Social Psych Exam 3 - Cultural Psychology

cross-cultural variability in levels of personality traits

- researchers have recently begun to compare mean levels of personality traits across large samples of cultures

Culture

- shared context - nationality, ethnicity, social groups - describes activities, behaviors, rules, norms, and organizations of group - idea, belief, technology, habit, or practice acquired through learning and passed down generations - specific groups of people

spontaneous trait inferences

research has reveled that people spontaneously encode observed behaviors in terms of underlying traits ex: learning of one person giving money to another person in need may be encoded as "generous" - however recent cross-cultural studies suggest that such spontaneous trait inferences might not be so common else-where

Functions of Self

self knowledge, self control, impression management, self esteem

cultural psychology

tests human universals and the relativity of psychological knowledge - involves inclusion of people of different cultural backgrounds

West: non-dialectical (synthetic) reasoning

- Aristotelian tradition in synthetic/liner thinking - 3 laws: law of identity (is A is true, then A is always true), law of noncontradiction (A cannot equal not A), law of the excluded middle (all propositions must be either true or false) - explains intolerance for cognitive dissonance - westerns believe something cannot be both true and false at the same time

analytic vs. holistic thinking: brain science evidence

- CORTICAL area related with controlled thinking activated when: - east asians are asked to ignore context - americans are asked to attend to context

East: Dialectical reasoning

- a reasoning structure through which an individual interprets the environment - 3 principals: change (everything is in flux, constantly changing), contradiction (opposing proportions may both be true), holism (everything is interrelated) - explains higher tolerance for cognitive dissonance in the east asians

analytic vs. holistic thinking: origins

- ancient philosophy: greek philosophy vs. eastern philosophy - geographical structures of cities - independent vs. interdependent self-schema

internal versus external frame of reference

- another mechanism that is implicated in cultural variation in self-enhancing motivations is the perspective of the evaluator - in evaluating themselves, people can attend to whether they are meeting their own internal standards of competence (I think I'm doing well), or they can attend to whether they are meeting other people's standards of competence (others think I'm doing well) - a concern with maintaining "face" leads East Asians to attend more to the standards of others when evaluating themselves, whereas a concern with enhancing self-esteem leads Westerns to attend more to their own internal standards

perceived consistency of traits

- another perspective on the utility of personality traits is the consistency that those traits manifest across situations - to the extent that peoples perceptions about their personality vary considerably across situations, this would render personality traits to be less useful for understanding the person - the power of the situation over behavior is acknowledged more in collectivistic cultures than it is within individualistic cultures - studies suggest that the east asian self is not as consistent across situations in comparison with the western self - this raises the question of how the East Asian self might maintain enough coherence to be even considered a self - one possibility is that despite being unstable across situations, one might display a stable personality within situations across time - the self-concept in East Asian contexts appears to be grounded in one's roles and relationships rather than something that primarily derives from component traits (people in collectivistic cultures appear to rely on personality traits less than do those from individualistic cultures in understanding themselves)

culture and schema (male/female)

- average female vs. average male -schema of color

what is universal

- basic emotional expressions - basic personality structure (the big 5) - implicit self-esteem: implicit self-positivity bias is cultural universal (me or good, not me or bad)

independent versus interdependent views of self

- cultural variation in self-enhancement can also be better understood when considering the kinds of self-concepts that are most common in various cultures - one way of considering the self is to see it as a relatively autonomous, self-sustaining collection of attributes that is largely independent from others (this independent view of self is more common in Western cultures) - in contrast, a second way of constructing selves is to see them as being fundamentally interconnected, situationally variable, and grounded in roles and relationships with significant in-group others (this interdependent view of self is more common in non-western cultures) - measures of self-esteem and self-enhancing biases tend to be positively associated with independence and negatively associated with interdependence. However the intrapsychic benefits that derive from self-enhancement come at the expense of one's relationships (no one likes self-enhancers)

culture and schema (cow)

