Lectures Comparing Cultures

Lecture notes from the course Comparing Cultures. Including different research and references to the book Psychology Across Cultures.

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Comparing Cultures colleges UU 2020
Weeks 2, 3, 4, 5, 7 and 8 will be in the exam, each week 1 question
All course material: lectures, articles and book
You should be able to understand and apply basic concepts discussed in the book (bold printed in
textboxes) and in the lectures
You don’t have to remember specific research findings, but you should be able to interpret them
Demonstrate your understanding
See problem sets for example question
Lecture 1: Culture and Cross-Cultural Psychology
Course goals:
 Identify and comprehend core epistemological and methodological questions
 Formulate plausible explanations for cultural differences
 Indicate how insights from cross-cultural psychology can be applied in practice
 Evaluate the equality of cultural comparative research, and take critical stance toward
‘traditional’ (‘mainstream’) psychological research
 Explain and discus cross-cultural psychological knowledge
Correlation
 Statistic index r, for the association between two quantitative measures (e.g. length and shoe
size)
 Ranges from -1 to +1
 Can be displayed in a scatterplot
 Differences (variance) required! There has to be difference otherwise there would not be
anything to investigate! (only one dot, not scattered!)
Generalizability
 To what extent can you apply your research findings to the population your sample was
drawn for?
 Test for significance: the probability (p) that your findings are absent in the population (and
hence coincidental)
 The probability of no correlation in the population
 The probability of no mean differences in the population
 P has to be as small as possible
 Normally p < 0.005, but better is p < 0.01 or smaller
For more information about the course manual, please check the powerpoint on blackboard/the
course manual.
Whom is psychology about?
 “When I mention a psychological subject, I mean a subject from a western industrialized
culture; and not only from a western industrialized cultured, but an American; and not
only an American, but a college student.” (Jahoda, 1920, p. 2)
 Arnett, J.J. (2008). The neglected 95%: Why American psychology needs to become less
American
(psychology is about) WEIRD (people):
 Western
 Educated
 Industrialized
 Rich
 Democratic (countries where there is a liberal society)
Cross-Cultural Psychology defined
 “The scientific study of human behavior (what people feel, believe, what motivates them)
and its transmission, taking into account the ways in which behaviors are shaped and
influenced by social and cultural forces.” (Segal et al., 1992)
 Focus on: “What is fundamental and basic about human nature, and what is malleable and
likely to emerge in a different form depending on the ways in which particular individuals are
socialized?” (Smith, Bond & Kagitcibasi, 2006)
Goals of cross-cultural psychology (Berry et al., 1992)
1. Testing the generality of existing psychological knowledge and theories (transport and test
goal)
2. Exploring other cultures in order to discover psychological variations not present in one’s
own limited cultural experience
3. Integrating findings resulting from first 2 goals to generate a more universal psychology valid
for a broader range of cultures
An old anthropological definition of culture
 6 classes of definitions (Kroeber & Kluckhohn, 1952): Descriptive; Historical; Normative;
Structural; ‘Genetic’; Psychological.
 Culture consists of patterns, explicit and implicit, of and for behavior acquired and
transmitted by symbols, constituting the distinctive achievements of human groups, including
their embodiments in artifacts; the essential core of culture consists of traditional (i. e.,
historically derived and selected) ideas and especially their attached values.
 Cultural systems may on the one hand be considered as products of action, on the other as
conditional elements of further action.
Culture as defined in this course:
 Culture is the totality of equivalent and complementary learned meanings by a human
population, or by identifiable segments of a population, and transmitted from one
generation to the next. (Rohner, 1984)
Origins and (in)stability
 Cultures are evoked and transmitted. (Heine, 2016)
 Evoked: biologically based behavioral repertoires are ‘elicited’ by environments. Cultures
are responses to environments.
 Transmitted: behavioral repertoires are acquired via social learning. Once culture exist it
is transmitted.
Evoked culture
 Adaptations to environments
 Ecological contexts (fysical environment) and social political contexts (political/social
environment)
 Eco-cultural framework p.59
 Similar environments leads to similar cultures
 Example: agriculture -> more conformism; hunting/gathering -> (you would expect) more
independence
 Different environments leads to different cultures
 More interdependence in rice-growing versus wheat-growing regions in China
Transmitted culture
 Imitation, explicit instruction, communication of ideas
 Relative independence from environment:
 Stability: ‘Functional autonomy’ of cultures
o Self-affirming and ‘immune’ to ‘external’ influences (e.g., immigration)
o Edgerton’s (1971) study in East-Africa: herders and farmers from the same
tribe shared similar cultural orientations
 Change: exposure to new ideas
o Contact between cultures: Borrowing and assimilation
o Chinese version of Buddhism
Traditional social science approaches How should we study culture? (Kashima, 2000)
Empiricist approach (natural sciences)
Interpretivist approach (humanities)
quantitative
qualitative
Causal laws about the workings of the mind and Human experience within sociocultural-
senses
historical context
Experimental method
Interpretive analysis
Study of culture (Kashima, 2000)
Empiricist approach
Interpretivist approach
Stable meaning system, (something that is out
Changing and continuously reproduced
there influencing people)
Culture ‘external’ to human nature
Culture intrinsic part of human nature
Explicit measure of meanings (e.g., values)
Broader focus: practices included
(things that are easy quantified)
Culture as the independent variable
Culture as the dependent variable
What is the right approach?
 No “either-or” answers