Chapter 5: Culture & Cognition

• Psychologists use the term cognition to denote all the mental processes we use

to transform sensory input into knowledge

• first cognitive processes to occur when people process stimuli are

sensation and perception

• sensation refers to all the feelings that result from excitation of the

sensory receptors (touch, taste, smell, etc.)

• perception refers to our initial interpretations of sensations

Culture as Cognition

• most scholars view culture itself as cognition

• culture is generally viewed as a set of mental representations about the

world

• norms, opinions, beliefs, values and worldviews are all cognitive

products and as such, one can view the contents of culture as

being essentially cognitive

• human culture is also essentially cognitive because of certain

cognitive skills that only humans have which allow us to have the

kinds of cultures that we do

Cultural Influences on Visual Perception

• most of what we know about cultural influences on perception come from cross-

cultural research on visual perception

• this work began with studies on optical illusions

• the three best known and most studied optical illusions are the

Mueller-Lyer illusion (see fig 5.1), the horizontal-vertical illusion (fig.

5.2), and the Ponzo illusion (fig. 5.3)

• two major theories as to why optical illusions occur: carpentered

world theory and front-horizontal foreshortening theory

• carpentered world theory: suggests that people are used to

seeing things that are rectangular in shape and

unconsciously come to expect things that have squared

corners

• in the Mueller-Lyer illusion, we tend to see the figures

as having square corners that project toward or away

from us and conclude they must be different sizes

• front-horizontal foreshortening theory: suggests that we

interpret vertical lines as horizontal lines extending into the

distance

• in the horizontal-vertical illusion, we interpret the

vertical line as extending away from us and conclude

that it must be longer

• these two main theories share common characteristics: they both

assume that the way we see the world is developed over time

through our experiences; they also both assume that we live in a

three dimensional world that is projected onto our eyes in two

dimensions

• A third theory has been offered to explain cultural differences in

visual perception; the symbolizing three dimensions in two theory

suggests that people in western cultures focus more on

representations on paper then do people in other cultures and in

particular spend more time learning to interpret pictures

• many cross-cultural studies have been conducted to challenge traditional

notions of optical illusions

• As early as 1905, W.H.R. Rivers compared the responses to the

Mueller-Lyer and horizontal-vertical illusions using groups in

England, rural India and New Guinea. He found that English people

saw the lines in the Mueller-Lyer illusion as being more different in

length than did the two other groups. He also found that the Indians

and New Guineans were more fooled by the horizontal vertical

illusion than were the English. The results showed that the effect of

the illusion differed by culture, but that something other than

education was involved. the researchers concluded the culture

must have some effect on the way the world is seen. Both the

carpentered world theory and frontal horizontal foreshortening

theory can be used to explain Rivers's results.

• Rivers’s findings were supported by Segall et al. but it was

also found that the effects of these illusions declined and

nearly disappeared with older subjects

• Wagner examined this problem using the Ponzo

illusion and found that with a simple line drawing, the

effect declined with age for all groups but when the

illusion was embedded within a picture, the illusion

increased with age but only for urban people and

those who had continued their schooling

• the effects of the Mueller-Lyer illusion are related to

the ability to detect contours, and this declines with

age. Ability to detect contours is also affected by

retinal pigmentation, and because Non-European

individuals have more retinal pigmentation, they are

less able to detect contours

• Stewart (1973) tested the effects of the Mueller-Lyer illusion first on

different racial groups, then on groups living in different

environments. She found that the effects of the illusion depended

on the degree to which the children lived in a carpentered

environment, and also noticed that the effect declined with age

• this provides evidence for learning and physiology playing

roles on the observed cultural differences

• Hudson (1960) conducted a study on cultural differences in

perception and found that differences in depth perception were

related to both education and exposure to European cultures.