- culture and content of schema (culture provides sources for schema) - Local Bantu herdsman in Swaziland in southeastern Africa vs. Average American - schema of cows (Cows are very important in their culture so they are different views of them, we would be able to recognize that an animal is a cow but they could pick out which one belonged to their heard)

approach-avoidance motivation

- one process contributing to the cultural differences in self-enhancing motivations - approach motivation focuses on advancement, accomplishments and aspirations; it involves a concern with the presence or absence of positive outcomes. -in contrast avoidance motivation focuses on safety, responsibilities, and obligations; it is concerned with the presence or absence of negative outcomes - in comparison with Westerners, East Asians show relatively more evidence for avoidance motivation and relatively less evidence for approach motivation - ex: asians rate opportunities to lose as more important than opportunities to win, persist more on a task after failure and less after success, are motivated more by negative role models - someone they want to ensure they do not become like

content of the self concept

- one source of info germane to the question of the utility of personality is the kind of information that people spontaneously consider when describing themselves - open ended descriptions of the self-concept have consistently revealed evidence for a weaker tendency to list pure psychological attributes (largely personality traits) among people from various collectivistic cultures than among those from individualistic cultures when describing themselves - instead, people from non-western cultures are more likely to describe themselves in terms of their social roles or specific descriptions that are not abstract trait terms - personality traits may not be useful to the same degree everywhere for describing the self

relational mobility

- refers to the perceived among of opportunity than an individual has for forming new relationships - in many individualistic contexts (such as American undergraduates) individuals live in a high-relational-mobility context, in which they are frequently meeting new people and have the potential to forge new relationships on a day-to-day basis - much of Japanese society, there is little relational mobility in that people tend to belong to non overlapping groups where there is little movement between social groups and the membership is largely stable - because self-esteem is influenced by the degree to which one feels socially accepted, it has been proposed that people will rely on their self-esteem to predict when they will by accepted by others

cross-cultural research

- since social psychology largely began as a western science, conducted by western social psychologists with western participants - it raises the question of how universal the findings are. So to study the effects of culture on social psychological process, social psychologists conduct cross cultural research... -research conducted with members of different cultures, to see whether the psychological processes of interest are present in both cultures or whether they are specific to the culture in which people were raised

personality traits and behavior

- some evidence for the predictive validity of personality traits in behaviors among Westerns includes behavioral residue, such as how one decorates one's dorm room, life outcomes, such as health and occupational success and discreetly observed behaviors, such as whether one cheats on an exam. thus far however, such direct behavioral evidence has been limited to studies with westerns - some indirect evidence speaks to the question of the predictive validity of personality traits across cultures (ex: when explain others behaviors,those from collectivistic cultures rely on personality info less than do those from individualistic cultures) - another indirect evidence comes from studies that compare peoples self-reported personality with peer ratings (results indicated that the self-peer correlations were lower among Koreans than they were among Americans)

Incremental versus entity theories of abilities

- the value of self-enhancement also depends on the lay theories that people hold about the nature of abilites - one way to conceive of abilities is to view them as arising from a set of relatively fixed and innate attributes. this kind of "entity theory" of abilities reflects beliefs in an underlying essence that is tied to abilities. within such a worldview, an individuals successes and failures directly reflect upon his or her perceived capabilities and self worth. - a second way of conceiving of abilities is to view them as being malleable and ultimately improvable. this kind of theory of abilities reflects a belief in the key role of effort in abilities. - greater tendencies for East Asians compared with North Americans to attribute school achievement to effort and not to abilities.

incremental versus entity theories of self

- typical views of personality in individualistic cultures are grounded in the notion that personality traits are inherited and somewhat stable across the lifespan - ideas that are conceptually consistent with an entity theory of self - the notion of an ever-changing and incremental theory of the self would seem to be at odds with the notion of trait theories. - in comparison with Westerns, East Asians are less likely to conceptualize their selves in entity terms - the incremental nature of the self-views of east asians is inconsistent with Western views of stable and innate personality traits

cultural relativism

- universal psychological toolkit: aptitude and cognitive abilities help people adapt to environment - individuals from different cultures all have similar toolkits, but differ in how much they have or use their toolkits - perception: analytic vs. holistic (e.g. more efforts needed to use non-default perception style (brain evidence) - self-view: independent vs. interdependent - reasoning: non-dialectical vs. dialectical

culture and self-schema

- west vs. east - individualistic vs. collectivist society - different schemas of defining the self (independent vs. interdependent self-construal)

culture and reasoning

- west vs. east - non-dialectical (synthetic) vs. dialectical philosophy / reasoning - different schemas of understanding the world

culture, schema and perception

- west vs. east - schema of perceiving the world - analytic vs. holistic thinking style (focus attention parts of things or properties of objects vs. overall context and relations between objects)

west vs. east differences in social behavior

WEST: analytic thinking, independent SC, non-dialectical reasoning (important to have different opinions/sides) - prefers internal attribution (fundamental attribution error), self-enhancement, intolerance for dissonance, conformity EAST: holistic thinking, interdependent SC, dialectical reasoning - less FAE (prefer situational attribution in some cases), self-effacement, tolerance for dissonance (no dissonance reduction efforts), higher normative conformity (due to the desire to be liked and accepted) ** but these cultural styles can be primed

