Cultural Norms

Cultural dimensions

- A conceptual framework suggested by Hofstede (1980) - individualism / collectivism ○ personal identity as a matter of personal choice vs social identities more important, and influenced by wider social groups (notably the family) ○ a popular dimension to classify cultures - masculinity / femininity ○ achievement and independence vs caring and cooperation - power / distance ○ hierarcy, someone having power over others, vs equality - uncertainty avoidance ○ risk averse vs risk-taking - long-term vs. short-term

Kashima and Triandis (1986)

- Aim ○ Investigate cultural factors affect on attribution regarding self serving bias and modesty bias - Procedure ○ Students from Japan and America, asked to do a test, and asked to fill out a questionaire to reflect on their success / failure - Results ○ American students showed a tendency to attribute success to dispositional factors, Japanese did the opposite. - Evaluation ○ Differences in culture in the dimension of collectivism and individualism affects behaviour, and also influences biases in attribution ○ Not very high ecological validity as it is a laboratory experiment, so it might reflect what people say when they are asked about their performance, however the results cannot be generalized to what they think to themselvs about their perfomance ○ Only two cultures, small sample, thus cannot maybe be generalized to other cultures in the same spectrum of the cultural dimension of collectivism / individualism

Basset (2004)

- Aim ○ Investigate differences in Chinese and Australian students' perception of conflict resolution in relation to the collectivist / individualistic dimension and short-term / long-term dimension - Procedure ○ Asked 15 management students from Australia / China about how a conflict between a Japanese and Canadian would be solved in their country. - Results ○ Confirmed the the individualist-collectivist dimensions ○ Confirmed the long-term-short-term dimension was confirmed by the Chinese having long-term orientation - Evaluation ○ Small sample of students and countries ○ Cannot neccesarlily be generalized to anything ○ Asked how it would be solved in their country, might therefore include assumptions about the residents view of their own country, especially as the students were management students. § This is a potential bias in the results ○ Does support the dimensions theories, and that culture can affect behaviour - how we solve conflicts

Cultural relativism

- All cultures are equally worth of study - Yes, if the goal is to understand human behaviour, but if you e.g. want to understand how and why the people around you are behaving, then no.

Mead (1935)

- Case study - Studied different people in New Guinea - Some people had the same typical gender personalities - Other people had the typical western gender personalities reversed - Shows how important culture is in human behaviour

Cultural transmission

- How cultural norms are taught - Explicitly; children are instructed, e.g. through religious practices - Implicitly; children observe and get feedback on behaviour, learning what is "normal" behaviour (vicarious reinforcement)

Individualism / collectivism

- Individualism: ○ Different view on self-concept § Behaviour is largely based on personal goals, it is acceptable that personal goals are prioritized over collective goals ○ Large emphesis on the pursuit of individual happiness ○ E.g. People choose their partners on the basis of attraction and love - Colletivism ○ Different view on self-concept § Behaviour is largely based on collective goals, it is socially desireable that collective goals are prioritized over personal goals ○ The social groups (notably the family) are more important ○ E.g. Parners are more like unions between families - Cousins (1989) ○ "I am a brother" and "I am in the gymnastics club in japan, vs "I am intelligent" or "I am musical" in the US

Cultural norms

- Norms - Rules that regulate behaviour within a particular culture - Some norms are enshrined in laws, and there are formal sanctions for breaking them - Others are enforced informally, through vicarious reinforcement - work to promote social control, work to promote conformity

Objective and subjective aspects of culture

- Objective: ○ Physical entities that can be seen ○ Clothing, Foods, Music, Buildings - Subjective: ○ Non-physical entities ○ Beliefs, values, shared ideas ○ Exert powerful and subtle influences on behaviour

Culture in psychology

- cultural norms - cultual dimensions - Kuschel (2004) culture shouldn't be used as an explanation of behaviour, but rather the beliefs, attitudes, schemas and norms of a culture can be used to explain behaviour ○ he also warned against making generalizations - Triandis (1980) distinguishes between objective and subjective aspects of culture

Emic approach to psychology

- looks at culture specific behaviour - cultural relativism

Etic approach to psychology

- the usual approach in early psychology - tries to find behaviour and apply it across cultures - naturally, this usually involves biologically driven behaviours, though biology does of course also vary - if not purely etic, cannot be automatically applied to other cultures, this misapplication is called imposed etic ○ there might be some external cultural context which will influence results ○ e.g. sleeping is biological, but how we sleep might still influence results