Bantu people who had been educated in European schools, or had

exposure to European culture, saw things the way Europeans did

versus those with no exposure or education who saw the pictures

differently

• Masuda & Nisbett (2001) tested Japanese and American university

students’ memory by showing them an animated scene of an

aquarium (fig. 5.5). Found no difference in ability to recall the main

object in the scene, but the Japanese students remembered more

of the background scenes than the Americans.

• These differences may occur because of differences in

environment: Japanese environments tend to be more

ambiguous and contain more elements than American

scenes

Culture and Categorization

• People categorize on the basis of similarities and attach labels to groups of

objects that share certain characteristics. People often decide whether or not an

object belongs in a category by comparing it to a representative member of that

category

• Eg. a robin is a representative member of the bird category because it is

the most common and shares the most features of the category than a

penguin or an ostrich

• The process of categorization is universal to all humans. Creating mental

categories helps us sort out all the complex stimuli we are exposed to everyday.

It helps us create rules and guidelines for behavior and to make decisions.

• some categories appear to be universal across cultures. facial

expressions that signal basic emotions: happiness, sadness, anger, fear

surprise and discuss are placed in the same categories across cultures.

• Also, there is widespread agreement across cultures know which

colors are primary and which are secondary.

• Stereotypes are a type of category and stereotyping is probably a universal

psychological process.

• There universality in how people across cultures categorize shapes in

terms of the best examples of basic forms rather than forming categories

for regular geometrical shapes.

• These cross-cultural parallels suggest that physiological factors

influence the ways humans categorize certain basic stimuli.

humans seem to be predisposed to prefer certain shapes, colors

and facial expressions.

• Although categorization itself is a universal psychological process the way in

which people categorize things may be culturally variable.

• For example although all cultures may have a category for furniture the

prototype of the chair is likely to differ across cultures.

• One common way to study cultural differences and categorization involves

the use of sorting tasks

• Young children in Western countries tend to group by color, and as

they grow older, by shape, and then by function

• when given similar sorting tasks, adult Africans showed a strong

tendency to group objects by color rather than function

• shows that something other than maturation is responsible

for these shifts

Culture and Memory

• Ross & Millson (1970) suspected that reliance on oral tradition might make

people better at remembering

• they compared the ability of American and Ghanaian college students to

remember stories read aloud and found that Ghanaian students

remembered the stories better than the Americans

• however, a later study testing memory for lists of words rather than

stories found no difference suggesting that the cultural differences

in memory may be limited to meaningful material

• One of the best known aspects of memory is the serial position effect

• this effect suggest that we remember things better if they are either the

first primacy effect or last recency effect in a list of things to remember.

• early cross cultural comparisons challenge the universality of this affect;

Cole and Scribner (1974) found no relation between serial position and the

likelihood of being remembered and studying the memory of Kpelle Tribes

people in Liberia.

• Wagner (1980) hypothesized that the primacy effect depends on rehearsal

the silent repetition of things you're trying to remember and that this

memory strategy is related to schooling.

• Participants who have been to school have had more practice in

memorizing and then have unschooled individuals.

• There may be some constants about memory across cultures.

• For example memory abilities tend to decrease as people get older and

one study showed that such memory decreases with age were consistent

across cultures.

• another aspect of memory that studies have found to be universal is the

affect known as the hindsight bias, which refers to the process in which

individuals adjust their memory for something after they find out the true

outcome.

Culture and Math Abilities

• the ability to do math is a universal human psychological process

• latest survey in 2003 tested math abilities of fourth and eighth graders in

53 regions of the world (see pg. 121 for findings)

• differences clearly exist across countries but this may be in part

due to the different educational systems

• studies of an area known as everyday cognition indicate that, even without formal

educational systems, members of all cultures learn math skills

• eg. Kpelle rice farmers can estimate volume better than Americans

• geometry may in fact be a core intuition found in all humans

• even isolated groups living in the Amazon use geometric concepts to

locate hidden objects

Culture and Problem Solving

• problem solving refers to the process by which we attempt to discover ways of

achieving goals that do not seem readily attainable

• Cole and colleagues conducted a study comparing the problem solving

abilities of Americans and Liberians and concluded that the Liberians’

ability to reason logically to solve problems depended on context

• when presented with problems using materials and concepts

already familiar to them, Liberians drew logical conclusions

effortlessly but when the situation was unfamiliar to them, they did

not know where to begin

• Another type of problem that has been studied cross-culturally involves

syllogisms (eg. all children like candy. Mary is a child. Does Mary like

candy?)