holistic thinking style

a type of thinking in which people focus on the overall context, particularly the ways in which objects relate to each other; this type of thinking is common in East Asian cultures (e.g. China, Japan and Korea) - here people focus on the "whole picture" - that is, the object (or person) and the context that surrounds that object as well as the relationships that exist between them - ex: judge how your friend is feeling by everyone faces in the group she is with - picture study - detect change in the background (vs. target) - how sad/happy is the central figure (judge based on everyone in the photo) - focus on relations (vs. properties)

analytic thinking style

a type of thinking in which people focus on the properties of objects without considering their surrounding context; this type of thinking is common in Western cultures - this style involves focusing on the properties of objects (or people) while paying much less attention, if any, to the context or situation that surrounds the object - ex: judge how your friend is feeling based on her face, and not pay attention to the faces of the others she is with - picture study - detect change in target (vs. background) - how sad/happy is the central figure (judge based on its face alone) - focus on properties (vs. relations)

independent view of the self

a way of defining oneself in terms of one's own internal thoughts, feelings, and actions and not in terms of the thoughts, feelings and actions of other people

interdependent view of the self

a way of defining oneself in terms of one's relationships to other people, recognizing that one's behavior is often determined by the thoughts, feelings and actions of others

cultual determinants of schemas

although everyone uses schemas to understand the world, the content of our schemas in influenced by the culture in which we live - culture can influence the kinds of thinking people automatically use to understand their worlds

fMRI brain study results

although participants from the two cultures were equally accurate at judging the lengths of the lines, they showed significantly more brain activity when they had to follow the instructions that were the opposite of their usual cultural thinking style (Americans showed greater activation in higher-order comical regions (frontal and parietal areas) when told to pay attention to the context, while east asian participants who'd greater activity when told to ignore context).

are you born with you're social perception or is it molded over time?

cross-cultural differences in social perception do not appear to be inborn; rather, we arrive in this world with a flexibility of thinking style that is molded over time by cultural (and other) influences - ex: unlike the significant differences observed among adults, children from the U.S. and India were more or less indistinguishable in terms of how they explained their friend's behaviors.

Dialectical reasoning about the self

east asian and western cultures differ in their tolerance for contradiction - westerns typically respond to contradictory statements by trying to dismiss or transcend the contradiction, East Asians are more content to accept the contradictions as they are

East Asian cultures such as those in China, Japan, and Korea tend to stress _______.

group autonomy. - the individual is more likely to derive his or her sense of self from the social group

reference-group effects

implicit comparison to the average, or ideal amount of a construct within your group when making self-ratings

are all people capable of both holistic and analytic thinking?

people in all cultures are capable of thinking holistically or analytically (they have the same tools in their mental toolbox) but that the environment in which people live, or even which environment has been recently primed, triggers a reliance on one of the styles

is the fundamental attribution error stronger in Western than Eastern cultures?

people in individualist cultures do prefer dispositional attributions about others, relative to people in collectivists cultures, who prefer situational attributions.

dissonance in collectivist societies

in collectivist societies, where the needs of the group matter more than the needs of a particular person, dissonance-reducing behavior might be less prevalent, at least on the surface. in such cultures, we'd be more likely to find behavior aimed at maintaining group harmony and less likely to see people justifying their own personal misbehavior - but more likely to see people experiencing dissonance when their behavior shames or disappoints others - in Japan, people will vicariously experience dissonance on the part of someone they know and like - the perceived privacy or public visibility of the choice being made interacts with culture to determine whether dissonance is aroused and the choice needs to be justified (Japanese participants justified their choices when they felt others were observing them while they were making their decision, but not later; this pattern was reversed for Americans)

who is more likely to believe in the belief of a just world

in cultures with extremes of wealth and poverty, just-world attributions are more common than in cultures where wealth is more evenly distributed (for example, research participants in India and South Africa received higher scores on the just-world believe scale than participants in the U.S., Australia, Hong Kong, and Zimbabwe, who had scores in the middle of the scale) - this is because the just-world attribution can be used to explain and justify injustice (the people that are poor and disadvantaged have less because they deserve less)

Independent vs. interdependent self-construal

independent SC - i am special, I am unique, I am me, I am an individual, I am who I am, I am a rational agent, I am responsible for my own action interdependent SC - I am part of my family, I am part of my community, I am part of my country, the goodness of the whole is more important than the individual, my actions directly impact my family and my community

North American and some other western cultures stress _______.

individual autonomy - a person is perceived as independent and self-contained; his or her behavior reflects internal traits, motives and values.

