Comparing Cultures – Hoorcolleges
Lecture 1: Cross-Cultural Psychology and Culture
Correlation = statistical index r, for the association between two quantitative measures (e.g.,
length and shoesize)
- Ranges from -1 to +1
- Can be displayed in a scatterplot
- Differences (variance) required, otherwise you can’t find associations. Similarities are
not the topic of research.
Generalizability (statistical significance) = to what extent can you apply your research findings
to the population your sample was drawn from?
- Test for significance: the probability (p) that your findings are absent in the
population (and hence coincidental)
e.g., the probability of no correlation or no mean differences in the population
- Normally p < 0.05, but the smaller the better
Whom is psychology about?
A lot of the times about the WEIRD =
Western Educated Industrialized Rich Democratic
Response to this problem:
Cross-cultural psychology = the scientific study of human behavior and its transmission,
considering the ways in which behaviors are shaped and influenced by social and cultural
forces.
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?
Goals:
1. Testing the generality of existing psychological knowledge and theories (transport
and test goal: you transport the cultural context and then you test it)
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
,However, two subdisciplines within cross-cultural psychology:
- Culture comparative psychology = “Psychologically, we are all the same despite our
cultural differences”. Cultural differences are superficial.
- Cultural psychology = “Mind and culture influence and complement each other, and
therefore we are often not the same”. Cultures are very different en therefor we are
fundamentally different.
Two flavors, differences are matter of degree
Psychological universals (book p.19)
- Core mental attributes shared by people everywhere
- Human mind as a toolbox (you could use this both ways)
Same tools?
Same use in same situations?
Same frequencies of use?
- Different levels of universality
Examples:
Different focal points:
- Cultural psychology: non-universals & existential universals (left part of the picture)
- Culture-comparative psychology: functional universals & accessibility universals (right
part of the picture)
An old anthropological definition (1952)
Not to memorize, but to portray the complexity:
6 classes of definitions: 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.
,The book on culture (book p. 5)
- Any kind of information that is acquired from other members of one’s species
through social learning that can affect an individual’s behaviors
- A group of individuals
Culture as defined in this course:
! Culture = the totality of equivalent and complementary learned meanings (what is
important to you, values, etc.) by a human population, or by identifiable segments of a
population, and transmitted from one generation to the next.
Origins and (in)stability
Cultures are evoked and transmitted
- Evoked: biologically based behavioral repertoires are ‘elicited’ by environments;
people have to deal with the environments they are in and humans are very flexible
in this sense
- Transmitted: behavioral repertoires are acquired via social learning
Evoked culture
- Adaptations to environments
Ecological contexts and social political contexts
- Similar environments → similar cultures
Example: agriculture → more conformism; hunting/gathering → more independence
- Different environments → 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
• Self-affirming and ‘immune’ to ‘external’ influences (e.g., migration)
• Edgerton’s (1971) study in East-Africa: herders and farmers from the same
tribe shared similar cultural orientations
Change: exposure to new ideas
• Contact between cultures: Borrowing and assimilation
• Chinese version of Buddhism
Biological explanations in cross-cultural psychology
- Biological differences between cultural groups are highly contested:
Racism is an enormous problem
Race is a social construction, and only “skin deep”
- Still:
Some genetic differences between groups (e.g., related to physical health,
book Chapter 13)
Despite evidence for variation within groups and difficulties of drawing group
boundaries
Interest in genetic heritage also among racially discriminated groups, e.g.,
African Americans
, Biological explanations for common behaviors
- As a species humans have common genes (the human genome) that evolved due to
common evolutionary pressures related to survival and procreation
- Thus, biological explanations can (partly) account for similarities in, for example,
parent-child attachment (week 3) and emotion recognition (week 5)
Traditional social science approaches (epistemological positions):
Empirism = the belief that
knowledge comes primarily from
sensory experience and observation.
Positivism = a philosophy that holds
that only knowledge verified
through scientific methods—
observable, measurable facts—is
valid.
Interpretivist = the subjective
meanings behind human behavior,
focusing on individuals' perspectives
Study of culture: within their social and cultural
context, often using qualitative
methods like interviews and
observations.
What is the right approach?
No “either-or” answers
Nowadays, consensus:
- Culture is an integral part of human nature
- Human development is a process of enculturation
- Culture and mind are complementary
- “Psychological agents generate culture, but culture too shapes the agents’ minds”
Post-positivist (realist) approach: “Perfect, objective knowledge about reality is impossible to
attain. Still, we try to approximate this knowledge, acknowledging the importance of
different perspectives and experiences”
Three positions on whether you can compare cultures:
1. Absolutism: People from different cultures can be meaningfully compared:
psychological phenomena are similar across cultures, but their quantities differ.