• in wide-ranging studies of tribal and nomadic peoples in East and

Central Asia, Luria (1976) documented sharp differences in the way

people approached these problems

• the ability to provide the correct answer to verbal problems

was found to be closely related with school attendance

• Luria concluded that illiterate people actually think

differently from those who are educated, and

according to this hypothesis, logical reasoning is a

skill that must be learned in a Westernized school

setting and is thus artificial

• Scribner (1979) questioned this hypothesis and in his study found

that uneducated individuals appear to be unable or unwilling to

apply concepts of scientific thinking to verbal problems

• this is not because they lack the capacity to think logically,

they just do not understand the hypothetical nature of verbal

problems or view them with the same degree of importance

• eg. when asked if the above question if Mary likes

candy many would respond that they didn’t know

Mary so they could not say

Culture and Creativity

• creativity is a universal and unique human process and has received a lot of

attention

• Research on creativity in the United States suggests that it depends on

divergent thinking rather than on the convergent thinking that is typically

assessed in measures of intelligence

• creative individuals have been shown to high capacity for hard

work, a willingness to take risks, and a high tolerance for ambiguity

and disorder

• the same characteristics appear to be true for creative individuals in

other cultures as well

• some important differences have been noted however, in the

specific ways in which creativity can be fostered in different cultures

• researchers found that countries high on uncertainty

avoidance prefer creative individuals to work for

organizational norms, rules and procedures. countries higher

on power distance preferred creative individuals to gain

support from those in authority before action is taken or, to

build a broad base of support among members for new

ideas. collectivistic cultures preferred creative people to seek

cross-functional support for their efforts.

• Music is universal for all human cultures.

• Music is thought to have evolved with language.

• the leading theory suggests that music plays an important role in

social cohesion, maintaining and coordinating large networks of

individuals, which would ultimately improve survival rates.

• music may also have involved to enable humans to show off

their reproductive fitness.

Culture and Dialectical Thinking

• Dialectical thinking can be broadly defined as the tendency to accept what seem

to be contradictions in thought or beliefs.

• this is in contrast to positive logical determinism that characterizes much

of American and Western European thinking.

• dialectical thinking tries to find a way in which both sides of an

apparent contradiction are correct, tolerates the contradiction, and

tries to find mutual middle ground.

• logical deterministic thinking tends to see contradictions as

music mutually exclusive categories, either yes or no, one or

the other.

• research has shown that East Asians tend to prefer

dialectical thinking whereas Americans tend to prefer

logical deterministic thinking

Culture, Regrets, and Counterfactual Thinking

• Counterfactual thinking can be defined as hypothetical beliefs about the past that

could have occurred in order to avoid or change and negative outcome

• previous research has demonstrated that these types of counterfactual

thoughts are often related to feelings of regret

• Counterfactual thinking can broadly be classified into two types: actions and

inactions

• research in the United States has shown that regrets related to thoughts of

inaction are more prevalent than regrets related to action

• Markus and Kitayama (1991) suggest that in individualistic cultures people are

active, autonomous agents in their world and thus would regret not having done

something more

• in collectivistic cultures these researchers claim that individual duty and

responsibility are encouraged and take precedence over internal attributes

• more recent research, however, has suggested otherwise

• In a study of Americans Chinese Japanese and Russians, all

participants in all cultures experienced more regret over inaction

that action, and the degree to which they experienced regret over

inaction than over action was comparable across all cultures

Culture and Dreams

• There are considerable cultural differences in the content of dreams. the results

from one study indicated that culture is not the only factor that influences dream

content however.