individualistic vs. collectivist societies

individualism - everyone is expected to only take care of themselves and immediate family - emphasize personal achievement, even at the expense of others - greater emphasis on competition - e.g. canada, western Europe, Australia collectivism - everyone is expected to protect extended families - emphasize social roles, collective responsibilities and harmony, even at the expense of the individual - greater emphasis on cooperation - e.g. China, Korea, Japan, Latin America

is culture unique to humans?

no - Chimpanzees: two cultures in fishing termites: Twig fishers (Senegal) vs. Bark fishers (Tanzania) - Imo the macaque: small island off Japan, washes potatoes, all other macaques followed - Elephants (a small area of South Africa park of Addo) - particularly aggressive to humans likely due to historical reasons

personality and culture are mutually constituted

one cannot fully understand the nature of people without considering the cultural context within which they exist; nor can one fully understand a cultural context without considering the values and beliefs of the people who inhabit it.

Attributes for behavior

people from collectivistic cultures might rely on personality traits less than Westerners do for understanding others as well - this shows another way that utility of personality varies across cultures - the fundamental attribution error has been conducted almost exclusively with Western participants (observations with a number of collectivistic cultures have painted a different picture regarding peoples preferred ways of making sense of the behavior of others)

The utility of personality across cultures

the difference in self-definition across cultures (interdependent vs.independent) raises the possibility that in societies more characterized by interdependent selves, personality traits might be of less utility (useful) for understanding oneself or in predicting the behavior of others than are more relationally defined aspects of the self - such as social roles

where is the self-serving bias (where people look outside of themselves - to the situation - to explain failure) strongest vs. not strong

the self-serving bias is strongest in the U.S. and some other Western countries - Canada, Australia and New Zealand. While, some Asian cultures displayed markedly low or even absent level of self-serving bias: Japan, the Pacific Islands, and India (due to their high values of modesty and harmony with others) - Ex: gold medalists - in the U.S. describe winner in terms of their unique ability vs. Japanese described the performance broader, including their past experience and role of others - note* in collectivist cultures such as Chinese, the reverse os true: people often attribute failure to internal causes, not external ones

what affects normative social influence

the society in which one is raised affects the frequency of normative social influence -collectivist societies conform more than individualistic societies - except in a study when the group gave a unanimously wrong answer, Japanese were less conformist than north american people (because their cooperation and loyalty are directed to the groups which they belong and identify, there is little expectation that one should conform to the behavior of strangers)

self-enhancement biases

the tendency to evaluate the self more positively than others -research reveals strong variation in the strength of this motivation across cultures - research finds that east asians evince far less motivation for self-enhancement than do westerners - below there are 6 different mechanisms that underlie the observed cultural differences in self-enhancement

naive dialecticism

the tendency to perceive and tolerate psychological contradiction - not only about the world but about themselves (east asians maintain more contradictory self-views than do Westerns - why east asians might show self-views of themselves that are less positive than those of westerns)

cultural universalism

the universalists view (vs. the relativist's view) - mind and behavior operates under a set of natural and universal laws that are independent from context - universal psychology toolkit: aptitude and cognitive abilities help people adapt to environment

self-esteem

the way in which we try to maintain positive views of ourselves

self-control

the way we make plans and execute decisions

impression management

the way we present ourselves to other people and get them to see us the way we want to be seen

self-knowledge

the way we understand who we are and formulate and organize this information

The Five Factor Model

there are five core personality traits: openness, conscientiousness, extraversion, agreeableness, and neuroticism - the "Big 5" are said to underlie the nearly 18,000 traits that exist in the English language - there is evidence to support that the five-factor model of personality appears to adequately capture the structure of personality traits in many cultures

examples of cultural universalism

understanding of math and concept of time, attribution, cognitive dissonance, conformity and obedience, aggressiveness and violent video games, basic emotional expressions, personality structure, implicit self-esteem

structure and content of personality across cultures

various different personality typologies have been proposed over time and around the world that serve to classify people into different types - most widely accepted personality typology - The Five Factor Model

can we find dissonance across all cultures?

we can find dissonance operating in almost every part of the world, but it does not always take the same form and the content of the cognitions that produce it may differ across cultures

Masako's decision to marry the prince example

what is viewed as positive and normal behavior by one culture may be viewed very differently by another - many western observers were mystified by Mask's decision to marry the prince and assumed she was coerced into the marriage by a backward, sexist society that did not properly value her worth as an individual with an independent life of her own - to many Japanese and other Asians, her decision to give up her career was not at all surprising and was a natural consequence of her view of herself as connected and obligated to others, such as her parents and the royal family.