Lecture 1: Cross-Cultural Psychology and Culture
Correlation = statistical index r, for the association between two quantitative measures (e.g.,
length and shoesize)
- Ranges from -1 to +1
- Can be displayed in a scatterplot
- Differences (variance) required, otherwise you can’t find associations. Similarities are
not the topic of research.
Generalizability (statistical significance) = to what extent can you apply your research findings
to the population your sample was drawn from?
- Test for significance: the probability (p) that your findings are absent in the
population (and hence coincidental)
e.g., the probability of no correlation or no mean differences in the population
- Normally p < 0.05, but the smaller the better
Whom is psychology about?
A lot of the times about the WEIRD =
Western Educated Industrialized Rich Democratic
Response to this problem:
Cross-cultural psychology = the scientific study of human behavior and its transmission,
considering the ways in which behaviors are shaped and influenced by social and cultural
forces.
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?
Goals:
1. Testing the generality of existing psychological knowledge and theories (transport
and test goal: you transport the cultural context and then you test it)
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
,However, two subdisciplines within cross-cultural psychology:
- Culture comparative psychology = “Psychologically, we are all the same despite our
cultural differences”. Cultural differences are superficial.
- Cultural psychology = “Mind and culture influence and complement each other, and
therefore we are often not the same”. Cultures are very different en therefor we are
fundamentally different.
Two flavors, differences are matter of degree
Psychological universals (book p.19)
- Core mental attributes shared by people everywhere
- Human mind as a toolbox (you could use this both ways)
Same tools?
Same use in same situations?
Same frequencies of use?
- Different levels of universality
Examples:
Different focal points:
- Cultural psychology: non-universals & existential universals (left part of the picture)
- Culture-comparative psychology: functional universals & accessibility universals (right
part of the picture)
An old anthropological definition (1952)
Not to memorize, but to portray the complexity:
6 classes of definitions: 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.
,The book on culture (book p. 5)
- Any kind of information that is acquired from other members of one’s species
through social learning that can affect an individual’s behaviors
- A group of individuals
Culture as defined in this course:
! Culture = the totality of equivalent and complementary learned meanings (what is
important to you, values, etc.) by a human population, or by identifiable segments of a
population, and transmitted from one generation to the next.
Origins and (in)stability
Cultures are evoked and transmitted
- Evoked: biologically based behavioral repertoires are ‘elicited’ by environments;
people have to deal with the environments they are in and humans are very flexible
in this sense
- Transmitted: behavioral repertoires are acquired via social learning
Evoked culture
- Adaptations to environments
Ecological contexts and social political contexts
- Similar environments → similar cultures
Example: agriculture → more conformism; hunting/gathering → more independence
- Different environments → 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
• Self-affirming and ‘immune’ to ‘external’ influences (e.g., migration)
• Edgerton’s (1971) study in East-Africa: herders and farmers from the same
tribe shared similar cultural orientations
Change: exposure to new ideas
• Contact between cultures: Borrowing and assimilation
• Chinese version of Buddhism
Biological explanations in cross-cultural psychology
- Biological differences between cultural groups are highly contested:
Racism is an enormous problem
Race is a social construction, and only “skin deep”
- Still:
Some genetic differences between groups (e.g., related to physical health,
book Chapter 13)
Despite evidence for variation within groups and difficulties of drawing group
boundaries
Interest in genetic heritage also among racially discriminated groups, e.g.,
African Americans
, Biological explanations for common behaviors
- As a species humans have common genes (the human genome) that evolved due to
common evolutionary pressures related to survival and procreation
- Thus, biological explanations can (partly) account for similarities in, for example,
parent-child attachment (week 3) and emotion recognition (week 5)
Traditional social science approaches (epistemological positions):
Empirism = the belief that
knowledge comes primarily from
sensory experience and observation.
Positivism = a philosophy that holds
that only knowledge verified
through scientific methods—
observable, measurable facts—is
valid.
Interpretivist = the subjective
meanings behind human behavior,
focusing on individuals' perspectives
Study of culture: within their social and cultural
context, often using qualitative
methods like interviews and
observations.
What is the right approach?
No “either-or” answers
Nowadays, consensus:
- Culture is an integral part of human nature
- Human development is a process of enculturation
- Culture and mind are complementary
- “Psychological agents generate culture, but culture too shapes the agents’ minds”
Post-positivist (realist) approach: “Perfect, objective knowledge about reality is impossible to
attain. Still, we try to approximate this knowledge, acknowledging the importance of
different perspectives and experiences”
Three positions on whether you can compare cultures:
1. Absolutism: People from different cultures can be meaningfully compared:
psychological phenomena are similar across cultures, but their quantities differ.