• Eg. children living in the dangerous areas of Gaza had intensive and vivid

dreams including themes related to persecution and aggression these

themes of course are present in the children's everyday lives and affected

the dreams considerably as well.

• More recently dream researchers have applied increasingly sophisticated

technologies such as neuroimaging and electrophysiology to understanding

dreams and their relationship to our psychology.

• Hobson states that dreams may reveal emotionally salient concerns in an

individual's life.

• Flanigan’s work suggests the content of our dreams is a reflection of our

everyday experiences thus it may not be the content of dreaming that is

meaningful but the emotion that it brings up such as anxiety which is "the

leading emotion in all dreams and dreamers."

Culture and Time

• People in different cultures experience time differently even though time should

be objectively the same for everyone.

• differences in time orientation and perspective are often a source of

confusion and irritation for visitors to a new culture (eg. being used to

punctuality and having to wait for a bus because it is running late)

• Hofstede suggested that long versus short-term orientation with a cultural

dimension that differentiates among cultures.

• people in long-term cultures delay gratification of material social and

emotional needs and think more but the future. members of short-term

cultures think and act more in the immediate present and the bottom line.

• Cultural differences in time orientations may be related to interesting and

important aspects of her behaviors

• Levine and his colleagues conducted a set of studies on this topic

• the experimenters measured how fast people walked a 60 foot distance in

downtown areas of major cities, the speed of a transaction at the post

office, and the accuracy of clocks in 31 countries.

• pace of life was fastest in Switzerland, Ireland, Germany, Japan

and Italy and slowest in Mexico, Indonesia, Brazil, El Salvador and

Syria.

• pace of life is correlated with several ecological and cultural

variables. Hotter cities is were slower than cooler ones, cultures

with vibrant and active economies were also faster and people in

individualistic cultures were faster. also people in faster places

tended to have worse health but greater happiness.

• These types of cultural and individual differences in time orientation and

perspective have important implications for real life situations such as in business

(negotiation), working in groups in school or at work, or just in everyday life such

as riding the bus or train

• eg. an orientation towards the future has been linked to lower rates of

risky health behaviors.

Culture and the Perception of Pain

• Today, we know that culture influences the experience and perception of pain in

several ways including:

• the cultural construction of pain sensation

• the semiotics of pain expression

• the structure of pain’s causes and cures

• the Sapir-Wharf hypothesis suggests that the structure of language, which is

highly dependent on culture, affects our perceptions and cognitions of the world

around us, including our pain experiences

• because the structure, content, and process of language differ across

cultures, so does the experience of pain

• Cultural display rules may also account for the differences in pain experience and

perception

• just as people of different cultures may have different rules for the

appropriate expression of emotion, they may have similar rules governing

the expression of pain

• The tolerance of pain may also be rooted in cultural values

• eg. interviews with Bariban midwives; in their culture stoicism in the face

of pain was idealized so the appropriate response to pain was intrinsic to

their identity

Culture and Intelligence

• for the traditional definitions of intelligence see pg. 134-135

• When early intelligence testing began in the early 1900s, it was a way to identify

cognitively challenged children to put them in special education classes

• these tests were soon used in schools around the world

• however, many students did not benefit from such tests due to the fact

that such tests relied at least in part on verbal performance and cultural

knowledge, and immigrants who spoke English poorly and came from

different cultural backgrounds

• there are ethnic group differences in measured intelligence

• the average scores of some minority groups in the US are 12-15% lower

than the average for European Americans

• Nature versus Nurture?

• The nature side of the debate argues the differences in IQ scores between

the different societies and ethnic groups are mainly hereditary or innate.

• Arthur Jensen is one of the best known proponents for this position.

• he found a African Americans typically score lower on IQ test

and European Americans. Jansen takes the position that

about 80% of a person's intelligence is inherited and

suggests the gap between the scores of European-American

minorities in United States is due to biological differences.

