psy 239 401 chapter 14 slides

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The Personality PuzzleSixth Edition

by David C. Funder

Chapter 14: Cultural Variation in Experience,

Behavior, and Personality

Slides created byTera D. LetzringIdaho State University 1

Objectives

• Discuss the implications of cultural diversity for personality psychology

• Discuss what cross-cultural psychology and culture are

• Discuss the characteristics of cultures and why differences are important

• Discuss how to assess cultures• Discuss the possible origins of cultural

differences2

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Think About It

• Have you ever lived in a different culture or known someone from a different culture? Do people in that culture view things differently? How fundamental are these differences?

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Culture and Psychology

• Cross-cultural psychology• How culture intersects with personality

psychology– Individuals may differ from each other, to some

extent, because they belong to different cultures.– Members of groups may differ from each other in

distinctive ways.– What differences are important may vary across

cultures.

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Culture and Psychology

• Cross-cultural universals vs. specificity• What is culture?

– May include language, modes of thinking, and fundamental views of reality

– Enculturation– Acculturation– Due to more than genetics

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The Importance of Cross-Cultural Differences

• Increasing international understanding• Assessing the degree to which psychology

applies to people around the world– Possible limits on generalizability– Most research based on WEIRD countries

• Appreciating the varieties of human experience

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Characteristics of Cultures

• How can one culture be compared to another?

• Etics and emics– Assumption– Examples: duty, marriage

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Characteristics of Cultures

• Tough and easy• Achievement and affiliation• Complexity• Tightness and looseness• Head vs. heart

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Characteristics of Cultures

• Collectivism-individualism– Importance of needs and rights of the group vs.

the individual– The self and others– Personality and collectivism

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Characteristics of Cultures

• Collectivism-individualism– Behavior, emotion, and motivation

• Social interactions• Self-focused vs. other-focused emotions• Importance of love in marriage• What emotional experience depends on• Fundamental motivations

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Characteristics of Cultures

• Collectivism-individualism– Vertical vs. horizontal– Can be crossed with collectivism-individualism– Does not apply to all individuals within a culture

• Cautions about collectivism-individualism– Be careful to not interpret cultural differences as

meaning that everyone in the same culture is the same.

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Characteristics of Cultures

• Honor• Face• Dignity• “Individual differences within a society are

every bit as important, if not more important, than the differences between them” (p. 493)

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Cultural Assessment and Personality Assessment

• Triandis’s three dimensions can be applied to individuals– Cultural complexity: cognitive complexity– Cultural tightness: conscientiousness and

intolerance for ambiguity – Collectivist vs. individualist: allocentrism vs.

ideocentrism

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Cultural Assessment and Personality Assessment

• Comparing the same traits across cultures

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Cultural Assessment and Personality Assessment

• Different traits for different cultures?– Is the meaning the same?– The Big Five are found in observer ratings in 50+

cultures.– Many variations have also been found.– Only conscientiousness, extraversion, and

agreeableness should be considered universal.– Difficulties of translations

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Cultural Assessment and Personality Assessment

• Different traits for different cultures? – Create endogenous scales

• Some of the Big Five traits have emerged.• Seven factors have been found in China and Spain.• Factors other than the Big Five: unselfishness, gentle

temper, dependency/fragility, positive valence, negative valence, pleasantness, engagement, interpersonal relatedness

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• Thinking– To what degree do people from different cultures

think differently?– Holistic thinking– Independent thinking

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Cultural Assessment and Personality Assessment

• Values– How can seemingly obvious and basic values vary

across cultures?– The search for universal values

• Implications of universal values• Possible list of 10 universal values

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Cultural Assessment and Personality Assessment

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Cultural Assessment and Personality Assessment

• Values– Cultural differences in values: moral reasoning

• Liberty, freedom of choice, rights, individual needs vs. obligations, reciprocity, duties to the group

• Based on imposing independent and individual choice or a group norm

• Seen in the debate on abortion

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The Origins of Cultural Differences

• Why are cultures different? What determines the specific, distinctive psychology that a particular culture develops?

• Avoiding the issue– Deconstructionism

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The Origins of Cultural Differences

• The ecological approach• Older model

Ecology → Culture → Socialization → Personality → Behavior

• Newer model Ecology

Culture Mind and Behavior

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The Origins of Cultural Differences

• Cultural differences from genetics?– Assumption: Differences are learned, not innate.– Genetic differences are small, at most.– People within cultures differ from each other.– Culture itself is based on more than just genetics.– People can belong to more than one culture.– It’s possible that personality could influence

culture.

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Challenges and New Directions for Cross-Cultural Research

• Ethnocentrism– Observations of other cultures will be influenced

by the observer’s own cultural background

• The exaggeration of cultural differences – The focus of research has been on differences– Large sample sizes lead to statistically significant

results even when differences are small– Outgroup homogeneity bias

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Challenges and New Directions for Cross-Cultural Research

• Cultures and values– Cultural relativism

• Does not always work– Makes the search for universal values especially

important

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Challenges and New Directions for Cross-Cultural Research

• Subcultures and multiculturalism– It is difficult to define culture.– Important subgroups exist within large cultures.– People can belong to more than one culture.

• Bicultural identity integration (BII)

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Think About It

• Can a person be a member of two or more cultures at once? Is it possible to be a member of just one culture? How many cultures do you belong to?

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The Universal Human Condition

• New emphasis on how people are psychologically similar– Differences in rule for appropriate behavior might

mask similar motivations– Culture may influence how people want to feel

more than how they actually feel– Desire to please one’s parents– Personal goals

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Think About It

• If you wanted to understand another culture, what would you have to do? How could you be sure your interpretation of that culture was correct?

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Clicker Question #1

Culture includesa) habits and beliefs.b) ways of thinking.c) language.d) all of the above.

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Clicker Question #2

has been proposed as an important characteristic of culture.a) Difficultnessb) Tightness-loosenessc) Ethnocentrismd) Variability

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Clicker Question #3

People from the same culturea)all have the same values.b)differ in important ways from people in other cultures.c)differ in important ways from people in the same culture.d)both b and c

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