Cat B, who lives in the same alley, to hold a mouse in a certain way so that the mouse can be more easily eaten. This way of holding mice then gets passed on to other cats in different alleys. Based on the definitions of culture used in the textbook, can this example be said to be culture?

yes, because the information was passed on by social learning between Cats A and B

After examining surveys that you collected from Culture X, you notice that everyone's responses tend toward the mid-points of the response scale (e.g., "Neither agree nor disagree"). How can you correct for this?

Give respondents forced-choice response options (e.g., "Agree/Disagree").

What is the main cost to humans for having large brains?

Large brains require an enormous amount of energy to function.

In your initial study, you noticed that your participants tended to say they strongly agreed with of the items on your questionnaire. When doing a follow-up study, how would you tell whether your original participants suffered from acquiescence bias?

Reverse-score half the items.

Why is studying cultural psychology important?

Studying cultural psychology can give psychologists a more complete understanding of how the human mind works.

What does the acronym WEIRD stand for, and what are at least two problems with relying on samples from WEIRD societies in psychology?

The acronym WEIRD stands for W:western, E:educated, I:industrialized, R:rich, D:democratic. One problem with WEIRD samples would be that human behaviors may vary among different situations while using or observing different groups of people and/or subjects.

A 2.5-year-old human child, a chimpanzee, and an orangutan are presented with the same problem-solving task: they must figure out how to use a tool to reach the top of a cabinet and nudge a wooden block that will knock over a banana. Based on the findings of Herrmann and colleagues (2007), which of the three participants will outperform the others?

There will be no significant difference in performance across the three participants.

Which of the following is one problem especially associated with studies using WEIRD samples?

They have very low generalizability.

What does the acronym "WEIRD" stand for?

Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, Democratic

Research on the rise of individualism shows that books published in the United States over the past 200 years have shown an increase in words such as

XXX "individualism," "collectivism," and "division."

Which of the following correctly compares cultural evolution and biological evolution?

XXX Biological evolution chooses what trait has a selective advantage to pass on; cultural evolution does not.

Which of the following provides evidence of culture in nonhuman animals?

XXX Chimpanzees show good emulative learning compared with humans, and each subsequent generation of chimpanzees shows better emulative learning than the previous generation.

Some people would describe cultural psychology as the study of how "culture and mind make each other up." What does this statement mean?

XXX Culture and the mind are very similar concepts.

Dynamic social impact theory can explain why

XXX cultural evolution can occur much faster than biological evolution.

A failure to replicate a psychological phenomenon

XXX is much more likely when the study and the replication have a high degree of statistical power.

After examining the surveys you collected from people in Culture A, you find that people tend to answer "yes" to all the questions, regardless of the content. This is called ________ bias.

XXX leniency

Steven is a new English-speaking cultural psychologist who only uses questionnaires. He wants to establish methodological equivalence when studying cultural differences in happiness between rural Nigerians and urban South Koreans. To do that, he will likely

XXX reverse-code half of the items on his questionnaires.

In Culture A, people are known to be talkative. In Culture B, they are known to be very quiet. Yet when Reggie gives out questionnaires, he finds that those from Culture A are more likely than those from Culture B to agree with the statement. "I don't talk that much." What is a plausible explanation for this?

XXX social desirability bias

Is culture among chimpanzees cumulative?

XXX yes, because chimpanzees have excellent working memory

According to the definition offered in the textbook, which of the following would NOT be a good example of culture?

a child creates a piece of art she has never seen before while, at the same time, listening to her sister sing songs

All else being equal, which of the following studies will have the most statistical power in a comparison of tight and loose cultures?

a study comparing Canada and North Korea