• Jensen has also provided a substantial database examining

the effectiveness of educational and remedial programs to

bolster the intellectual capacity and abilities and ethnic

minorities when extraneous factors are controlled, he

concludes these programs have had little or no effect on

improving intelligence in ethnic minority groups.

• Twin studies revealed that the scores of identical twins raised in different

environments were significantly more alike than those of fraternal twins raised

together.

• today there is widespread agreement at least 40% of intelligence can be

attributed to heredity.

• biological characteristics appear to be related to brain size and function

which in turn appear to be related to racial or ethnic differences

• On the other hand some scholars suggest that members of certain ethnic groups

in United States score lower because most subcultures in this country are

economically deprived.

• Advocates of this position turn to studies showing that IQ scores are

strongly related to social class. the average IQ score of poor whites for

instance is 10 to 20 percentage points lower than the average score of

members of the middle class.

• It is also possible that between group differences in intellectual scores are

the results of different beliefs about what intelligence is or culturally

inappropriate measures of intelligence.

• One recent theory that offers an alternative interpretation of the

differences in IQ scores between African American and European

American individuals is Claude Steele's work on stereotype threat: the

threat that others' judgments and or their own actions will negatively

stereotype them in the domain

• in other words he posits that societally stereotypes about a group

for instance concerning academic or intellectual performance can

actually invoice the performance of individuals from that group

• eg. Steele conducted a study in which he gave

questionnaires to white and black students. When told it was

an intelligence questionnaire, the black students performed

much worse than a different group that had not been told

this. The same result happened when students were asked

their race on the questionnaire

• Other researchers found evidence for an environmental basis for

intelligence by showing that black and interracial children adopted by

white families scores above the IQ and school achievement means for

whites

• Evaluating Both Positions

• on the nature side, the use of race or ethnicity as a variable is problematic

because of the ambiguity of these concepts, which may not refer to

anything meaningful about biology or psychology

• these concepts are basically a social construction

• It is a fact that biology itself is influenced by cultural and environmental

factors, not only over the long term but also in the short term as a result of

recent social history and even individual experience within a lifetime

• on the nurture side, if intelligence really is a social construct, then it would

be impossible to have a test that is “culture fair” or “culture free”, because

culture cannot be understood outside a cultural framework

• proponents of this view suggest that factors such as motivational

levels of the participants, experience with similar tests, and difficulty

of the items have affected previous ethnic group differences in IQ

testing

• evidence does not support this

The Concept of Intelligence in Other Cultures

• Researchers in this area have discovered that many languages have no word

that corresponds our idea of intelligence

• because of the enormous differences in the way cultures define

intelligence it maybe difficult to make valid comparisons from one society

to another

• different cultures value different traits and have divergent views

concerning which traits are useful in predicting future important behaviors

• these differences are important to cross cultural studies of

intelligence because successful performance on a test of

intelligence may require behavior that is considered immodest and

arrogant in one culture and therefore reluctantly displayed in

members of that culture but desirable in a different culture and

therefore readily displayed by members of that culture

• another reason it is difficult to compare intelligence cross culturally

is that test of intelligence often rely on knowledge that is specific to

a particular culture; investigators based in that culture may not even

know what to test for in a different culture.

Recent Developments in Theories about Intelligence in Contemporary

Psychology

• One of the most important contributions of cross-cultural psychology has been in

expanding our theoretical understanding of intelligence in mainstream American

psychology is well

• Gardner (1983) has suggested that there really seven different types of

intelligence: logical-mathematical, linguistic, musical, spatial, bodily kinesthetic,

interpersonal and intrapersonal

• history of multiple intelligence ease has broadened our understanding of

intelligence include areas other than "book smarts"

• Sternberg (1986) has proposed the theory of intelligence based on three

separate subtheories: contextual, experiential and componential intelligence.

• Sternberg's theory focuses more on the processes that underlie thought

than on specific thought outcomes.

• because this definition of intelligence focuses on process rather

than outcome, it has the potential for application across cultures.