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Lecture Notes 6 - Chapter 8 Culture and Cognition
Cross-Cultural Psychology (21:830:322)
Rutgers University
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Chapter 8 Culture and Cognition a term denoting all mental processes we use to transform sensory input into knowledge the focusing of our limited capacities of consciousness on a particular set of stimuli, more of whose features are noted and processed in more depth than is true of nonfocal stimuli What kinds of stimuli in our environments, or in our minds, do we focus our attention to in the first place? the feelings that result from excitation of the sensory receptors such as touch, taste, smell, sight, or hearing. the process of gathering information about the world through our our initial interpretations of sensations How do we perceive the world around us? Do people of different cultures perceive the same physical realities? Thinking How do we think about the world? How do we categorize objects? Do we remember things in the same ways across cultures? Do we solve problems in the same ways across cultures? a method used to determine if one stimulus affects another Cognition to knowledge acquisition) involves memory, perception, attention, and most of all thought processes Sometimes extended to: judgments, attitude formation, problem solving (skills) Masuda and Nisbett (2001) Some cultural differences at psychological level can be attributed to different ways of cognitive processes Showed one scene, then showed elements that were in the original scene and elements that were not in the original scene Japanese were more attuned to context than Americans were Americans paid more attention to the foreground Holistic versus analytic (Nisbett, Holistic context dependent perceptual processes that focus on the relationships between objects and their contexts Analytic perceptual processes that focuses on a salient object independently from the context in which it is embedded Dialectical, linear, thinking Opposites can coexist if looking at them in terms of a dynamic relationship Blind a spot in our visual field where the optic nerve goes through the layer of receptor cells on its way back toward the brain, creating a lack of sensory receptors in the eye at that location micro eye movements that help our brains fill in scenes so it looks as if we see everything Optical perceptions that involves an apparent discrepancy between how an object looks and what it actually is Carpentered world a theory of perception that suggests that people (at least most Americans) are used to seeing things that are rectangular in shape, and thus unconsciously expect things to have square corners foreshortening a theory of perception that suggests that we interpret vertical lines as horizontal lines extending into the distance. Because we interpret the vertical line in the illusion as extending away from us, we see it as longer Symbolizing three dimensions in a theory of perception that suggests that people in Western cultures focus more in representations on paper than do people in other cultures, and in particular spend more time learning to interpret pictures the process which objects are grouped or classified together based on their perceived similarities Hindsight the process in which individuals adjust their memory for something after they find out the true outcome Cultural understanding of perception comes from research on visual perception, specifically illusions Misjudging lines to be different sizes when they are actually the same size for different reasons We may be predisposed to see right angles We may interpret the vertical line as going away from us, therefore it is longer What falls on your eye is two dimensional, but we have to learn to interpret depth cues (three dimensional cues) What we see is the way the image falls on the retina and how we interpret it ( learning to interpret the way the image falls on your eye) Seeing depth and learning cues for depth is a learned skill Perceptual constancies the world is constantly changing in your senses, but you learn that the world actually just your relative position to those objects W. H. R. Rivers (1905) Compared responses to illusions among people in England, rural India, and New Guinea English saw lines in illusion as more different (they were more fooled it) and other groups were more fooled the illusions English people were more used to seeing rectangular shapes because of things like buildings, etc. but the other groups were more used to rounded, organic shapes in their environments They are used to different ways of depicting things (like art) than it is important to question if they would make the same distinctions if the scene was presented in real life They are not used to drawings on paper in general, so already this is different than what they typically see Motivation can also be a factor in how we the world We have different goals, so what we pay attention to in the environment will be different Broota and Ganguli (1975) Scenes with facial expressions shown to Hindu and Muslim children are more attuned to recognizing faces related to punishment Cultural differences also related to categorization Western children differ from Western more superficial and impressionistic when younger, but as they get older, they have more conceptually advanced understandings of objects and they separate objects on the basis of their functional use Adult Africans use the same color strategy that children do Do they place the same kind of value on things like formal operational thinking? Perhaps their world is more dependent on color cues Tells us this is not a universal characteristic that we categorize things differently as we get older East Asian children categorize more their relationship to functional context (put what looks like the mom, dad, and child together because they are a family) in cognition Hindsight bias tendency for people to look back as if they understood something the whole time, but really their responses were ambiguous at people think they knew more about what was going on than what they actually led on (this is universal) Serial position the finding that people tend to remember something better if it is either the first or the last item in a list Episodic the recollection of specific events that took place at a particular time and place in the past Gender stratification the idea that gender differences are related to cultural variations in opportunity structures for girls and women Everyday an area of study that examines cognitive skills and abilities that are used in everyday functioning that appear to develop without formal education, but from performing daily tasks of living and working Problem the process which we attempt to discover ways of achieving goals that do not seem readily attainable Dialectical the tendency to accept what seem to be contradictions in thought or beliefs Positive logical a tendency to see contradictions as mutually exclusive categories, as types of categories Naive a constellation of lay beliefs about the nature of the world )rather than a cognitive style as suggested dialectical thinking). Naive dialecticism is characterized the doctrine of the mean, or the belief that the truth is always somewhere in the middle Counterfactual hypothetical beliefs about the past that could have occurred in order to avoid or change a negative outcome Social orientation the hypothesis that cultural differences in individualism versus collectivism are associated with differences in social orientation patterns that affect the ways individuals attend to and think about their worlds Stereotype the threat that judgments or own actions will negatively stereotype one in a domain (such as academic achievement) Collective the general ability of a group to perform a wide variety of tasks Serial position effect (universal) we usually have the worst memory for information presented in the middle (between what was first learned and what was last suffers from the most amount of interference) But personally relevant information, there is a general dominance for recency effects (people remember things better when they think that the more recent events will affect their lives more) this is typically universal Cultural differences primacy effect stronger in children with formal schooling because their schooling teaches them to do more formal the information that was started with is always returned to (so the very first items you learned will be remembered better) Europeans demonstrate more episodic memories than Americans Events from your are remembered (more individual biased) Cultural differences in mathematical ability Highest performing countries in math were Singapore, Korea, and Hong Kong in 4th grade and Korea, Singapore, and Taiwan at 8th grade Highest performing countries in science were Korea and Singapore in 4th grade and Singapore, Taiwan, Korea, and Japan in 8th grade Paik and Mix (2003) Fraction study in children Culture and problem solving Uneducated people have a harder time dealing with word problems and syllogisms because it is too foreign (it is not a real life dilemma) Depending on level of real life familiarity that the problem has, people will handle the problem differently Cole (1971) Liberian and American participants Americans could do the problems, but it was too foreign to Liberians American toys, cars, etc. are so similar to these problems already that they are more likely to understand them hypothesis: cognition is inherently dependent upon you think about the world in words, so if you alter the words, you alter the cognitive processes, and thus you alter the meanings If you frame something in different language, you could make the thing itself different Display rules ways that people are supposed to or not supposed to express pain If you make pain out to be worse than it is, it may feel worse than it actually is Nayak et al. study Indian college students were less involved with the dramatic expression of pain than American college students and the Indian students had higher pain tolerances because they succumb to the pain Culture and intelligence Not strict there are many different viewpoints on what intelligence is Predominant theory is factor theory overall mental ability measured through various scores of multiple factor intelligence test Notion that what is smart depends on context is debated Abilities make you more adapted to specific contexts theory of multiple intelligences Arthur Jensen controversy Found that African Americans typically scored lower on IQ tests than European Americans He said that IQ is intelligence and it is genetic (nature versus nurture controversy) He concluded that environmental factors could not have been systematically related to the intelligence levels of twin pairs He ignored socioeconomic status, these people come from, etc. inequality probably plays more of a role The amount of genetic influence on IQ is Steele and Aronson (1995) Stereotype threat when black students were asked to record their race on a demographic questionnaire before taking a standardized test, they performed significantly worse as compared with black students who were not primed to think about their race before taking the test When the exam was presented as a measure of intellectual ability, black students performed worse than white students When the same test was presented as unrelated to intellectual ability, the detrimental effects of stereotype threat disappeared
Lecture Notes 6 - Chapter 8 Culture and Cognition
Course: Cross-Cultural Psychology (21:830:322)
University: Rutgers University
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